"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."

.....

"And yet it is a sign of Iraqis' utter mistrust of the leaders who have replaced Saddam that anger over Haditha has been directed as much toward the Iraqi government as toward U.S. troops. Like many Iraqis across the country, the survivors accuse their elected leaders of cocooning themselves in a highly fortified Baghdad enclave, with little thought for the plight of their countrymen. "The concrete walls of the Green Zone are too high, so they can't see what's happening to us," says Khaled Raseef, the spokesman for the Haditha victims' kin. Whatever they think of the Marines, Raseef says he was impressed with the thoroughness with which the U.S. military has investigated the killings. As of last week, he says, nobody from the Iraqi government had contacted him for an account of what happened."


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200784-1,00.html