Iraq's Self-Inflicted Wounds

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Certainly in recent months, most of the violence has been Iraqi-on-Iraqi, with civilians being killed by Shi'ite death squads or Sunni insurgents and jihadis. U.S. forces often find themselves trying to prevent Iraqis from killing one another. On the same day that Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that the government would launch an investigation into the 24 Haditha killings and called U.S. attacks against Iraqi civilians "a regular occurrence," at least 18 Iraqis died at the hands of their countrymen. The rate of sectarian killings has escalated sharply since the Feb. 22 bombing of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra. In Baghdad alone, morgue officials say they have received at least 3,500 bodies since the bombing. Some of those officials have told TIME they routinely understated the toll because of political pressure from the interim Iraqi government to deny that the capital was in the throes of a civil war.

How do Iraqis make sense of the carnage? For many, the only way to cope is to block out the daily reports of civilian deaths--such as the story of U.S. troops' opening fire last week on a car carrying two women, or of Islamic extremists gunning down a tennis coach and two of his players last month for wearing shorts. Iraqis honed their imperviousness to atrocity under Saddam Hussein, when the regime killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens. But the sheer numbers of victims from this war has deepened the desensitization. That may explain why the debates about the overall death toll don't seem to resonate with many Iraqis. "What is the use of numbers?" asks Mithal Alussi, a secular, independent member of the Iraqi Parliament. "When you reach a point when every Iraqi can say that a member of his family or a close friend was killed, then statistics don't matter anymore. You don't need numbers to tell you it's a national catastrophe."

The Iraqi media had little interest in the Haditha story until last week, when it emerged that the Marines involved were likely to be punished. When TIME's first Haditha story ran in March, it was picked up by most of the Arab TV stations beaming into Iraq, but the local channels and newspapers repeated it with no comment or further reporting of their own. A senior Western diplomat who monitors the Iraqi media was surprised: "They treated it as just another atrocity, nothing special." There is one other explanation: Iraqis take it for granted that the military--any military--will mistreat and murder civilians. After all, that's how their own soldiers behaved for decades. They expected no different from the Americans, so there was a built-in propensity to believe that many, or most, Iraqis killed by U.S. forces were innocent victims of oppression. That is especially true in the Sunni triangle, but many Shi'ites believe it too, especially those who follow the radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Abu Ghraib scandal merely confirmed what they had suspected all along, that George Bush's soldiers were no different from Saddam's. Haditha was simply more of the same. But the possibility that Americans may be punished for killing Iraqis--that, at least, is new. Saddam's soldiers were rarely brought to justice for their crimes.