Helicopter gunship attack

War is the health of the state.

The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

Teh point about the media’s priorities is beyond dispute. But “the U.S. political system” is a fiction, like “The Government.” Is the argument that we should stop infiltrating groups of stupid people with guns in southeast Michigan in order to devote more resources to exposing Pentagon coverups of war crimes? If not, what does one thing have to do with the other?

Americanmoralcretin, fuck off.

Wars of choice ARE criminal precisely because this kind of stuff is guaranteed to happen.

‘Henry: As a political scientist, shouldn’t you be providing more balance, not to mention relevant research? I realize this is “The Timber,” but sheesh!’

Americaneocon is a truly contemptible person as his worthless blog indicates, but undoubtedly we will be hearing milder versions of his ‘arguments’ from such great thinkers of our time as Glenn Reynolds etc.

To which the only real response is: if all the ‘rules of engagement’ were followed, and everything was above board……why did the Army lie about what happened, not once but over and over again?

I found the video to be one of the most upsetting things I’ve ever watched, largely because I don’t think I’ve ever watched real people be killed before. But Steve LaBonne is right, these sorts of things are bound to happen. What I found so upsetting is the way the American soldiers were so cavalier about it, taking such pleasure in killing people. I don’t really doubt that they thought the people they were shooting were armed, but it doesn’t matter, because I don’t think they cared, except legalistically. They’re joking, their pleasure at a kill, their laughter at the truck driving over a body–it suggests a profound dehumanization that happens in war. And that’s precisely why war should be avoided.

This is particularly true with this kind of war, waged by contemporary Americans. The soldiers in the helicopters were never threatened. They floated above the Iraqis, firing (in my mind, surprisingly and remarkably) accurate machine guns, totally insulated from their actions. They took on little or no risk; it was like a video game–which of course they grew up playing–with all the moral weight of playing a video game, which is to say none. How terrifying it must have been to be one of the wounded men, lying on the ground, listening and watching as the flying machines of death that had already shot you flew around and around over your head. In contrast, how profoundly unfrightened the Americans sound in their banter.

A lot is being made of the rules of engagement, but it seems to me that someone should mention the principles of just war. Here’s a quick attempt of mine that I spit out earlier this morning:

http://cruelmistress.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/rules-of-engagement/

@10: It is demonstrably true that large segments of society value the lives of Americans over the lives of any foreigners, and especially dark-skinned foreigners. However, I still question the use of the Hutaree affair as a datapoint to support this thesis. Are you implying that if the group had been talking about targeting black cops, the Bureau would applied the “every dog is entitled to one bite” principle? I just don’t believe that.

As I have acknowledged, the Hutaree roundup may well turn out to have been an cynically calculated to obtain publicity, promotions, and funding. There is a depressing amount of recent precedent for that. The Bureau’s informant may turn out to have been acting as a provocateur in furtherance of those goals. But at this point, we don’t know. (On the evidence that has been shown, I can’t see that anyone will be convicted. But I think the authorities are obligated to put safety first.)

It’s the protests and political organizing that I want to contribute to. Specifically in response to this, as part of something productive that’s large enough and specific enough to draw attention.

I wrote out a letter longhand this morning, but my right-wing senators and reps stand no chance of listening whatsoever.

E.g. I would chip in to play this video, suitably introduced for contextual clarity, on TV ad spots, or something. I don’t really know. At least enough to force the cable TV media to start a running ongoing story on it, and keep up pressure. “Protesters continue to demand a draw-down in Iraq, responding to a video in which American troops are shown to be laughing as they fire on civilians…”

Surely there was a golden age, when militarists had the decency to disregard their own losses too.

The modern version is “invade, but no losses, we need the approval ratings”. So all you have to do is encourage the military to shoot if anything moves in a non-reassuring way (apparently a pleasant routine for these charming fellows in the helicopter), and cover up if you have to.

And that’s now, with an army made of people on the ground and in big, vulnerable helicopters that leak fuel and images all over the place. Just wait till everything is drones – cheaper, further from the target, better control of images.

Already nothing seems to really dent the amazing militarism of the us media/blogosphere (and let me say I support the troops), imagine this future bliss.

@14 – You’re right, my comment was sloppily worded. I was trying to suggest that the value-distinction being made was between ‘American/Iraqi’, rather than between ‘white/black/middle eastern’, but that’s my fault. Of course, it would make no difference if the cop that had been threatened had been white, black, Hispanic or anything else.

On your point that the Hutaree case might have been publicity-motivated, I find that very interesting. Not wanting to hijack the thread at all with this, but can you tell me about any of the recent precedents you mention? Just some links or something, if you know of any; I’d be interested to read more.

I’m going to cross the streams…

This incident demonstrates a principle that Glenn Greenwald thoroughly understands and Orin Kerr apparently doesn’t: this kind of constant deception is fundamental to the way the War Party (in both its Republican and Democratic manifestations) thinks. They always lie, they always seek to avoid accountability, and they’re consistently awful enough that a strong presumption of guilt is a very sensible stance. They deserve the best possible defense within the limits of law and morality, same as everyone else, but as citizens and human beings we should be judging them guilty and requiring them to prove their innocence. The only threat they respect is actually being stopped, and that isn’t happening much.

Hi Americaneocon!

It’s been great to know you but could I just echo Steve LaBonne and ask you to fuck off now?

There’s a good lad.

I think it was on the Slate comments thread about the wikileaks extract (possibly it has been deleted) but for some reason someone thought this film extract from Full Metal Jacket was relevant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S06nIz4scvI

No idea why.

Lord, you guys miss the point. It’s not whether these things happen in war. It’s not why the first attack was legit, but the second was not. It’s not SLB’s ranting. It’s very simple:

Why hasn’t anybody court martialed the assholes who are losing us the war?

Sure it’s horrible, but it’s war, there’s no specific objection to be made here

Yes, there is: an objection to the war.

More specifically and pedantically, even if this is to be shrugged off as an acceptable act in a just war (something I’m not ready to concede), that only obtains if the war itself is just.

You guys are swatting at gnats, while a grizzle bear is sitting in the corner licking its lips. Makes me wonder if Americans are even intelligent enough to even deserve not having their teeth knocked out by a bunch of ignorant tent dwellers.

Neither the first nor the second attack was “legitimate” because we had no right to be there in the first place. A.) This is not a “just war.” We were not attacked by Iraq, nor did Iraq have any potential or inclination to attack us. B.) This is not a legal war, but rather instead a clearly unconstitutional imperial usurpation of presidential authority, which neither Congress nor the Supreme Court have the balls to stand up against. 3.) Armed or not, no one in the first group, or in the van, was in any way threaten, most especially not threatening to a heavily armored and armed agile Apache helicopter hovering hundreds of feet in the sky above them. It is clear as day in the video that no one on the street had even taken notice of the helicopter. 4.) The audio of the tape make the intent crystal clear. Those boys were looking for prey and they out-and-out lied to their superiors in order to get permission to fire upon them. They lied about the number of people, they lied about the number of weapons, they lied about being able to identify the make and model of the weapons when, in fact, they couldn’t even identify the “weapons” as 35mm cameras. From start to finish they misrepresented the situation to the authorizing “gods” on the radios. Further, they comments, laughing, joking, and self-congratulatory behavior throughout the entire encounter demonstrated a clear disregard for human life.

This was not only murder, it was a war crime and one in which the highest levels of authority are implicated through the coverup. We’d be wise to stop quibbling about how WE think this should be viewed and to start facing up to the reality of how the rest of the WORLD is already viewing it — which isn’t good. On 9/11/2001, America tragically gained a level of international good will that it had not benefited from in almost a century. Within a decade, by 4/5/2010, America has become an international pariah, despised by all. Obama was suppose to help clean this up, but instead, he has only exacerbated it by continuing and even expanding the war, by continuing the coverups, and by essentially functioning, for the Neo-con corporate statists, as George Bush in an unconstitutional third term. The honeymoon is over, the goodwill has run out, America is about to be hung out to dry — and yet you guys are still arguing over the little things, as though the rest of the world doesn’t matter. Utterly clueless.

LOL — this is why I observe that you guys miss the point.

It’s not whether WE think the killings were justified under the rules of engagement (much less just war theory).

It’s that the second attack is clearly questionable.

Yet nobody was made to stand tall before The Man.

Remember — that somebody could have been court martialed (most likely the officer who gave the go-ahead to fire), doesn’t necessarily mean that he would have been convicted. He might have been acquitted.

But the very fact of the trial is the sort of thing that could win us the war. The lack is what could lose it for us.

Or to be more careful about this:

The semantic trouble with calling the occupation of Iraq by the name “War in Iraq” is that it allows us to contemplate absurd notions like “winning” which would be immediately obvious for the nonsense they are if we were sticklers for vocabulary: how does one “win” an ongoing military occupation?

Atrios just a few hours ago: “The Logic Of Our Wars — It’s hard not to think that the goal is to stay until everyone who wants us to leave is dead, at which point we can finally leave.”

Teh point about the media’s priorities is beyond dispute. But “the U.S. political system” is a fiction, like “The Government.”

If “the Government” is a fiction, what entity, beyond a single individual human, is not?

parse, if the government is a fiction then there are good grounds for thinking that individual human beings are fictions too.

If “the Government” is a fiction, what entity, beyond a single individual human, is not?

I can only answer this with a specific example which involves revealing where I work — the Civil Rights Division. Its is an organization with a coherent defined function — enforcing anti-discrimination statutes. Over and above winning particular cases, our goal is to get judges to decide cases in ways that will make it easier for future plaintiffs to litigate successfully.

But the various agencies of the United States also get sued for discrimination all the time. There is another part of the Justice Department which is responsible for defending these cases; its overriding goal is to shape the decisional law to make it harder for plaintiffs to win these cases .

So we want to make arguments they don’t like; they want to make arguments they don’t like. These conflicts get resolved by a process of ad hoc negotiation; I am not involved and don’t know the details.

So the Civil Rights Division is a coherent entity unified by a goal, and so is the Civil Division; neither is a fiction in the sense I used the word. But it is not possible to say in general terms what the policy of the “government” is with regard to whether it should be harder or easier for discrimination plaintiffs to win.

Most especially, and to the current point, I maintain that nobody on either side of the conflict I have described bears any particular responsibility — over and above whatever guilt accrues to American society in general — when people in helicopters on the other side of the world blow up the wrong people, just because the US Treasury writes their paychecks as well as ours. We have no more control over their actions than you do.

