NBC News says reports that Marines fighting in Iraq killed more than a dozen civilians in the aftermath of a firefight appear to be true. The killings in the western Iraq city of Haditha, a hot spot of the insurgency, were first reported the day they occurred in November of last year. Military officials told NBC News that photos from the scene show, among other horrors, “a mother and young child bent over on the floor as if in prayer, shot dead.”

That’s a war crime. The men who pulled the triggers should and will be punished, although the Pentagon’s cavalier attitude toward previously revealed crimes leaves in doubt to what extent. The enablers of the crime, the Bush administration, won’t be. The enablers of the administration — Congress and the voters who reelected Bush only a month before this atrocity — won’t be either.

Wars beget war crimes. There has never been and will never be a war free of them.

Two years ago, I wrote about the wholesale, willful ignorance of the inevitability that the US would commit war crimes in Iraq.

The question of whether the goals of a particular war are worth inflicting the burden of those inevitable crimes upon the nation and upon the soldiers we send off to fight is one that should be at the forefront of the national debate on war, assuming we ever regain the privilege of having a debate beforehand.

We didn’t have much of a debate about going to war in Iraq, a war that was on its own a violation of international law, and what little debate there was didn’t feature taking responsibility in advance for whatever atrocities the military was certain to commit in our name at our behest.

For a great chunk of the world, the US has long functioned as a sort of moral barometer. Aside from the self-imposed, if perhaps only theoretical, moral burden of war crimes committed in our name, the crimes lower the bar for other nations and non-state actors. In that respect the Haditha massacre, which is about to become as iconic as Abu Ghraib, is perhaps only a minor blot on a parchment that now includes the normalization of torture, kidnapping and the repeal of other basic human rights for presumed opponents in our War on Terra^®.

That erosion of trust, and perhaps more importantly, faith, in the US has national security implications as well. The Bush administration has done much to damage the country on that front, sometimes with the active acquiescence of the public and sometimes not. Willing accomplices or note, Americans as a whole will be paying for Haditha and the much larger crimes it represents for a generation or more.

John Dean once described the Watergate scandal as a cancer growing on the presidency. This presidency is a cancer growing on America. Excise it, and we’ll be on the way to recovery.

Our country will always be a nation of recovering war criminals. I don’t know whether we’ll get on the wagon or whether we’re capable of staying there if we do. I don’t know if we’ll hold ourselves to account, or if anyone else will in a clear enough fashion to arouse the national conscience. We will be held to account, in a thousand ways on a thousand days; will we notice? I don’t know.

Some people will read this and see nothing but “Blame America First.” Those people are moral idiots; they’ve not undergone a rite of passage into adulthood; they don’t understand responsibility as a concept independent of others’ behavior. Maybe the country doesn’t either. I like to hope we do. I suppose we’ll find out.

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