This Haditha thing just keeps getting worse.  Bad enough that U.S. Marines summarily execute 24 Iraqi non-combatent civilians (including children) in cold blood, an act that is far worse than the Abu Gharib scandal (at least the abused prisoners in Abu Gharib were, you know, supposedly combatents).

But now there’s strong evidence of a cover-up by Marine superiors:

The U.S. military investigation of how Marine commanders handled the reporting of events last November in the Iraqi town of Haditha, where troops allegedly killed 24 Iraqi civilians, will conclude that some officers gave false information to their superiors, who then failed to adequately scrutinize reports that should have caught their attention, an Army official said yesterday.

Ezra Klein hits the right note when he discussed the long-term implications:

American troops have massacred innocent Iraqis, not by accident, but on purpose. This is a barrel of gasoline dumped on the already-flaming insurgency. This will ricochet across the Arab world. We will become more hated than we already are. Al Qaeda will have another item to add to their list of casus bellis. Our country can’t afford to further inflame anti-American sentiment — but doing so was as inevitable as morning dawn the moment we entered Iraq.

The Bush administration has many failings, but in the long run, their most dangerous blind spot will be the one they had for anti-Americanism. No hated country is ever safe, and we are truly loathed, more so every week. It was all predictable, it could all be foreseen. But the Bush administration refused to see it. They believed they could fight a perfect war, and didn’t consider or didn’t care what would happen if they couldn’t. But they proved unable to alter the nature of combat, and now the very portion of the world we needed to mobilize against the murderers in their midst see us as ruthless monsters.