“He’s faking he’s [expletive] dead,” says the marine in the video, pointing his rifle at the head of a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi insurgent in a Fallujah mosque. The frame freezes, but the audio continues with the sharp crack of a rifle.

“Well,” says one of his companions, “He’s dead now.”

The military is investigating the alleged execution and likely will report that this was an isolated incident, and that the marine, rightly or wrongly, made a questionable decision under the unimaginable stress of combat.

And Americans will be shocked at the scene but relieved that it was only an isolated incident. Just like we were after the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Just like we were when an army reservist unit refused a convoy mission. Just like we were when American soldiers were charged with forcing Iraqi detainees to jump off a bridge into the Tigris River.

The problem is, after a while, all these isolated incidents cease to be … well, isolated.

This is not to criticize those men and women who bravely serve our country in Iraq; by and large, they are doing their job professionally and well. Rather, it is to criticize a government, and to a lesser extent, a culture that glorifies and uses war as a political tool but refuses to accept responsibility for the inevitable consequences.

Many remember the famous first half of William Tecumseh Sherman’s quotation that war is hell, but few remember the important second half – that “there is no refining it.” Wounded are executed. Prisoners are tortured. Similar things happened in Sherman’s war – and every other.

The shooting raises two important questions about our involvement in Iraq.

First, why do many Americans continue to embrace war as a reasonable extension of foreign policy, yet object to actual scenes of war? Perhaps it would have been better if we could see, and not just hear, that final Fallujah gunshot, or if we could see the flag-draped coffins being sent back from Iraq. Is there a cause-and-effect between how we Americans shield ourselves from images of war and our support of it?

Prior to our occupation of Iraq, the populations in nearly every other country around the world opposed our invasion. Could that be because the rest of the world has seen war first-hand in the past 70 years? That, for them, it has been less newsreels of liberated citizens throwing flowers and tickertape parades, and more pillaged towns and fire-bombed cities?

Second, why have some ground soldiers been punished for misconduct in Iraq, but not those in the government, military and intelligence communities who mistakenly put them there? The Duelfer Report proved that our stated reasons for going to Iraq were false – Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were not connected; Iraq had no WMD nor the means to produce them. But still we went. Who is going to be held responsible for this?

Ultimately, the individual soldiers bear responsibility for their own misconduct. But the blame should not belong only to a few government-offered scapegoat troops. As all wars do, this one has demanded of them the physically improbable and the psychologically impossible. Accountability also should be demanded from the government that needlessly sent them to war, where such misconduct is inevitable, and the population that didn’t do enough to stop it.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.