Russell,

In Abu Ghraib, soldiers deliberately violated the laws of war to abuse prisoners.

In the video, soldiers in good faith and in a lawful manner engaged a group they believed to be enemy insurgents, in the process killing two reporters.

The former is a crime, deliberately undertaken. The latter is a horrible mistake that is the inevitable accompaniment to any war.

What’s interesting to me is that most of the commentary (not as in comments above, but on blogs and columns elsewhere) I’ve read seems to need to find something beyond “this is an example of the horror of war” to justify giving it attention.

They’re joking, their pleasure at a kill, their laughter at the truck driving over a body—it suggests a profound dehumanization that happens in war.

Of course it is. And if, say, 0.001% of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan carry that esprit de corps back to the US, you’ll see the result splashed bloodily over local news broadcasts, and perhaps people will give a shit then.

nick s: Of course it is. And if, say, 0.001% of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan carry that esprit de corps back to the US, you’ll see the result splashed bloodily over local news broadcasts, and perhaps people will give a shit then.

Because on your view, if a soldier doesn’t fully appreciate the humanity of the people his duty is to kill, then he cannot, and will not, appreciate the humanity of anyone else? You seem to think that a soldier’s attitude towards shooting what he believes to be the enemy will translate into his attitude towards all other human beings.

But, of course, the same soldiers who kill, day after day, also run into fire to help a fallen comrade, or put their lives on the line to escort vital equipment to a local hospital, or do a myriad of other things which indicate a great reverence for human life. The situation, I believe, is considerably more complex, and I think we oversimplify, if not demean, these soldiers when we decide that their jokes in combat must reflect the entirety of their views and emotions concerning human life.

There’s a reason we stopped doing “counterinsurgency warfare” after Vietnam

Much is made of the The Man Called Petraeus writing a field manual on counterinsurgency warfare for an Army that had been without such before Iraq, as if this were some Promethean feat, bringing enlightenment to an institution hidebound by conventional thinking.

Actually, the Army once had a very extensive and robust doctrinal literature on the subject of COIN. That was back in the Vietnam era, when an insurgency was the big, overwhelming, problem the Army was handed, and the institution, understandably, felt it needed to be on a common sheet of music in handling that problem.

Well, after that Vietnam problem removed itself from our further intervention, and became no longer the Army’s problem, the Army concluded that being asked to do COIN in the first place was the problem, not the Viet Cong, and burned all the COIN literature. The idea, which is associated with General DePuy, but was a fairly clear consensus at the time, was to bring back the radical notion that the only legitimate purpose for the Army was to defeat the armies of enemy nations, not to wage war on “enemy” civilian populations. Not that anyone ever puts it that way, “waging war on civilians”, when they ask a real army to do COIN. The rationale is always that we are using the army to enforce domestic order in some country whose inhabitants “really” want us to enforce order in their country, despite the massive popular support for one or more sources of order competing with the folks we think are the legitimate authority. The DePuy solution was that we would simply bypass and reduce to irrelevance the obfuscations and self-deception of policy-makers who will always find some endangered regime somewhere that deserves the support of our military used in a “police action” — by the simple expedient of keeping the Army constantly at a high state of unreadiness to do this illegitimate thing, waging war on a civilian population.

As people have noted, yes, civilians in a combat zone in any war are at risk of being attacked by troops who mistake them for combatants. But in an actual legitimate war, one being waged by armies against armies, not armies against civilians, those combat zones are limited in extent, spatially and temporally. Civilians, wisely, do their best to vacate the combat zones, or at least lay low if escape is impractical, until the combat zone moves on with the tide of battle. But what we have in Iraq and Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, is no legitimate war of army against army. By deciding to pretend that it is a legitimate aim of war to subjugate an entire nation, that there is some legitimate role for our Army to do COIN, we made entire countries combat zones, for indefinite periods of time. The wealthy in these countries, wisely, have chosen to flee. But neither flight to another country, nor laying low in some basement, is possible for most Iraqis. They have no choice but to “bring their kids to a battle”, since we have made their entire country a battlefield, a free-fire zone, to use the Vietnam-era terminology, and that for years on end.

There is no reason to think that this video is at all an aberration, or that the participants whose words we can hear are at all unusual. Of course they have no idea who they’re shooting at. At the very highest levels, we have no idea who we’re fighting against (This wonderful “Sunni Awakening” was no more than a co-option of people with guns we once were convinced were our enemies. We met the enemy and he was us.) The pilots and aircrew would have no way to make sense of an American, much less Iraqi, street scene from their vantage point. But we sent them there, we put Eric Blair’s elephant gun in their hands, and when an elephant-like object lumbers into view, they have to pretend they know what they’re doing, so of course they shoot up people at random while convinced they are about the important COIN mission we set them on. Legal action against the participants would make no more sense than court-martialing the pilots we sent to bomb German and Japanese cities, war crimes though those actions clearly were.

Eventually we will once again burn the COIN books. But this time, let’s not rely on mere doctrinal unreadiness of the Army to do COIN, to somehow force policy-makers to stop and think through the consequences, so that hopefully the absence of a COIN capability will deter them from invading and occupying foreign countries where we don’t have a native government immediatley ready to hand off internal security to. That plan didn’t work last time we tried it. Next time, after the inevitable disillusionment that inevtiable failure in Iraq and Afghanistan will bring, let’s follow the wisdom of that disillusionment to its natural, and only firm, conclusi0n, the conclusion we always reached between all of our wars before the end of WWII. Let’s disband the Army down to the corporal’s guard strength it always before stood at in our peacetime history. Let’s create a situation in which there can be no foreign military adventures without the need to first rebuild an expeditionary force from scratch.

How different is the uS Army (lowercase “u” as in the Declaration of Independence) from the Wehrmacht?

I’m not in any way condoning this attack, which is appalling, but it has to be said that if you look at 3:40-3:45 closely (and uncaptioned by Wikileaks) that one person in the group appears to be carrying a Kalashnikov and another person carrying something that looks very like an RPG.

And so we come to the fundamental issue that so many of those who are implicitly or explicitly defending this atrocity are so careful to avoid.

If these civilians ‘appeared to be carrying a Kalashnikov’ and the soldiers were acting ‘in good faith’ and it’s all just a ‘terrible mistake’…..why did the Army lie about it? Why didn’t they immediately release this video and state openly that they were proud of the actions of the soldiers, who had nothing to be apologetic about? Why was it left to Wikileaks? And if Wikileaks are merely showing ‘a terrible mistake’ which we really shouldn’t be getting so het up about….why has the Pentagon stated that Wikileaks is a ‘national security threat’?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7475050/Pentagon-deems-Wikileaks-a-national-security-threat.html

this response from someone who claims experience in these matters is worth reading I think.

Although they announced they were releasing the video back in January, so it may or may not be related to the release of this video.

You seem to think that a soldier’s attitude towards shooting what he believes to be the enemy will translate into his attitude towards all other human beings.

You seem to have a comprehension problem. What I think, Heur, is that war is not easily left on the battlefield. My thoughts are based on conversations with people who provide VA mental health services, though for some reason they don’t have as much spare time to talk these days as they did seven years ago.

Hidari,

There have been some pretty gross instances of the Pentagon lying about events, but I’m not sure this is one of them. I’m open to correction though. What do you think they lied about?

If there was a cover-up, then that’s news in itself, but as far as I can tell the video is important in that it graphically depicts what engagements can be like in the kind of day-to-day “low intensity” urban warfare that was conducted in summer 2007.

Russell,

I’m sure this video stirred strong emotions in you, as it did in all of us. If you think I was wrong to disagree with Fallows about his analogy to Abu Ghraib, that’s fine. But there’s no reason to engage in personal attacks.

The Vietcong was not defunct in 1972, and just to prove it they inflicted 25,000 casualties on the ARVN during the period between the 1972 ceasefire and the end of 1974.

Shh. Don’t disrupt the LOL-troll’s cretinous fantasies about how the US coulda, shoulda, woulda “won” in Vietnam if it weren’t for those damned hippies.

Americanist, I did write a long reply to your last post, but decided to shorten things by replying only to true statements which you made. That shortened it down to this:

ROFL — as a rule, Barry, sensible people recognize a distinction between what are known as “questions” even “challenges”, and “statements”. I realize this is difficult for you, but if you are going to try to reach beyond feeble in argument, these kinds of distinctions are important. Otherwise you will continue to confuse screwdrivers with hammers, as in #69. (Psst — a screwdriver is not an impact instrument. It won’t work well if you use it as one. That’s what your response was like.)

For example: I noted that humility is generally a good idea, and asked how many of you guys had been in combat? I added the true statement that I have not, which I cited as a reason not to be too sure what people in combat know, and when they know it.

I didn’t notice you answered the question: have you been in combat, Barry? Kindly form your answer to the standard of a true statement, as you suggested. I did — not that you noticed.

I also repeated my question: why isn’t anybody court martialing the assholes who are losing us this war?

I note you didn’t answer that one, either. But perhaps you’d like to crawl before you try standing up: let us know how much personal experience you have with people shooting RPGs at you, will ya?

See — if, for example, you are a four-tour guy, then you might have some useful insight into the question why the officer who gave the command to fire hasn’t been court martialed. But since you have trouble with even more basic stuff….

You can actually see what the photographer was taking pictures of in the military report, where a few of the photographs are published.

The military’s report on the incident is here: http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%2025210/Death%20of%20Reuters%20Journalists/6–2nd%20Brigade%20Combat%20Team%2015-6%20Investigation.pdf

Some additional context, based on that report: The helicopters were providing support to an infantry unit that had been engaged in combat for the previous 4 hours (which is why the streets are so empty) in the area. In the video, when you see the photographer peering around the corner with his camera, the infantry unit was directly in his line of sight, and the photographer was pointing his camera at them. See page 41 of the military report, showing still photographs retrieved from the camera. So the pilot or gunner thought the cameraman was engaging the infantry unit, and the pilot and gunner would have been sharply aware of the position of the infantry unit.

The weapons retrieved from the site of the attack include a loaded RPG and multiple rounds for it, which makes me doubt the notion that some of the men in that group were carrying weapons simply for self-protection.

From the helicopter crew’s perspective, then, they are 4 hours into an operation that has involved, apparently, continuous enemy contact. The streets are apparently empty of normal civilian traffic and pedestrians. They note a group of men moving toward the infantry unit, carrying weapons, one appearing with reasonable clarity to be a RPG. One man appears to crouch behind the corner of a building, and point his weapon at the infantry unit, raising it as though he were aiming.

