that's not the point

When a crime is committed, of course it must be some comfort to the victims to know that it will be investigated and the perpetrator/s brought to justice - much preferable, obviously, to being the victim of a crime and voiceless, unable to get redress.

But when the crime is committed against you by someone from an organisation which claims to be acting in your best interests, and as the outworking of the highest ideals of enlightened principles, it makes the crime much much worse, and the comfort of being told by that organisation that the perpetrator will be brought to justice becomes somewhat cold, one would expect.

If you haven't guessed already, I've just been reading some of the reports of the alleged killing of civilians by US troops in Hadith, Iraq. And not only that, but Hilary Benn's almost incredibly unhelpful explanation that this actually represents progress for Iraq, because they can now complain about it.

This argument is perhaps most politely described as disingenuous. If all this so-called openness had arisen under Saddam's regime, then you might have considered it progress. But the point of the so-called liberation of Iraq was meant to end all this violence and undeserved bloodshed. When it turns out that the liberators themselves are basically as violent and bloodthirsty as the dictatorship, I'm afraid that's not progress. Given that the stated purpose of America going into Iraq in the first place was to bring in an idealised version of the freedoms that we enjoy in the West, it's completely beside the point to talk about the opportunity of "due process" when the very people who were meant to be introducing human rights are flouting them at will. All they're doing is perpetuating the misery that the population was already experiencing, with the only difference that they're now giving Western democracy a bad name while they're at it.