THE light sentences being given to US soldiers found guilty of abominable crimes against Iraqi civilians are an insult to their victims. The sentences also send entirely the wrong signal to the world at large. The latest travesty of justice came this week with the pathetic sentencing of a US paratrooper who had pled guilty to the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in addition to the murder of her parents and six-year-old sister.
Because the 24-year-old solider, Paul Cortez, cut a plea bargain with the prosecution, under US military law his 100-year sentence will actually mean only ten years in prison. Cortez copied another soldier’s plea bargain for the same crime; the other solider was given 90 years in jail — again likely to be little more than ten years. The US military argues it needs these men’s testimony to convict the three other soldiers of this appalling attack in which no other witnesses survived. If the men are found guilty, they could in theory face a death penalty. Though from Abu Ghraib up to now, the evidence of brutal, sadistic and murderous behavior by scores of US soldiers has become all too strong, no convicted American serviceman has yet been handed sentences befitting the crimes.
What is notable is that few of these crimes were committed in the heat of battle when soldiers in any army are pumped up by fear and aggression. The murder of a family of four and the rape of a young girl — for which two soldiers will walk free in 2017 — was plotted cold-heartedly. The five men, manning a traffic checkpoint at Mahmoudiya near Baghdad a year ago, had seen the girl and realized that her father was the only man in the house. Emboldened by alcohol, they broke in and raped the girl while one of their number took the other three family members into another room and shot them dead. When all had raped the child, she too was murdered.
There are many US soldiers serving in Iraq who abhor what their president has forced them to do and are genuinely trying to do some good. These men and women will be as sickened as any decent person by such crimes. But the succession of rape, torture and group murders of which US troops have been convicted or for which they are to stand trial demonstrates a sinister truth which echoes America’s failures in Vietnam.
These soldiers knew and understood even less than President Bush, about the country they were sent to invade. When they were not welcomed as liberating heroes, when the ultramodern technology which had blasted away Saddam’s armies, proved woefully ineffective to deal with a civil insurgency, the Americans ran out of ideas. Knowing nothing and perhaps caring even less about the Iraqis, they were never in a position to win hearts and minds. Besieged in a foreign land, they dehumanized the Iraqis and once this was done, a catalog of atrocities became inevitable in the same grotesque patterns that culminated in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