I am wondering how many times it is possible for a troll to begin posts with LOL on a thread which contains video of, and is about, civilians being murdered.

Are you really the same human being who generously shared an outline of your play about the Catholic church in America, and spoke considerately at length about the “American heresy” notion?

How am I supposed to reconcile your behavior here with the Americanist of, like, less than a week ago?

As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality.

Imagine if this film were from Gaza, and you were an Israeli professor who strongly deplored it. On sabbatical, in England.

I would greatly appreciate anyone (other than theAmericanist) who can point out the RPG in that video. Go for it, Heur.

The fact that an RPG was “found” frankly does not impress me, because the possibility that it was planted after the fact seems credible to me. After shooting up some reporters and two kids, one needs one’s cover story intact. I don’t have any evidence for this, and wouldn’t assert that it happened affirmatively; but I currently assign no credibility whatsoever to the original source of the RPG information.

‘There have been some pretty gross instances of the Pentagon lying about events, but I’m not sure this is one of them. I’m open to correction though. What do you think they lied about?’

You are kidding, right? This is how the unofficial outlet for American military propaganda, the New York Times, reported the incident we have all now just watched.

‘The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.

”There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.’ (emphasis added).

Now, as we have all now seen, literally every single word of that statement is a lie, and, of course, as we have all seen the video (as, presumably, had Lt. Col. Bleichwehl) we know that the word ‘lie’ is appropriate, that is, it was a knowing and conscious falsehood.

So: to repeat: if there was no problem with the rules of engagement and it was all above board and no one had anything to be ashamed of….why the lie?

I’ve watched a lot of morbid shit on the internet but this video is fucking horrible.

Not surprising, mind.

It’s pretty safe to say a lot worse has been done by Coalition forces in the conduct of this war, most of which we’ll be lucky to ever find out about; shit like this has been going on since an Italian guy in plane tossed a grenade at some Turks.

The Medium Lobster:

Literally tens of Americans were shocked this week to discover that the United States military likes to kill people. Unsettling news, yes, particularly for those of us who had assumed in good faith that one million Iraqis had accidentally slipped on a banana peel one morning and fallen into a pile of mislaid cruise missiles, but before we leap to all sorts of unsightly conclusions, calling Our Boys “mass-murderers” just because they happen to enjoy the occasional mass-murder, let’s remember that in the fog of war with the eggs and the omelettes and the War Is Hell, who can say what’s right and wrong, what’s good and evil, who’s an unarmed pregnant woman and who’s a ticking time bomb threatening to produce future foreigners? Our troops have a job to do, after all – defending our country from those countries who would defend their country from our country – and if we hounded and nit-picked them after every little massacre, gang rape or atrocity, they’d hardly get any killing done at all.

Now, is this video disturbing? Of course. Were atrocities committed, innocents slaughtered, corpses desecrated and children maimed? Absolutely. But was it all done according to proper procedure? Ah, now, that’s the question. We should all certainly be willing to support a full and complete investigation into the possibility of an official recommendation for preliminary motions toward an investigation, looking into the matter of whether or not the people here were properly murdered in triplicate, signed twice on the goldenrod form, in accordance with the Code of Canon Law. And we shouldn’t rest until any guilty parties have been found, and strongly-worded disciplinary Post-Its firmly applied to their personnel files.

Apart from that, I don’t think we have to spend much time thinking about this sort of thing – this is an isolated incident, just like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this – and one has to accept a certain amount of rape, torture and murder with one’s military. After all, if the military wasn’t free to rape and torture people, then it certainly wouldn’t be free to murder them; and if the military wasn’t free to murder people, then it wouldn’t be free to slaughter them en masse; and if the military wasn’t free to slaughter people en masse, then what would we even have a military for?

I’m still not sure who the rest of the people in the street were. They weren’t just passers-by – from the video, they were definitely moving along with the Reuters guys, as in they were all part of the same group. (In fact there don’t seem to be any unconnected passers-by on the street at all – which would make sense if it was just up the road from a four-hour firefight. All the locals would have got off the streets.) And they aren’t acting like locals who are reacting to the news team – they aren’t clustering round the cameramen and trying to get their story across, in fact some of them are pushed up 10-15m ahead and a few more are hanging well back.
But they weren’t Reuters employees – they aren’t identified as such on the video or by Reuters, and in any case there are too many of them. A TV news team is going to be 3-5 people at most – cameraman, reporter, producer, fixer, maybe a sound guy – and there seem to be more like 10 or 12 of them. And they seem to be in charge – they’re taking the Reuters guys by the arm, gesturing, leading them down the street, pointing where to go.

Ajay, journalists showed up and started taking pictures, and some of the locals came out to see what’s going on.

The RPG
i41.tinypic.com/343tb0j.jpg

theAmericanist:

” So IMNSHO, I’m asking the right question, which you guys are studiously avoiding: Why isn’t anybody court martialing the assholes who are losing us the war?”

there is no war. your country invaded another, over the protests of everyone in the world, and in direct contradiction to the advice of experts. your country made claims to be ‘doing good deeds’, none of which have materialized. every predictable failure has occurred, and your policy has been to militarize daily life, erect permanent military bases and fly goons aground the country for turkey shoots.

you can split hairs all you want, but no one outside your own tent buys your bullshit.

d

Daelm — not know which armed forces you served in, it’d help if you also noticed that you missed the point. There is NO way to dodge the blowback from an incident like this, publicized as it’s been. That’s why I asked why nobody’s been court martialed for it.

Since you’re bragging you’ve been in combat, kindly explain what the Uniform Code of Military Justice prescribes for a case like this — and if you’re not familiar with the US laws on the subject, use your own nation’s military laws as an example.

Salient: you’re obviously skipping a few steps. Like daelm, you seem to think I’m arguing precisely the opposite of what I AM arguing, which may explain why (among other things) you seem to be among the many who don’t understand the relevance of the Vietnam experience here. But geez, I cited Maxwell Taylor’s insight and used short words and simple sentences. I can’t help it if you guys are educated past the capacity to understand what is obvious to lesser folks.

Which is why I begin many posts by laughing — y’all don’t notice it, like many folks who take themselves too seriously, but you are often really, really funny precisely because you are so clueless. And when you argue about how clueless you are, competing to see who can get the furthest from the point, you’re funnier still.

Back in the day, I never supported going into Iraq. But I did say that once Bush had said Saddam had to go — well, he had to go. I want bad guys to BELIEVE the President of the United States when he says stuff like that, particularly after 9-11. And I told folks who bitched about that uncomfortable bit of common sense at the time, that it would have been smarter not to elect the guy in the first place. (There were lots of Nader voters who were baffled at the connection between their vote and the guy in the White House.)

But I also said what I modestly consider to be an insight that has stood up kinda well ever since: Wars are easier to start, than to finish.

Any of you impressive thinkers dispute that?

Maxwell Taylor’s great insight into Vietnam was that the American war made sense on its own terms, until Diem was assassinated. That isn’t to say that it would necessarily have worked, just that supporting a regime (however unpopular) against an internal rebellion (the Viet Cong and the Buddhists) and an external invasion (the NVA) is a relatively straightforward proposition. Then Diem was killed, there was a sort of regime of the month for a couple years during the US escalation, and finally there was a new South Vietnamese government DURING a massive American war effort. Taylor pointed out this was a huge contradiction — building a independent government that can defend itself while defending it against both its internal enemies and an external invader is exponentially more complex than the previous mission. With the minimum respect to folks who are impressed that there was a whole division of VC (and you will believe anything) involved by the end of the war, in the end what crushed the South Vietnamese government was an invasion from the North, not an internal rebellion: QED.

So by any standard, we lost the war. I’d rather not replicate any part of that experience.

In Iraq, there is no external invader. (There is the complicating factor that Iran is mostly Persian Shi’ite, while Saddam ruled with the Sunni minority over the Arab Shi’ite majority.) So basically, what winning looks like for the US is simple: we leave. In fact, what makes it look like victory is that we CHOOSE to leave — the more it looks like it wasn’t our idea, the harder for us to do it.

Incidents like this make it harder to leave like it was our idea. Those of you who aren’t Americans can jeer as much as you like, but it’s pretty counterproductive: I’d rather that we win, and walk out, than that we stay — and lose.

Which is why I focused on THE question, the one you guys can’t ask cuz it never, ever occurs to you how much crap you take for granted (which is another reason you’re amusing): why hasn’t anybody court martialed the assholes who are losing us the war?

Daelm: kindly explain — and use your own experience, please.

‘In Iraq, there is no external invader’.

Let me just stop you right there.

ROFL — Hidari @99: okay, ya got me.

I meant, other than US. But as often happens when things go without saying, ya shoulda said ’em.

Just to insist on the Vietnam lessons, basically we got caught between Senator Aiken’s solution (declare victory and go home), Taylor’s insight (the military did a contradictory job well, it just took too long, cost too much, and lost the support of the American public), and Kissinger’s vile “decent interval”, where we basically dropped our friends and allies and left them to re-education camps and, in Cambodia, an outright holocaust.

No, Iraq is not like Vietnam.

Basically, all we gotta do — is leave. We have pretty minimal needs and expectations for a post-American occupation Iraq. The late Jack Murtha’s proposal was not a bad idea — that we would take our capacity to kill people and destroy things (which the late Harry Summers liked to point out is the REAL, and very honorable purpose of the American military) over the horizon, with the ability to return quickly to blow a lot of shit up if people start doing stuff we don’t like. Given the amount of money and equipment we can bring to ambitious Iraqis, those are pretty powerful levers for a very small target: winning shouldn’t be that hard to do — if it wasn’t for incidents like this, without a court martial: the question you don’t answer.

A reasonable person might not be able to resist concluding that you want us to lose more than you want us to leave Iraq.

I say we win.

What do you mean by that? You must have some objective in mind (well, I certainly hope so, given your recognition of the importance of objectives), and it isn’t the death of Saddam. So what is it?

If you’re not completely brain-dead you must know that “we must stay until we win” coupled with a vague definition of “win” (or none whatsoever) is the leading justification advanced in public debate for prolonging the war indefinitely. So if that’s not what you intend, then… what is?

