You can’t just shoot anybody

Latest revelation from the court-martial of Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III for the murder of Awad the Lame: it was inspired by a 1999 Willem Dafoe movie I’ve never heard of, “The Boondock Saints,” about some guys in da neighborhood who decide to do the vigilante thing and kill members of the Russian mob. The Onion’s A.V. Club describes it as “Less a proper action-thriller than a series of gratuitously violent setpieces strung together with only the sketchiest semblance of a plot... clearly designed to appeal to heartless armchair sadists.” Much like, well, you know.

The witness who gave us this tidbit, Lt. Nathan Phan, admits that he really did once order Hutchins to choke a prisoner unconscious. Phan, who is testifying in exchange for not being charged with beating up prisoners, agreed that maybe that order contributed to the lawless environment that led to the murder of Awad the Lame.

The Pentagon has been talking a lot about “bottom-up” reconciliation in Iraq. Evidently, while parliament and the Maliki regime may be failing to achieve anything, there’s just boatloads of bottom-up reconciliation, which is conveniently immeasurable – unbenchmarkable if you will – but which they’ll be happy to tell you a few anecdotes about. And Sunni militias, which the US is arming, they count too, because sectarian militias have always been such a force for reconciliation. Says Gen. Petraeus of what either he or the WaPo call these “grass-roots forces,” “This is a very, very important component of reconciliation because it’s happening from the bottom up”. Must be a definition of reconciliation with which I was not familiar.

The Post also checked in with Col. Ricky Gibbs, who is helping Sunnis form militias in Baghdad itself. He was telling some Sunni leaders (however that is defined – the article doesn’t say), “You have the green light. But they have to follow the rules. You can’t just shoot anybody. No vengeance . . . But the bad guys -- I don’t care. Go get them.” See, now they know they can only shoot “bad guys.” I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with that.

I’m not really sure whether the American military types are really so stupid as to believe this is an effective military measure and that these militias in Anbar and now Baghdad will focus their lethal attentions exclusively on “Al Qaida in Iraq,” or if this is a “divide et impera” tactic to put pressure on Maliki and the Shiites – the longer you take passing an oil law, the more guns we’ll give to your enemies.