Making the rounds...

...of some of the sources I spent a fair bit of the weekend avoiding, I find that (as so often) Josh Marshall gets it about exactly right.

"As I think is already becoming clear, the responsibility for all of this goes right to the very top -- to the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President and many others. The point isn't that the president ordered or knew specifically that soldiers in Iraq were setting attack dogs on to naked prisoners or all the other outrages we're about to hear of. But going back almost three years these men made very conscious and specific decisions to disregard or opt out of the various international conventions, rules and traditions governing the treatment of prisoners of war and enemy combatants that are intended to prevent such things from happening."

Eric Alterman makes a related point.

"This is the kind of thing that happens in every war, particularly one as incompetently planned as this one was. While the details are always unknowable, something like this scandal was entirely predictable. Add to the natural inhuman pressures of war, the lack of concern this administration has demonstrated for the niceties of civil liberties and human rights since 9/11, and the signal that sends down the chain of command, revelations of this type become only a matter of time.

"And all the hawks, liberal and otherwise, who find themselves “shocked, shocked” by the actions of our own soldiers should have read a little military history before embarking on this catastrophic adventure under the leadership of dishonest and incompetent ideological fanatics."

The juxtaposition of these points is leading me to reexamine one of my early conclusions. I've been inclined to believe that the Buscho cabal really was blinded by their ideology and inexperience in war - that they really didn't believe that eventually, American soldiers in the kinds of circumstances that they were sent to in Iraq wouldn't eventually commit war crimes, wouldn't succumb to the pressure to perform atrocities.

With Marshall's reminder, though, about the strenuous efforts that were made to remove the US from the purview of oversight by the traditional rules and agencies that have been developed to expose and punish behavior that is, in fact, fully predictable, the war planners weren't acting in ignorance at all.

I don't think that ignorance offers an adequate excuse in the first place, but the notion that American troops were sent to war knowing that there would be atrocities, expecting that war crimes would occur, with a plan to cover up those crimes established in advance of the deployment adds a new dimension of shame to the situation. What they were doing was, in effect, offering encouragement, if not orders, that atrocities take place. One of the basic protections owed the troops is to train and supervise against placing them in this kind of criminal jeopardy, and the Bush policy has been exactly the opposite. As if the usual risks of war were not enough, they seem to have deliberately subjected our troops to an additional dimension of danger.

Shame is such an inadequate word in these circumstances.