P.S. “Losing the war for us” isn’t actually a court-martialable offense, unless you’re doing it deliberately, and even then only in unsubtle ways like sabotage. In theory it’s court-martialable to lie about whether or not you think some guys have weapons so that you can receive permission to shoot them, but in practice you have to prove that it was a lie rather than a mistake, which is nearly impossible; and an acquittal would be perceived as a whitewash, which is in some ways worse than doing nothing. But, in any case, if we don’t know what “winning” means, then how can we determine who is “losing the war for us”?

Apologies in advance to Uncle Kvetch for not following his admittedly sage advice. I realize this probably isn’t going to end well.

Salient: you’re obviously skipping a few steps.

I’m skipping the steps where you’ve become a [–] [–]. It’s like you’re visiting a funeral and taking the piss on attendees for not agreeing with you about who should be awarded inheritance. It has been completely irrelevant to me which positions we currently agree on, and it is in fact completely irrelevant to me what points you are attempting to assert.

What’s relevant to me is that you’ve been acting like a complete [–].

So please. Take your laughing [–] and go [–] along now. Whistle while you leave, if you must, in fact be my guest to spit on the [–] monitor while the [–] video’s running if that’s your [–] joy in life, but afford us the [–] decency of getting the [–] out of here and taking a breather for a couple days. I’ll be happy to offer to do the same, if that’s what gets you out of here long enough for your conscience to regain control of your giggling.

Chris: I’ll grant that there probably is a fancy philosophical term for two Americans, say, who disagree about what we should want regarding Iraq. But I’m not sure that it’s worth looking too hard for it. This isn’t complex.

For one thing, of all the umpteen problems that can be described for the collision of foreign policy goals with military force, this one has to be among the easiest: like I said, our primary mission in going into Iraq was to knock off Saddam. That’s done.

How hard can it be to get out?

Put another way, I MEANT it when I observed that a lot of folks want us to lose more than they want us to leave — if leaving means we win.

LOL — I think that’s why you guys are fighting so hard against a simple question about court martials. You have a horror of the possibility that just maybe, we really are the good guys.

I don’t agree that an acquittal would necessarily be perceived as a whitewash. I think it’s telling that you figure that, and even more that you imagine the potential perception of a whitewash is a more important problem than, for example, that it could be a fair trial and the guy gets acquitted.

See what I mean about the crap you guys take for granted?

I ask why the assholes who are losing us the war aren’t being court martialed precisely because court martialling, let’s say, the officer who gave the okay to fire in this case would require a review of the facts. Enrique posted a link at #61 that goes into some detail about how a good deal of what the WikiLeaks video claims to show is actually a lot more ambiguous than virtually all of you take for granted.

My point is simpler: WE’RE a nation that holds itself accountable. Why not put the officer on trial? He says — look, here is where the good guys were, here’s where the bad guys were, this is what we saw, this is what we had to do: I’ll take the consequences.

That’s how we win. Cuz that’s how we can get out of Iraq. I don’t want us to ‘stay until we win’. I want us to win — which is how we get out.

And no, he wouldn’t put tried for ‘losing the war’. He’d be tried for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice and his standing orders for determining when it is lawful to open fire. If he didn’t do either of those, that’s what a trial would show.

And if he did — he’d be convicted.

Look — I interviewed Anwar al-Awlaki in 2002, so I know something about American citizens who betray their country. I’m not saying that folks who want the US admit that we lost in Iraq are disloyal.

I AM saying that they’re arguing a pretty stooopid case: we won the day Saddam lost power.

All we gotta do now, is leave.

There are a handful of NEGATIVE conditions that would determine that we hadn’t won, so we couldn’t leave. Incidents like this foster those conditions.

A court martial — even including, imagine, an acquittal from a fair trial — would alleviate those conditions.

Salient,

Per comments above, see the full version, at 2:10-2:12. As the individual spins around, you can see the RPG quite clearly.

Hidari,

The statement seems accurate to me: the ground forces had been receiving small arms and RPG fire. The group containing the Reuters photographers were about 100m from the ground forces. The Reuters photographers were killed during an engagement. What the statement doesn’t say is that the Reuters photographers were misidentified as insurgents.

This excerpt from David Finkel, a Washington Post reporter who was embedded with the ground unit, tells the story:

What’s helpful to understand is that, contrary to some interpretations that this was an attack on some people walking down the street on a nice day, the day was anyting but that. It happened in the midst of a large operation to clear an area where US soldiers had been getting shot at, injured, and killed with increasing frequency. What the Reuters guys walked into was the very worst part, where the morning had been a series of RPG attacks and running gun battles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2010/04/06/DI2010040600750.html

And I think that contextual reset is important. When I first saw the video, it really did look like the helicopter was simply scanning an urban neighborhood on a “normal” day, saw a group of men that had some weapons, and engaged them. Learning that this is an area which had been the scene of combat for the previous 4 hours (and the streets seem deserted with the exception of this group), that the group of men was about 100m away from the ground unit, etc., changes things considerably.

‘The statement seems accurate to me: the ground forces had been receiving small arms and RPG fire.’

You see, now you are being silly. The military description is clearly false in every respect, and what was happening elsewhere in the area (or what had been happening a few hours before) is completely irrelevant. It’s a particularly ridiculous excuse in terms of Iraq because (except for parts of Kurdistan) by 2007, almost every urban centre in Iraq was the scene of almost constant ferocious violence, so to point this out is ‘straw-manning’ of an extremely unpleasant variety.

See, the last two posts demonstrate why you guys are genuinely ridiculous, as a rule.

Exhibit A: “Who was held accountable for slavery?”

It’s always impressive to witness genuine, profound ignorance on the hoof, particularly when gallivanting about in the public dress of an intellectual. Perhaps you’ve heard, Mal, that the original draft of the Declaration of Independence SPECIFICALLY held the British Crown responsible for introducing African slavery to the US. This was taken out of the draft at the behest of South Carolina in particular (the only colony explicitly founded on slavery), but a better educated person than you (or perhaps a smarter one, with the benefits of your, ahem, education) would have sensed the irony in demanding who was held accountable for slavery, when the principal who brought it to these shores lost his empire, in part, because of it.

And as for the broader question who was held accountable for slavery, there was this Lincoln fellow (you’ve heard of him, no?), who spoke to it thusly: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

There were these places — Antietam, Gettysburg — any of them ring a bell?

Then there’s Hidari’s notion that what goes on in a war zone has nothing to do with the way warriors act in it.

See, the last two posts demonstrate why you guys are genuinely ridiculous, as a rule.

I will grant that this is a true statement.

In fact, given that we can’t get you to leave, the fact that anyone is still here other than you is a demonstration of how genuinely ridiculous we are. (Though “ridiculous” is a poor substitute for “hopeful for a civil discussion” here.) It’s not often that that’s true for a CT thread, even one with a substantial troll presence, or extensive heated argument. So, congratulations, I guess.

I feel for Henry, who will probably at some point feel a need to step in and invest time and resources warning and/or banning you (and probably me for my [–] comment — I’m sorry, Henry).

It’s too bad you’re choosing this route, tA, because I’m fairly certain that had you been more polite, you’d find us happy to listen thoughtfully to your perspective. But yes, I should grow up. I am young; growing up takes time — years, I’ve heard. I’ll get my coat.

LOL — as noted, you guys are pretty silly. I gather that the post I made responding to Chris, which noted among other things that “the last two” did not refer to 112, has gone aglimmering… perhaps I’ve already been banned for being uncomfortably clear about your errors.

Can’t have that.

I had noted in that post that I draw the line somewhere between dissent and treason, and I cited as an example of treason the interview I did with Anwar al-Awlaki in 2002.

I also noted that the Nuremberg Trials prosecuted for waging aggressive war and the holocaust, and asked Chris for evidence that America’s WW2 allies had done either of those.

As a further f’r instance: at the time of the American Revolution “we” would have referred to colonists who were also British subjects. The document that changed this was the Declaration. The original language of the Declaration, which included a long series of charges against the Crown, included: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”

So it is simply a fact, which you guys rather oddly deny, that the Declaration was originally drafted to include slavery as one of the reasons why the Crown was no longer fit to rule America. Since Mal is demonstrating his ignorance, I suppose this explains why he doesn’t understand how listing slavery as one of the crimes in an indictment that led to the loss of the first British empire is precisely holding the culprit responsible for slavery.

Cuz, ya know, it was not the AMERICAN navy that was running the slave trade before 1776.

LOL — ah, you guys are priceless.

And, Mal: if you weigh “Confederate Heritage Month” in Virginia heavier than 600,000 dead guys, perhaps you should learn a bit more about humility and what’s important in life.

the Declaration was originally drafted to include slavery as one of the reasons why the Crown was no longer fit to rule America

The clause you’re referring to also bitched about George III offering freedom to slaves who came over to the Loyalist side. The clause was deleted because (a) not all slaveowners were as keen as the Virginians to see the trade abolished, as, unlike the Virginians, they didn’t have more slaves than they needed which could be traded within the colonies; and (b) ulterior motives aside, it was felt that simultaneously complaining about the King starting the slave trade and the King offering freedom to slaves required an intellectual agility probably only a brilliant hypocrite like Jefferson could manage.

So a that removed element of an early draft of the Declaration isn’t quite the smoking gun you think it is. On whatever point it was you were trying to make.

In war, you get to kill people who are merely holding RPGs and small arms. They do not get a pass because they are next to people who are not holding them. In war, those people are very foolish for standing near the RPG and small arms people. For example, US soldiers do not get a pass at being killed if they drape unarmed US citizens from their kit.

This bit of wisdom applies to war photographers as well. Plus the additional wisdom that these people should wear extremely conspiciously clothing and emblems that normatively identify them as such.

So, good kills the first go-round. Another day at war. ho-hum.

Now, the second part. You do not get to kill people who show no indication of being armed and who are merely trying to evacuate the wounded from the battlefield. It is foolish for the evacuators to show up with children in the van, and it is unrealistic to expect the helicopter guys to see the kids, but all of that is irrelevant because in the first place it’s wrong to shoot a van with or without kids when the only act witnessed is a removal of wounded people.

Conclusion: US Army guys committed unjust killings. They reflect shamefully on the US Army. They should be held accountable.

Everyone can go home now.

If people have something interesting to say about the video, I’d be happy to read it, but if it’s just going to be troll feeding then time to abandon the thread.

Sure a lot of dust flying.
I won’t look at the video.
All I can think of is; This is going to come home.

