How many Hadith's have there been?

There have been reports of indiscriminate killing by U.S. military forces in Iraq since the beginning of the invasion and many specific incidents have only moved off the public stage because the military initiates its own investigations that eventually dissolve into obscurity.

It appears that Haditha will be different, although the military certainly followed the same pattern of deferral and cover-up for as long as it could. So now, at least, we have a concrete case to consider where troops on the ground appear to have created the Iraqi equivalent of a Mai Lai massacre. The images are horrifying. The idea is morally numbing.

But is Haditha any more grotesque than the commonly accepted practice of dropping 500 lb. bombs on the houses of “suspected insurgents” which annihilate whole families and neighborhoods which are then simply footnoted as “collateral damage.” We know full well, from the most famous missing WMD’s to the innumberable bombings to get Saddam Hussein and others that missed but blewn up hundreds of completely unsuspecting Iraqis in the middle of the night that our intelligence is criminally negligent if it is to be relied upon for pre-empitive force. The reality of the situation is that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has taken over 35,000 well documented lives, approximately 2/3 of them women and children. Given that there was no foundation for this invasion in the first place, how can we consider any single one of these deaths, qualitatively different from the ones lost at Haditha?