LAST Monday, Memorial Day in the US, Americans honoured the sacrifices made over two centuries by the nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

In towns and cities across the country, officials laid wreaths, veterans organised parades and millions of citizens reflected, with that uniquely intense American patriotism, on the central role played by the nation’s military in the protection of their own and the promotion of other peoples’ liberty.

The next day, overshadowing the stories of recollected honour, the newspapers were dominated by the escalating tale of dishonour and shame that unfolded last November at al-Haditha in Iraq.

As the week wore on and other stories of US military excesses dominated the headlines, it seemed as though the most powerful image of the US serviceman was not the hero of Iwo Jima or Normandy but the callow bully, rampaging through the homes of helpless civilians in desert villages.

This Memorial Day week has probably been the worst seven days for the US military since the Vietnam War ended more than 30 years ago. If proven true, the stories of the massacre at al-Haditha will have profound consequences, not just for the public’s increasingly hostile attitude to the Iraq war, but also for its belief in and support for the very idea of US engagement in lengthy struggles to create stability in far-off places.

The events of the past week have underscored, as Abu Ghraib did two years ago, that for the US military, true defeat comes only rarely at the hands of its enemies and far more often through the arms of a small but significant minority of its own servicemen, whose indiscipline and inhumanity can dwarf the honourable efforts of the vast majority.

It was, as much as anything, the sense of lost honour that led to America’s worst military reverse in its history — the Vietnam War. In March 1968 Lieutenant William Calley led his men on a murderous rampage through the Vietnamese village of My Lai. When, after a lengthy cover-up, he was finally convicted by a court martial three years later, it marked a turning point in the public’s tolerance for the war. A month after his conviction, a poll recorded for the first time a majority of Americans calling for an immediate end to the war. It was with that searing memory in mind that American commanders dispatched their troops into Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 with the instruction: “No My Lais — you hear?”

Not that there is any danger now of a return to those days during the Vietnam War when returning servicemen were spat at in the street. For the most part, whatever they think of Iraq, Americans are confident that the vast majority of their armed forces uphold the highest standards.

The real danger in the al- Haditha massacre is different. The slaughter seems to have had its origins in the desperate and frightening conditions of a counter-insurgency operation in Iraq for which most American servicemen have not been well prepared. Although there has been much outrage expressed in the US this week, there has also been much sympathy for the conditions in which American soldiers find themselves. There is a gathering sense that the outrages of al-Haditha and elsewhere are not isolated examples of bad behaviour but also the almost inevitable consequence of deploying the US military to a task for which it is ill equipped and poorly trained — policing and pacifying an alien people.

This scepticism about using the military as a tool to remake nations and civilise a hostile world was put best by an article in the periodical Foreign Affairs in 2000. The author attacked the misuse of the US military in nation-building projects in the Clinton years.

“The president must remember that the military is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.”

It was a succinct indictment about the dangers of using the military as anything other than a fighting force. Its author was Condoleezza Rice, then principal foreign policy adviser to the man who was soon to be President Bush.

It is hard to escape the sense that Americans are increasingly coming to embrace its wisdom, even as its authors have disowned it.

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