Henry embeds a video with the inflammatory title:

“Collateral Murder”

The wikileaks video is deliberately misleading as it has edited out footage showing that weapons (AK47 & RPG) were being carried by members of the party that was attacked by the US helicopter gunship. The wikileaks editor has now admitted this, acknowledging that:

it’s likely some of the individuals seen in the video were carrying weapons.

After the action a US patrol recovered weapons from the scene which, were later documented in an incident report by US military authorities.

So it looks like the journos went to investigate a street-level contact and happened to meet some armed Iraqis who were likewise involved. Got caught in the cross-fire.

This fact does significantly mitigate the US pilots culpability for this tragic incident. Although shooting up an ambulance looks pretty cold.

Its disappointing, but not surprising, that the intensely ideological academics who populate this site did not see fit to bring up these inconvenient facts. Not the way to show disinterested pursuit of truth.

More generally, this incident shows that war inevitably produces atrocities. War itself is an atrocity, only justified by the likelihood of greater atrocities.

That said the US military does a fair and reasonable job of trying to minimize civilian casualties. The use of smart weapons is part of a more general effort to reduce collateral damage.

But the US military has an awful lot of fire power at its disposal. So even with the best will in the world its inevitable that civilians will be killed in large numbers when the fighting moves to built up areas.

So best not to go there in the first place.

This thread is probably as dead as the dodo. But I just wanted to note something I found interesting about theAmericanist’s writing style. He uses “LOL” and “ROFL” and “(wicked grin)” in a thread about a helicopter gunship murdering civilians. He comes off looking quite the sociopath.

Donald,

I’m not sure that anything I have to say about the video is interesting, but it does illustrate some points which we’ve discussed ad nauseam on Deltoid:

1) The ratio of wounded to killed doesn’t match that of the Battle of the Somme, as so many people seem to think it must.
2) Presumably Dr L’s survey team would call this an airstrike, but AFAICT the military reserves that term for USAF attacks.
3) Although the military claims to have been in action in that area for several hours prior to the attack, these killings seem to be the only ones that made it into media reports.

It’s a shame this thread is, indeed, dead, because once again many of the scholars here have commited the amatuer scholarly pratfall of seeing one important kernel of truth and using it to do way too much work. And yes, I mean pratfall, as in an embarassing fall on the buttocks.

It’s clear as day the gunship has no business shooting at people who are working from the van (no, not am ambulance; a van- if you call it an ambulance then you are admitting that the occupants were profoundly at fault for allowing children in a vehicle that intended to go to places where combat had recently occured to evacuate its victims, who may still be in danger). The van didn’t seem to have weapons in it, nor were the people who trying to pick up and move the injured to safety. We get all indignant and incensed when somebody shoots at a medic or corpsman treating a wounded soldier or Marine, so it’s fair to be angry and demand answers when our helicopters do the same.

No matter what else happens to them (a trial or tribunal might be nice), the officers in that gunship should never be trusted with the responsibilities of combat again, and the video should be used to train new gunners about their moral responsibilities during war.

But, still, I cannot overstress the fact that the first round of shootings is apparently justified by almost every norm and law of war I can think of. A group of men, several of them armed with the standard weapons of war in their theatre (and not relics, or hunting rifles, or small target pistols), is part of a larger group of men, some of whom are unarmed. All of them are associating voluntarily, at close quarters, demonstrating engagment in some common project on the battlefield, right then and there. They know they are in a war zone. Nobody eles is hanging out in the street. There is no civic life around them. Each one of them is free to leave. These are legitimate targets of war, no matter who is waging it. So as I said above, the first round of gunfire was hard to watch but still just.

As for the photog, there is no way to know he is a photog. Seems foolish of him not to wear conspicuous marks. And anyway, if he was an embed with US troops who was shot by an insurgent sniper from an equivalent distance, I have a feeling the intuition pumps at work here would see my line of thinking.

By dismissing the entire video as a series of completely unjustified war crimes, it is hard to take a protest agaisnt it seriously. The average person with access to the facts will see it this way, the correct way, hence the pratfall. Academics and activists, who rightfully care a lot, once again overraching.

As for the commentary by the pilots, it makes perfect sense and they are perfectly acceptable. Think of what you’ve muttered to yourself when you’ve failed a student who needs to be failed but who is otherwise nice and agreeable. It would be interesting to play that stuff on youTube, in your own voice, ripped from you as you said it: “Idiot made himself fail. Deserves it. Nothing I can do. That’s what you get for daddy paying tuition and baby not giving s ahit about school. Too bad…” These pilots know they are doing something truly wicked and unfortunate and their utterances are the beginning of a lifetime of trying to live with it by distancing themselves from their acts, rationalizing them, and dehumanzing the people they’ve killed. This is as old as humanity itself and we can only demand it is done in the larger context of a just war. That is another discussion.

Another bystander here who was very interested in Americanist’s comments in the recent discussion of Catholic history and utterly repelled now. LOL and ROFL do not belong in a discussion like this. At all. Anyone who can grin and giggle through this kind of thing is suffering a moral breakdown, and deserves, at best, some condolences and best wishes for a speedy recovery.

sdr, heur,

I don’t see an RPG. I see a spade. I’m not suggesting it’s a spade; I’m just suggesting that this is the picture my visual cortex constructs out of the limited data.

Then again, I’m not looking to see any specific thing.

I suppose people who have an idea about what they will see might be more likely to see a confirmation of their expectations.

Could be wrong, but I didn’t go looking to see any one thing.

~ Jack

Man, you guys are just… precious.

126, 129, and 132 all agree with points I’ve been arguing — citing FACTS (like the video editor’s confession), no less.

But you know what upsets you guys?

It’s not that WikiLeaks edited the video to exclude what they’ve now admitted, that the crowd fired upon had weapons.

It’s not that you’ve all obviously committed, as steven notes at 132, the kind of intellectual sin that the teachers among you routinely (I hope, anyway) correct when your students do it.

No, what upsets you guys is that I find YOU funny for it.

Ceri, I’m not laughing at the killing. I’ve known a couple people who were killed in Iraq.

I’m laughing at you guys.

But, geeze, that cannot be admitted because then YOUR self-righteousness would have to be considered separately from the fact of the war. I pointed out that the objective for the American invasion was knocking off Saddam. Having achieved that, we can and should get out with the most minimal expectations for what happens after. We should have done it years ago, and we could do it on Obama’s timetable, even now. Recognizing that we won, long ago, makes that easier.

Demonstrating typical intellectual brilliance, somebody actually argued with me about the objective, rather than accepting the obvious that, regardless of whether you or I or anybody else AGREED with that objective: that’s what it was — which is what sets the bar very low for getting out. That’s why I noted that a lot of you clearly would rather that America lose the war, rather than leave.

Which is why I keep pointing to the lack of a court martial in cases like this (not just this one, for the fools who imagine that I know even less than you do about war zones) as the key to why we haven’t gotten out yet.

Hell, you guys can’t even focus on the underlying moral issues, because you confuse self-righteousness (e.g., Salient) with philosophy.

Here is a simple test (and the kind of thinking I’d commend to you, as academics): you want to sort out what the moral line is here?

I noted that I’ve had family in Iraq (and will likely have another nephew deployed soon), people in the circumstances of this video. I said upthread that God forbid any of ’em ever fire a shot they shouldn’t have — and if ever they do NOT fire a shot when they need to, God save ’em.

The test for where you draw the moral line is right there: when an American soldier is in harm’s way (as in this case, simply by being in an Apache above an area where there has been an exchange of fire recently), which do you consider the greater sin — for a commander to order fire when it MAY not be justified (which is what a court martial would determine, as a matter of fact and law), or for a commander to refuse when that may cause the American to be killed?

Lord, folks: you’re supposed to be scholars and intellectuals — and it takes 138 posts and considerable mocking at your self-righteousness before anybody engages the central moral question?

Since you were all taken in by the selective editing of that video, perhaps at long last you might take my advice, waaay upthread: and practice a little humility.

According to Greenwald here:

From the very beginning, WikiLeaks released the full, 38-minute, unedited version of that incident — and did so right on the site they created for release of the edited video. In fact, the first video is marked “Short version,” and the second video — posted directly under it — is marked “Full version,” and just for those who still didn’t pick up on the meaning, they explained:

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

So, answer the question. Draw the line.

Even kibitzing about killing imposes certain moral obligations.

As he swings about, the shape is extremely distinctive

Bullshit. You’re seeing what you want to see. And yes I have watched that segment repeatedly on full screen.

I don’t know what the object was and neither do you. And neither did the pilots. Have you ever, for example, seen a telescopic camera lens?

A court martial is neither necessary nor indicated in EVERY instance. I’m suggesting that it seems indicated in this one — but my point is broader, and distinct: the LACK of a court martial in an instance like this is why we’re still in Iraq.

One of the truly baffling things about American politics is how kibitizers with no real power can nevertheless influence the perception of what is possible. For example, take SLB’s bizarre idea that because he doesn’t know a shovel from an RPG, the guys who might have been killed by the latter should never, ever, fire in self-defense.

Since you guys pride yourselves on intellectual clarity and force, I’m asking IMNSHO the right question: when a commander can order what MAY be an unjustified shooting, OR can refuse permission to fire when it MAY get Americans killed — which is the moral choice?

No, you don’t get to be sure about the facts. It is abundantly clear that you guys aren’t all that interested in facts, as SLB demonstrates.

In many circumstances, a court martial isn’t appropriate: when the facts cannot be clear because there’s nothing but garbled eyewitness evidence (any of you who have investigated crimes will know there ain’t nothing as unreliable as an eyewitness), when the situation itself was ambiguous (e.g., civilians in a firefight), when what was clear to the shooter wasn’t clear to the commander, etc.

I don’t think those apply here. So not so much what the results of a court martial of THIS case would be, but the fact that none was initiated, strikes me as good a piece of evidence as any (and better than the half-assed argumentation in this thread) for why we’re still there.

Cuz we haven’t won.

Packer’s article makes much of the commentary here academic.

The video was edited by wiki leaks. So to come to a conclusion based on that sole piece of evidence suggests people are doing some heavy duty filtering of their own. The bar stool experts here are either in denial (Well “I” don’t see an RPG) or using a red herring (the war was illegal)

The video is pretty grim stuff and other boards – more able to deal with the facts – the have raised serious questions about the 2nd engagement. But the first attack wasn’t – by the evidence available – a war crime.

