The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture

Counterinsurgency in Iraq 233
the incident once the press had unearthed it. Marines felt the sting of the
Haditha disgrace on their Corps and, despite instincts to close ranks with
brothers, condemned the incident in their own journals. While Marines may
have voiced sympathetic opinions elsewhere, authors to the Gazette made
no excuses for the Haditha Marines and decried their action in the strongest
possible terms, labeling it an “atrocity,” a “massacre,” and a “war crime,”
alongside such incidents as My Lai in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib earlier in
Iraq. The prevailing recommendation was enhancement of ethical training
in order to prevent like incidents from happening in the future. 85
These Marines strike a very different tone regarding the role of the media
than one finds in response to press highlights of abuses in the Banana Wars
years. In Gazette articles referencing Haditha, the press is not vilified for
reporting the incident—rather, Marines take responsibility for it and accept
public censure as appropriate. Twenty- first- century Marines regard it as an
operational reality that their mistakes will be sensationalized by a newshungry
media. Writing in 2006, 1st Lt. Matthew H. Peterson puts the onus
on Marines to avoid giving media outlets negative material to work with:
It has become a perennial truth that the media routinely exchanges
truth for sensationalism, but I reject this argument as an explanation
for the declining support for the Iraq war for two reasons.
First, sensationalism is what the media does and always has done.
To be outraged or even surprised by the media’s behavior is tantamount
to being mad at a snake for biting someone, but that is what
snakes do. Second, while the media may misrepresent an event or
fail to objectively present both sides of a story, rarely can the men
and women of the press be credited with total fabrication. In other
words, they may fan the flames, but they don’t start the fire. 86
Preparing for a Turnaround:
Lessons Applied, 2005–6
While Marines continued to slug it out downrange in the bleakest years
of the Iraq War, Marine leadership at home was working with US Army
counterparts to forge doctrine suitable for a modern counterinsurgency theater.
When comparing this effort to the after- the- fact doctrine of the Banana
Wars and the doctrine- free CAP program, it is clear that this century’s
Marine and Army forces were far quicker to appreciate counterinsurgency
as a distinctive type of war and one deserving of doctrinal attention. In that
sense, the lesson forged by Marine Corps predecessors in the Small Wars
Manual—that counterinsurgencies are “wars of an altogether different kind,
undertaken in very different theaters of operations and requiring entirely
different methods from those of the World War” 87 —was recognized and