While their prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is fighting a determined battle to save his image as a man whose friendship is valued by US President George Bush, Italians do not seem to be excited about that friendship. Their emotion is one of outrage. It has been that ever since the killing of secret agent Nicola Calipari, who was shot dead by US troops as the car carrying him and freed journalist Giuliana Sgrena approached Baghdad airport. Now it is worse, fueled by a feeling that the US military has dismissed their legitimate concerns and acted arrogantly to protect its own men.
Almost immediately after the incident, a joint US-Italian investigation was launched. However, instead of producing an agreed report, each side has come up with contradictory findings. Despite choosing its words with exaggerated care, the Italians make it clear they believe that the tired and frightened US troops failed to follow their own rules of engagement and that a high-level warning that the Italian party was arriving at the airport had not been passed down to the roadblock soldiers. The American report, by contrast, says that the car was speeding, ignored orders to stop and subsequent warning shots and that anyway the soldiers had only fired at the engine. The truth will probably never be established. Very disturbingly, US duty logs were destroyed. The basic facts however can never be disputed. US soldiers, assuming they were facing yet another car bomb attack, opened up on the Italian vehicle with a withering hail of fire.
That the US military has whitewashed the behavior of its troops that fateful March night, not even coming up with a reprimand, may be highly significant. Iraq is not a popular posting, especially for America’s part-time soldiers. The ordinary GI is wrapped up in his helmet and body armor and weighed down with his ammo and personal weapon. He is thus largely equipped to do nothing but defend himself with main force. Defending the rights and lives of innocents who come within the range of his gun is secondary, even though that is in essence the reason why he and his comrades are supposed to be in Iraq. As happened in Vietnam, it seems that many US troops are just hunkering down and looking to get through their Iraq tour alive, while having little contact and less sympathy with the people whose protection and support is supposed to be their mission. Had the Pentagon accused any of the soldiers who opened fire on March 4 last, it might have had a further impact on the morale of thousands of other frightened and reluctant reservists elsewhere in the country.
However, the awful truth is that it is precisely because Washington has been so selective about whom it blames for anything, whether it be the Abu Ghraib depravities or the gunning down of innocents in cars, that America’s moral position in Iraq is undermined. Calipari was actually a victim of all the previous car bombings, which had so sapped the morale and judgment of US troops that they presented their opponents with yet another victory, at no cost whatsoever to themselves.