Why stop at annoyed?

“Why stop at annoyed?”

A very little league instance of why the linguistic turn had its uses.

Meaning, limit our annoyance to the second attack, not limit our reaction to the second attack at mere annoyance. Stronger feelings about it are certainly warranted. I am trying to be less emotional than I could be in deference to British participants here.

The muzzle velocity of the rounds fired from the cannon used in the video is 805 m/s (2,641 ft/s). The helicopter was very far away when it fired at the group of guys, at least three thousand feet by my crude estimates. This explains their casual posture, despite being armed insurgents.

Henri- Not the laws of war, no. You can kill the enemy when he is asleep, and running away, for example. Insurgencies are the murky middle, seeming to rely on norms more so than laws, but I think you’re ceding way too much to the insurgents.

So you could make the argument you are making, namely that US soldiers may only shoot at people roaming otherwise deserted streets in Iraq with rockets and machine guns in close proximity to US combat operations only if those people are actively engaging or preparing to engage with US troops, but I think you would have a hard time selling it to more than one or two people who are reasoning in good faith but have a genuine stake in the issue.

What if US soldiers on a rooftop peer over it and see three guys in civvie clothes with AKs and a rocket walking through the alley below? Do they just watch them walk and hope they aren’t noticed? Ask probing questions? Wish them well? Tell them to “freeze!”

People carrying machine gungs and rockets who don’t want to be mistaken for insurgents and killed should probably put these things down, and people standing next to them who don’t want to get killed should leave their side. Seems more reasonable.

And to clarify and restate: a person with a telephoto lens standing next to men with machine guns and a rocket is not absolved of the suspicion of being a combatant solely because he only has a telephoto lens. Many a US combat photographer is buried somewhere for this very reason. And his presence, as well as that of other unarmed men in this area otherwise bereft of civic activity, does not provide an adequate reason not to fire. This is my case regarding the first incident, explained in more detail above. I will have to abandon it and hope it does well. As for the second shooting of the van, I cannot defend it. It is important to be mad about the right things.

There are some additional details in the official army report, including a picture taken by one of the Reuters cameramen showing a US vehicle not far away.

Steven, is your surname Gerrard? The pre-emptive understanding of self defence seems the same.

Even if the possibly armed guys were insurgents (which means what exactly?) they almost certainly didn’t have WMDs or work for Saddam or Al Qaeda and therefore they might be owed an explanation of what on earth the guys in helicopters from 6,000 miles away think they are doing deciding who lives and dies in their home town.

To all those whining about the biased portrayal of events in Iraq the question is does its existence improve our understanding or not? Of secondary importance is the question of whether it is more or less biased than what had previously come out of official channels. Only then is it really worth worrying about whether the film is balanced or not.

Does the presence of two guys possibly carrying guns (weren’t they more or less a necessity for moving about Baghdad at that time?) mean the initial engagement fell within the officially sanctioned levels of paranoia? Not the most important question. The first is what the foreign helicopter was doing there at all, the second is what do we hope to achieve by leaving the population of Iraq to such tender mercies. The third is who thought shooting the van was OK and didn’t take action against the helicopter guys. Only then do questions of whether the helicopter guys were acting within orders or not really apply and what is more, the jury is already in — they were investigated and not disciplined so it was within the rules. Knowing that just kicks the questions upstairs, it doesn’t dismiss them.

The 1st President of my alma mater said it best: “War is Hell!”

And an unjust war (or occpuation) continually wreaks Hell on a populace for no justifiable reason!

I mean, don’t get me wrong virgil, glad to see you commenting on CT again. But why o why does anyone think that saying “well atrocities happen in war” is at all a convincing argument to an audience who believes the war shouldn’t be happening.

Really, the conversation’s like this:

* Person A: This war should end! It will cause horrible things, and given the poor arguments for going to war we’ve seen, the war is not morally justifiable!

* Person B: …

* {some time elapses} {atrocities occur} {some are recorded + disseminated}

* Person A: An atrocity happened! Isn’t this horrible!

* Person B: Well, you know. War is hell. What did you expect?

* Person A: I EXPECTED THIS AND THAT IS WHY I AM OPPOSING THE WAR

* Person B: Just because bad things happen in war, doesn’t mean you should oppose it. Bad stuff happened in WW2.

* Person A: Well, uh, in order for that to make sense, there must be a satisfactory justification for us to continue the war in the first place. And there’s not.

* Person B: …

I have no idea who Person B might be, it might be a straw man, but up through “war is hell” seems to be coming up continually. As if that should prompt us to shrug our shoulders and let it go and not care. That makes no sense.

Steven, that makes some amount of sense to me: though I’m not willing to make judgments according to that criterion, I can see why others would. And if I were assigned to jury duty, I’d consent to abide by your metric.

What interests me most is this paragraph:

I think the invasion was a huge mistake, and continues to be one, however. So I will not explore the things that put a gunship over Baghdad in the first place.

The first sentence is kind of the whole point for me. If these things are being done kinda in my name, or whatever the phrase is, I really really need to revisit the things that put a gunship-in-my-name over Baghdad in the first place.

If I’m supposed to nod my head and say “well these things happen in war” it seems quite natural to wonder: ok, so, given the horrors our involvement allegedly causes because war is automatically hell, why don’t we stop creating hell, and withdraw from the war? What objectives are we currently fighting for, and does our chance of success justify committing atrocities? That’s not at all a trivial question to me.

LOL — you see, Salient, this is a perfect illustration of why you are inadvertently funny. (It’s like the old story about the ostensibly Irish invention of the bagpipes and the car bomb: the Scots still haven’t seen the joke, but the Middle East takes the latter far too seriously.)

A more accurate illustration of the dialogue would be along these lines:

Enlisted soldier: I volunteered to put myself in harm’s way to protect the kind of innocent people murdered by the thousands on 9-11 — and in Spain after, etc. There are seriously bad people in the world who want to blow up airliners, who believe that the world is ‘us vs. them”.

Knucklehead academic: I’m against the war in Iraq.

Enlisted soldier: You don’t seem to understand the sacrifice a soldier makes. I don’t choose where they send me.

Knucklehead academic: Then you’re a criminal.

Enlisted soldier: Bold talk for someone who sleeps safer because I’m not safe at all.

Knucklehead academic: You’d be safer if you weren’t in Iraq. Did I mention I am against the war?

Enlisted soldier: So what? When I’m on patrol, I’m not debating the war. I’m trying to win it.

Knucklehead academic: And that’s why you’re a criminal.

Enlisted soldier: You should probably be talking to an officer.

Knucklehead academic: That’s right. And not just officers — generals, admirals, and Presidents should be listening to me, because I know what to do in any circumstance.

Officer: So why aren’t you in charge?

Knucklehead academic: How can you justify a shooting like this?

Officer: (detailed explanation of the tactical situation, the available intelligence, and the risks faced by American personnel)

Knucklehead academic: None of that matters, because the war is wrong.

Officer: Perhaps you should be talking to the President, or the UN, or somebody. Me, I’ve got lives to save.

Enlisted soldier: Bold talk for someone who sleeps safer because I’m not safe at all.

You’re not making me any safer by being in Iraq.

There. That was easy.

Still kibitzing about the academics.

What a putz.

Knucklehead academic: Tell you what. You’re the one making this about my personal safety, which by the way is quite a kindness to extend to an apparition of your own imagination. But given that my existence depends on your countenancing me, I’m game for whatever you have to say. Present to me a credible threat to my person that Saddam Hussein, or would-be-Iraq-insurgents, presented between 1990 and 2003.

Officer: What? Why?

Knucklehead academic: Well, if this is about keeping me (and my compatriots) safe, I deserve to know what threat we faced and continue to face, so I can assess whether the threat prevention is effective, or worth the cost, or etc.

Officer: Sure, ok. It won’t be you personally, but Americans in general.

Knucklehead academic: Well, sure, that’s understandable. Go ahead.

Officer: {some details about Saddam’s weapons plans}

Knucklehead academic: {some refutations and follow-up questions}

Officer: {some details about treatment of the Kurds}

Knucklehead academic: {some qualifications}

… {hours of intense conversation} …

Knucklehead academic: Well, shucks. You’ve convinced me.

Officer: It’s amazing how much easier it was to do once I pulled my gun on you!

Knucklehead academic: Yep! That’s been working in Iraq since 2003!

Officer: Oh, and the fact that I figured out how to literally put words in your mouth.

Knucklehead academic: Turtle turgid knuckle sauce!

Officer: Say it.

Knucklehead academic: (whimpers)

Officer: SAY IT.

Knucklehead academic: …

Officer: {aims gun}

Knucklehead academic: thankyouforsavingmeandkeepingmesafe

Officer: I couldn’t hear you…

Knucklehead academic: THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME AND KEEPING ME SAFE

Officer: … heh

Knucklehead academic: Can I go now?

Officer: Oh, no. I plan to toy with you quite a bit more before you disappear.

Salient, et al, would rather preen along the lines of Uncle Kvetch: HE doesn’t feel any safer because Americans are in Iraq

Not preening, just stating a fact.

I keep suggesting humility, folks. It’s good advice.

Ah…finally, a joke to break the ice. Now tell the one again where you’re rolling on the floor laughing about how smart you are.

OK…we’re dealing with either a parody troll or some kind of traumatic head injury that produces a complete and total lack of self-awareness. Either way, we can all go home now. DNFTT.

Yes, this guy is a seriously wacko troll and will only regurgitate more of this stuff the more you bait him- I’ve seen him in action on other blogs. Indeed, DNFTT.

I wonder, Americanist, what you think the reason that “we’ haven’t declared victory and left Iraq actually is. Your statements about why “we” can’t leave yet are opaque to me.
The idea that “we” invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein makes no sense. I’m surprised no one here has challenged it. Maybe they’re trying to stay on topic.
This incident, by itself, neither condemns nor justifies the invasion and occupation. It’s so far from being the worst atrocity committed there, almost daily, that it’s trivial.

Funny; no one, especially in the MSM, EVER mentions one little word, you know, the reason they couldn’t name the invasion ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’.

Yes, I believe the whole fiasco is an atrocity, it’s plain armed robbery on an unbelievable scale. Even if you just count the Americans killed there who will never go to college, even if the state pays; they can no longer learn with what’s left of their heads. Just that much. Not to mention much of Iraq radioactive forever, birth defects up 600% or more, the same for leukemia, a million or more dead, 2-4 million driven from their homes – a country ruined. And “we” helped Hussein get into power.
Tell me the US is not ‘the great Satan”.

