N.K.I.A.

Non-combatants killed in action.

There's a trial going on at Camp Pendleton in California that draws the curtain back on the indifference commanders in Iraq feel towards "N.K.I.A."

On Friday Major McCann, an experienced Marine lawyer, interjected some unsettling questions about how many civilian deaths it would take to constitute a violation of military regulations.

Alluding to Haditha, he asked, “At what point do we have to scratch our heads that we killed a lot more civilians than enemy?”

Because so many witnesses had testified that civilian deaths from “combat action” need not be investigated, Major McCann said, “I’m trying to figure out what authority they are citing.”

The witness testifying then, Col. Keith R. Anderson, a senior Marine Reserve lawyer now with the Department of the Navy, delivered a succinct and telling answer. “There is no authority,” he said. “I think it’s just a mind-set.”

The two officers had tackled some of the same issues that had troubled military investigators, including Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, who bluntly criticized Marine commanders in a secret report last year for tolerating large numbers of civilian deaths in combat operations.

“All levels of command,” including the American command in Baghdad, “tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics,” General Bargewell wrote.

The report suggested that Marine commanders — from Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of ground forces in Anbar Province, to First Lt. William T. Kallop, leader of Company K’s Third Platoon — created “an unintended command climate” that did not encourage compliance with the laws of armed conflict.

This is one of the definitions of quagmire: a conflict in which our troops are battling an enemy that is all but indistinguishable from civilians so that civilian deaths become part of the landscape.

And, as with so many aspects of the way this war has been conducted from the very beginning, a few relatively junior officers are going to take the fall for a climate of brutality that is accepted -- if not encouraged -- at the very highest levels of the command structure.