It now appears that four U.S. Marines will be tried for the killing of more than twenty Iraqi civilians (including women, children, and old men in wheelchairs) in Haditha last November.
What I don't understand is why these men are being tried by a U.S. military court and not by the Iraqi civilian courts. The crime, if crime it was — that remains to be proven — was carried out in Iraq, against Iraqi citizens. If elements of, let us say, the Chinese army in California were to kill a bunch of innocent San Franciscans, I feel fairly confident that we would insist that it was our right and responsibility to try them, here, not that of the Chinese army in China. Maybe it's my long-term exposure to the world of Esperanto, where Americans are no better (and no worse) than Hungarians, but it seems to me that, on the international scale, "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."
There's a similar asymmetry in the reaction of some members of Congress to the proposal, floated a few months ago by the Iraqi government, that, if it would end the insurgency, a general amnesty for those who had engaged in fatal actions might be issued. This, it seems, was (as far as those members of Congress were concerned) tolerable, when we are talking about the mass killing of Iraqi civilians by, e.g., car bombs (terrorism), but every insurgent guilty of the death of a U.S. serviceperson in Iraq must be brought to justice (not terrorism; the more usual term is "resistance"). To me, the fatal flaw in the proposal is just the opposite; those guilty of killing occupiers should be forgiven in a general post-insurgency amnesty (after all, we'd do the same thing here, under similar circumstances), but those who have engaged in genuine acts of terror should be excluded.