It was quite interesting, actually. In the beginning it was about “the assholes who are losing us the war“; I’m assuming that’s the pilots. Then in the middle it was “WikiLeaks edited the video“, and finally it has become about “whether a commander should be more willing to risk the wrongful death of people these guys shoot, or the death of his own guys who get shot by somebody whom he did not authorize them to shoot first.” – no assholes in sight anymore. Other than knucklehead academics, that is.

Clearly, we’ve witnessed a metamorphosis here.

Irrelevant

The US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan likely set an unprecedented standard in care exercised by an occupying military force to avoid civilian casualties in a war zone. That’s what this video shows.

But what this video also shows is that all of that is completely irrelevant. It is a war crime, pure and simple, to make of a whole country a war zone for years on end. To do so simply erases the fundamental distinction of combatant vs non-combatant on which all civilized, legal, limitations of war rest. No amount of care to avoid particular incidents of “collateral damage” under those conditions of the universal exposure of an entire country to being treated as potential combatants 24/7, can prevent systematic and cumulatively massive loss of non-combatant life. This is genocide that this video documents, a genocide in which scrupulously careful procedure only serves to insure that the genocide only happens one drop at a time.

The war and invasion were illegal, so any time the US, or the British, or the Dutch, or … kileld anybody in Iraq it’s murder, whether justified by rules of engagement or not.

Quibbling over whether or not some particular set of murdered Iraqis were carrying weapons or not and whether this made them legitimate targets is missing this vital point.

The Iraqis had a right to be there, the US did not.

Here we go again. Another “The war was illegal” argument by assertion. By any standard of measure the war was both justified AND “legal”–whatever THAT means. Iraq was in so many violations of the Gulf War I cease-fire document that I’ve lost count–from firing at US and Allied patrol aircraft in the no-fly zones to failure to document disposal and disposition of stocks of chemical artillery warheads . There were some 14 Security Council UN resolutions threatening dire consequences for non-compliance, IIRC, And Congress authorized the President to use “All means available in a bi-partisan vote to green-light military operations. Just because some here think it SHOULD have been illegal doesn’t make it so.

Further, wasn’t the take-away–one of THE central take-aways of WWII–that France and England should have actively, forcefully, opposed Hitler’s re-occupation of the Rhineland? And that the UN’s Article 51 right of self-defense–collective and otherwise–strongly implied the right to take just such pro-active “preventative” steps using military force to keep “small” problems from growing into big, uncontrollable ones? Pray correct me if I am wrong..but wasn’t the pre-emptive use of force by Israel in 1967 to keep the assembling Arab armies from overwhelming that small nation thought by the civilized world to be entirely justified? In this day and age of hi-tech it’s a little late to wait until one can see the whites of Muhammad Atta’s eyes..

And only a moron would still compare in this day and age the war on Iraq to WW2. But then you have to be quite the mouth breather to still support the war in 2010.

This thread, with its persistent trolling, reminds me of why I generally avoid the blogosphere nowadays, and why (normally) CT comments threads are head and shoulders above the norm.

However, some guidelines.

1: Anyone who, in 2010, defends the invasion of Iraq is a troll.

2: Anyone who attempts to defend the invasion by (implicitly or explicitly) stating that ‘we’ lost Vietnam and therefore ‘we’ must learn the lessons and win this time…..is a troll.

3: Anyone who defends the invasion by (explicitly or implicitly) putting forward the ‘Iraq is World War 2 and Saddam was Hitler, and if you opposed the invasion you are, essentially, a Nazi’….is a mega-troll.

Oh and anyone who denies that the war was illegal: don’t bother posting on blogs. Instead, why not write to Kofi Annan? He, the poor benighted soul, was under the impression that the war was illegal, and yet he ran the UN. I mean, what would the man who ran the UN know about the UN? Clearly, you all know better. You must write to him immediately (over and over again) to point out your own superior knowledge of international law. This is if you can find time, between writing to Roger Federer about your own superior knowledge of the rules of tennis, and phoning Tiger Woods to tell him exactly what he is doing wrong with his golf game.
Anyway I’m off skiing. Enjoy the shouting match.

If it’s an illegal war according to the UN, why is the UN taking no action on that basis?

If it’s an illegal war according to the UN, why is the UN taking no action on that basis?

The great tragedy of the UN (and, of course, this was deliberate) is that, for almost all practical purposes, the Security Council — and, more specifically, its permanent members — is the UN. The fact that something is illegal makes little difference if any of the permanent members don’t want to discuss it.

But, of course, you knew that when you asked the question, and I really don’t know why I’m bothering to answer.

Has anyone posted the rules of engagement on here?

I gather that detailed rules of engagement are generally classified so you’ll have to wait until Wikileaks gets them. Apparently they vary quite a bit according to local conditions.

In some sense, I don’t care about whether the war occupation is illegal so much as I care about the fact that the war and occupation were clearly at the time they were initiated, and clearly continue to be, wrong.

LOL — Salient: if you were as clever as you evidently think you are, you’d notice that most folks responding have engaged points I’ve made. You don’t — but it’s not because I’m obnoxious.

That’s your excuse for refusing to recognize when your intellectual bluff has been called. It’s pretty obvious, yanno.

HV — if you were paying attention, you’d have challenged your blithe assumption that by “assholes who are losing us the war” are the pilots. For one thing, the pilots are not always, much less generally, the officers who authorize firing various weapons. Psst — they have a different job, relating to the name of their job description: “pilots”.

This is the sort of thing that makes you guys ridiculous. You get simple, obvious stuff wrong, mischaracterize and distort (when you don’t outright lie) what people say — and then you have solipsistic arguments among yourselves about whether you are just all right or ALSO all-knowing.

I’m not defending the war. I never advocated for the war. I did say in this thread — and I didn’t have to be honest, I just wanted to set an example for you guys — that once Bush said Saddam had to go: he had to go. You guys may not much like that, but it is a radically different thing than defending the clusterfuck the war promptly became.

It is also directly related to the actual problems of the war, and of this incident, which somehow HV hallucinates is a change in my position or argument.

In fact — at least, for literate people — I’ve been completely consistent and reasonable in this thread, as elsewhere.

The failure to court martial anybody in this incident (and others) really is the key question. There are basically just two answers, I think (although I’m open to others if anybody can think of some): EITHER, despite WikiLeaks’ slanted take on this incident, it is so clear cut a legal shooting that the military FAIRLY and LAWFULLY closed the after action investigation, OR even though there is enough evidence (particularly in the second part, which I also noted way upthread) that a court martial should have been initiated, even though it is possible, even probable that the officer(s) would be acquitted, the military decided not to court martial anybody for reasons that are worth discussing.

None of you engaged these obvious insights. I don’t recall anybody even offered a reason why there has been no court martial. I referred to the question, I dunno, a half-dozen times? Nope — you guys are much more interested in bragging about how you understand this incident well beyond the actual evidence, and besides: the war is illegal anyway, and you can’t miss an opportunity to remind everybody how righteous you are for recognizing that.

Folks with an actual sense of perspective might have noticed that there are still American troops (among other countries) getting shot at, as well as shooting in Iraq, so there are practical moral questions which are not exactly engaged, much less resolved, by your circle jerk.

So I noted a second point: the failure (or inability, if you like) to court martial these guys is not only what is losing the war, it is also why we haven’t left.

I realize this is a subtle point, and you guys don’t do subtlety. (It’s not conducive to a circle jerk, I suppose.) But it’s not THAT difficult — as I pointed out, since the objective of the invasion was to knock off Saddam, we won the war long ago (as somebody other than I noted above: another example of Salient’s inability to recognize even the blindingly obvious — there have been a lot of folks in this thread responding to points I’ve made: Salient’s inability to do so says much worse about his capacity for substance than it does about my rhetoric). That sets the bar quite low for getting out.

And it begs some real questions: with a new President, who ran on the pledge to GET out — why haven’t we done it already?

I’ve noted the reason: to leave, we have to win. To win, we have to leave. You all may not LIKE that insight — but it happens to be inconveniently true.

And suddenly, the truth of my observation becomes clear, because it is the basic organizing principle of you guys in this thread: you would rather than America lose, than leave. You’re nowhere near as against the war as you think you are.

I expect that in the end — for real intellectuals, as opposed to academic knuckleheads — the difference is that responsible folks see the war in Iraq as a practical moral problem, rather than an opportunity to preen an already over-polished sense of self-righteousness as if killing and dying was mere philosophy.

For soldiers, it does not matter whether you or I or some ephemeral objectivity determines that the war is illegal. They are in harm’s way. That’s the practical matter. (That is why it also does not matter if Kvetch doesn’t feel safer that American soldiers are in Iraq. The truth is — whether he continues his insane denial or not — he is safer because American soldiers will go risk their lives where they are sent.)

So I asked the real moral question, which I note you guys have also ducked: the closer folks look at it (read the link @61), the more clear it is that you guys are all so many folks in the mezzanine, hollering that the second baseman missed the tag when the umpire with the best angle called the runner out.

So it really is simple: should a commander authorize lethal force when it MAY not be justified, or should he refuse and put Americans at risk when it MAY get them killed?

HV — the questions I’m asking are complementary, not contradictory, and they follow, one from another, the way you guys have consistently evaded 1) your own lack of knowledge, viz your inability to tell a shovel from an RPG , 2) your urge to be irrelevant, e.g., “the war is illegal”, and 3) your compulsion to self-righteousness (any of SLB’s posts), much less 4) the desire you have, which in its own way is far greater than mine, to mock those who ask you hard questions, viz. Salient’s reaction when I called his bluff.

I mock folks who EVADE hard questions — which I find a more sound approach: afflicting the comfortable, cuz that is often a more effective route to comforting the afflicted.

Somebody asked about the rules of engagement — those in force at the time (and before, and after) are on the Collateral Murder website:

http://collateralmurder.org/en/resources.html

I’d greatly appreciate it if you can get theAmericanist to knock off continuing to come after me here

Salient, why on earth do you care what that goofball writes about you?

Incidents just like this one happen 50 times every day. If they court-martialed for doing this, in a couple of weeks they’d have no military.

“Like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500,” is the classic expression.

