June 6, 2006: Accusations that American troops murdered civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are in the news again. Some of it is the usual propaganda that the enemy has learned is worth tossing out there from time to time. Some of it sticks with someone, somewhere. Even Europeans media sometimes fall for doctored or mislabeled photos of dead civilians, and publish them as "American atrocities". The implication is that American troops are out of control, poorly trained and led. Much of this is fed by those opposed to the removal of Saddam, via a war that did not have to approval of the UN. This is all more about scoring political points than anything else.

What is unusual about the current accusations is that such events are rare. While there are a lot of civilians killed by combat actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, most are clearly just people caught in the cross fire. The enemy knowingly takes cover among civilians, to take advantage of American "Rules of Engagement" (ROE). But at the same time, the American ROE these days puts the safely of American troops above all else. Thus if the enemy hides among civilians and opens fire, U.S. troops will return fire, and the civilians either get out of the way, or get hit. Brutal, but the alternative is dead Americans. The enemy makes the most of the civilians they have caused, through their actions, to get killed. The current atrocity accusations are about "cold blood" killings. The investigation will have to decide when the "heat of battle" turns into "cold blood." That's a tough decision to make, and the large number of imbedded journalists have written stories about it. These are not the kind of pieces editors love, as they are not as headline grabbing as atrocity stories.

There are other kinds of stories editors have avoided. Take, for example, what commonly occurred during World War II. When the Germans, for example, were found to have killed Allied prisoners, there was a period of weeks or months after that where Allied troops were taking far fewer German prisoners. After D-Day in 1944, this happened first on the Normandy beachhead, when some German SS troops killed some Canadian prisoners. Soon, German troops realized it was not a good idea to get captured by the Canadians, as German prisoners did not survive their captivity very long. This sort of thing happened again at the end of 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, when SS troops killed a lot of American prisoners. Retribution was quietly applied. These events got out pretty fast after the war, and were even reported in the history books. But less remembered were cases in early 1945, as Allied troops advanced into Germany, and occasionally encountered armed resistance from German civilians. Retribution was swift, brutal and often not very precise. There were other incidents where people released from concentration camps, organized themselves into death squads and went after Germans. Some of these stories are only now coming out into the open, although they were whispered about by Allied Military Police and intelligence officers who investigated deaths among German civilians at the time. Sometimes the patterns were noted, and sorted out, but dead German civilians were not, at the time, something the victorious Allies were very concerned about.

Try as you might to stop it, incidents of troops making their own rough justice will persist. But there is a lot less of it. But it's not considered news that there is far less of this atrocity stuff in the current Iraq and Afghanistan fighting, than in earlier wars. Interesting, but not newsworthy. But when it does happen, as it will inevitably will, the longer the fighting goes on, it is news. But it is very poorly understood, and poorly reported news. That you can depend on.