They came on the night of Nov. 20, 2005, inflamed over a comrade's murder from a roadside bomb in Haditha the day before. They blew open the doors of several homes in the neighborhood, killing 24 unarmed civilians — including a 76-year-old man and children between the ages of 3 and 15. They allegedly raped women and peed on the dead.

This was the Haditha massacre. The players? Not another Hosni Mubarak or some terrorist insurgent flying high on the wings of a convoluted interpretation of jihad, but our U.S. marines: the few, the proud.

Not one was held accountable.

As our nation bolted the doors on the Iraq War two months ago, we also contained the flames of the Haditha massacre. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the last defendant to face charges, received no jail time after pleading guilty to negligent dereliction of duty while all others' charges were dropped, dismissed or acquitted.

Bravo! That's how it should have worked.

However difficult it may seem, this is the price we pay for a military justice system that prioritizes the rights of the accused over a desire to punish criminals. Don't tell me about the "fog of war" and the necessity of second-guessing decisions made by fighters. Over the last 10 years, the U.S. Army has tried to court-martial 43 people on murder or manslaughter charges in Iraq or Afghanistan. Fifteen were acquitted — about twice the rate as in civilian courts — and the phrase "collateral damage" gets old.

Forget the 24 innocent Iraqis killed. The real tragedy lies when we look not across the borders of Syria, but within ourselves.

In the interest of national security, we ignore the civilians and forget the sacrifices of the Iraqi people. We have entrenched ourselves in what is known as the "frontier myth," where righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we're trying to conquer. It has been part of our national narrative — from communism in Korea and Vietnam to the labeling of Islamic terrorists as frontier savages.

Robert D. Kaplan wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2004, citing one officer as saying "The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century."

This explains that the resistance fighter is a terrorist — the father protecting his children with a gun is an insurgent.

But what's more striking than our indifference is our belief of right and wrong. We live in what social psychologists call the "just world" theory: When our view of a rational and orderly world is disrupted, we explain the event as an disorder of the mind. When wars went poorly in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we ignored the victims. We can dismiss the hundreds of Iraqi civilian deaths.

So what? Rip off this label of indifference by thinking of civilian casualties while chugging down your daily cup of coffee and that's that? No. Our attitudes have important consequences. We not only create tension with host governments but provide permission to our military and political leaders to pursue more interventions. We damage our global reputation. Though a handful of U.S. marines do not represent the whole, our inaction and indifference speak magnitudes.

We are regarded as an advocate of human rights and we undermine this reputation by being dismissive of civilian casualties. How can we call for international intervention in Syria, Sudan and many other countries when we believe in these values so hypocritically?

Let us learn how to count — count the civilians who are a part of the carnage and the larger tolls of the wars we wage. Only then can we erase the graffiti lining a victim's home which reads, "democracy assassinated the family that was here."

A 2011 New York Times investigation of the Haditha massacre was based on 400 pages of classified interrogations left behind in an Iraqi junkyard when American troops departed the country. We've got to look at it. There will be grit and gunk.

But that is war.

Fatimah Waseem is a freshman neurobiology and physiology and journalism major. She can be reached at waseem@umdbk.com.