“i.e.”, because Iraq is what we’re talking about.

before rejecting the idea that soldiers go where they are sent

Remember, you responded to Uncle Kvetch saying “You’re not making me any safer by being in Iraq.” with “…he is safer because American soldiers will go risk their lives where they are sent.”

If your response was a sneaky attempt to change the subject, that’s your problem; I’m still on the subject.

HV has the peculiar idea that the reason no one has been court martialed for this incident is that it was … publicized.

No, you misunderstood. Try reading again, it’s not complicated.

LOL — naa, the excuse that you mis-used the English language because you didn’t bother to read what you were reacting to doesn’t cut it: “he is safer because American soldiers will go risk their lives where they are sent…” says precisely what I meant. Nothing sneaky about it — at least, to somebody intelligent and honest enough to READ it.

That you’re both illiterate and opinionated doesn’t alter the meaning.

See, this is another old habit of the over-educated: you want to talk about a particular incident (which you misunderstand) to make larger points about the conflict (because you are oh-so-righteous in opposing it), AS IF the two are the same.

I keep pointing out that they’re not.

So HV promptly proves my point, by misusing ‘that is to say’ when what he meant (that is, if he’d had a clue) was ‘for example’.

This proves my point (again!) because in Iraq as a whole in 2010, much less in this particular incident, the practical moral problem is not resolved by the easy way you guys blur all distinctions except the ones that you make up, to show yourselves in the best light. I noted way upthread that even kibitzing imposes moral obligations — that you dislike the war in Iraq doesn’t relieve you of moral obligations for those fighting it, especially when (as in this thread) you’ve decided to accuse them of murder: ya bought the ticket.

Take the ride.

C’mon, HV. You can do it. Try starting a sentence with ‘I think there was no court martial in this incident because…’

You might consider a few clauses along the lines of ‘the factual evidence of the exchanges of fire that had occurred earlier that day in the area, the immediate risk to the aircraft and to American soldiers in the vicinity, and…’

Perhaps even one or two like: ‘but the second incident…’

Yanno, for folks who like to brag about your fearless intellectual self-awareness, you are awful reluctant to consider extensive evidence documenting the possibility that you’re willfully ignorant in order to be self-righteously wrong.

Heur @ 1:44,

Yes, I did. Then I asked a combat Marine to look at it. His answer: “I don’t know what it is. Could be a shovel, could be a telescoping camera tripod. Probably not an RPG, since it has a very distinctive look.”

I don’t know what it is. I do know that a number of people reject the automatic assumption that it’s an RPG:

“Defense analyst Pierre Sprey, who led the design teams for the F-16 and A-10 and who spent many years in the Pentagon, stresses two particularly damning features of the footage. The first is the claim that Noor-Eldeen’s telephoto lense could be mistaken for an RPG. A big telephoto for a 35mm camera is under a foot and half at most. An RPG, unloaded , is 3 feet long and loaded, 4 foot long. These guys were breathing hard to kill someone.’ ”

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn04092010.html

…oh, and also, please don’t lecture me about moral obligations. Remember, it’s you who is concern-trolling here (albeit clumsily) to whitewash mass-murder.

Also, Anderson, I was not completely out of line in making my request:

If your comments are blatantly racist, sexist or homophobic we will delete them and ban you from the site. The same goes for comments which are personally defamatory or insulting or which seek to derail a thread through provocation of one kind or another.

Maybe it’s fair to say that applies to me more than it does to tA, I can’t really be a fair judge of that. But I would note for the record that I do try to engage civilly with anyone who is civil, and theAmericanist doesn’t seem to particularly care what kind of pain he inflicts in my direction (or others’ direction); at least, perhaps he thinks that any harm done is fully warranted, and at worst, he seems to be taking pleasure in it, regardless of whatever topic is allegedly being discussed.

One statement suggests that they were about 800 metres from the Iraqis. […T]he Iraqis’ behaviour is quite consistent with the story of the local witnesses: they wanted to take advantage of the Reuters reporter to draw attention to the way their lives were being disrupted by the fighting.

All of which is quite consistent with what I posted earlier, based on the muzzle velocity of the cannon and the statements made to a reporter by locals the day after the incident.

I second any request that the Americanist be invited to shove off, at least from this thread.

you’re all missing the point. The war is the crime.
Meanwhile life goes on ignored:

“US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.

“Despite earlier reports we have determined that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Nato spokesman. The coalition continued to deny that there had been a cover-up and said that its legal investigation, which is ongoing, had found no evidence of inappropriate conduct.”

Personally, I apologize for not answering The Question promptly, and thus confusing my self-righteousness with any factual perspective, or the broader issues of the war today.

Won’t happen again. Peace? No hard feelings?

Congratulations, theAmericanist, you’ve single-handedly established a new standard for what level of aggressive behavior is condoned on CT. Goodbye now.

And here I was feeling guilty for feeding the troll yesterday!

Truly, Salient, you’ve no reason to feel the he deserves an answer anymore. It’s obvious that he is desperately seeking validation of some kind by staying here, engaging people he’s constantly saying aren’t worthy opponents. He’s destroyed his own point there. And he ignores points he doesn’t want to answer, busily complaining he needs HIS questions answered. All he has to fall back on is jingoism.

In my head I condemn soldiers for being tools, yet in my heart I know that they pay a horrible price for their mistake. A couple of times I helped set up a display of combat boots to remind ‘citizens’ (I always put that word in quotes because so few seem to care that they are) of the American lives sacrificed for the military. We affixed a name, rank, etc. and age of those who won’t come home to each boot; Gonzalez, 19; Herndon, 18; _____, 22; I wept the whole time (hours).

Not to mention those who return without the ability to engage in a discussion like this with what is left of their head.

We on the left tear ourselves up because we haven’t stopped it, but we have a president who was never elected, a self-serving Congress, and ‘citizenry’ that is muddled, misinformed and mute. Plus our opponents, not to say, ‘enemies’, don’t care what is moral (that would cost them money), don’t care what we say, or what the populace wants, and they own everything, including nuclear weapons, which they DO use ( ‘depleted uranium IS radioactive). Not an easy challenge.

But we can’t be silent.

Easy, there Salient, or we’re gonna have to up your blood pressure meds.. :)

Easy, there Salient

I know, I’m sorry! I should’ve left off after #229. Felt good to type out though. Rereading it (at home now and less nettled), the only part I regret is potentially implying an imputation of Henry as moderator, which wasn’t intended, and which would be unjustified as well as ungracious of me. theAmericanist is responsible for his own [–] behavior.

Kevin, I don’t know whether any of this is correct. But from the perspective of the helicopter crew, I think we can all easily understand why they believed what they did.

Of course I can understand why they believed what they did. They saw a group of men who were taking an interest in a firefight instead of keeping safely out of sight. They immediately thought “gotcha” but they were well trained and, following SOP, they set about making the case for opening fire before “lighting’em all up”. In that frame of mind they naturally saw what they wanted to see. Cops exhibit that mentality too sometimes, with the result that innocent people get locked up for crimes they could not have committed.

It didn’t occur to the aircrew that the Iraqis might be explaining to a reporter how the fighting was affecting their lives and taking him to a suitable point for getting pictures of the fighting. I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought of that either. If they had thought of that possibility, it would certainly have been easy for them to see how the Iraqis might feel safe in the company of a photographer, because Americans don’t make a habit of killing civilians accompanying newsmen just for the hell of it, do they?

On that level the story of the initial attack is simply one of a tragic failure on the part of the aircrew to visualise what the people on the ground might be doing and thinking. (The killing of the wounded man and his would-be rescuers is something else again; I’m not discussing that here, because I’ve nothing to say to anyone who would seek to justify it.) Like thousands of colonial policemen before them, they were on the lookout for troublemakers and, like thousands before them, they killed a bunch of natives who aroused their suspicions. Eric Blair would have understood their situation and their thinking very well. But discussion of the incident doesn’t have to stay on that level.

BTW, you remark on how careful the Iraqis become as they approach the corner where they could be killed by the ground troops. Is it really so noteworthy that Iraqis are not especially stupid?

theAmericanist:

“Basically, all we gotta do—is leave.”

Hey, I agree completely, at least with the last six words. But isn’t that Senator Aiken’s idea for Vietnam, with which you also seem to disagree? So what else is there to do, except just leave?

I like the Court Martial idea too. Who should be included?

Heur, Steven, et al. There are no gun laws in iraq. So a person wandering around with any weapon is not an insurgent by definition. A group of people standing around holding RPGs in Iraq does not count as insurgents. As others have observed, it’s funny to see the American right justifying murder in Iraq on the basis of a right they want Americans to have.

virgil, I see you’re still reading, I was amused by this:

Hesitation in combat can be fatal.

because that’s exactly what the helicopter crew did. They spent several minutes waiting for the men to gather in one spot so they could kill them all. This action was not justified by their fear for their fellow soldiers, and this fact is patently obvious from the video.

Finally, I would like to add my voice to the calls for theAmericanist to be banned. His manner is insulting and patronising in a way that I have never seen from any other right wing person on this blog (and boy, haven’t we all seen them!) If David K can be banned for being obstinate and obtuse, surely the people running this blog can ban this scumbag for being the stony end of humanity?

sg-

Good point. I made a careless, over-broad and unqualified statement–although the underlying truth still applies. What I SHOULD have said is there is usually a”sell by” date/time for decision-making. A point beyond which any further Hamlet-like delay in taking action means risking the lives of one’s own troops in the sense that theAmericanist poses@214: Take action or no? In this instance, yes, the Apache crew had time –SOME time, at least–to both a) analyze and b) wait for all to neatly assemble. But they didn’t have ALL DAY. American ground elements were approaching down the street a few blocks away . Ultimately a decision had to be made to “fish or cut bait.” What if they had ignored the assembled group and one of the group proceeded to incinerate the crew of an approaching Humvee with an RPG? How would the decision to have “checked-fire” and abort any leathal action looked then?

What this video DOES demonstrate is the need for closer cooperation between the American forces and their Iraqi counterparts. Better integration of Iraqi advisor s/laison officers would possibly have helped to either a) avert this incident or b) confirm that the group were indeed valid targets, as the case may be.

This whole incident once again validating the accuracy of the phrase “the cruel calculus of war” i.e., the inevitable, eternal question of how many of “their” lives are worth how many of “ours.”

xenophon, self-serving twaddle. that gunship gave those guys plenty of time to separate, take up combat positions, and cause trouble. It waited for a particular moment – when everyone gathered.

heur, if only one person had an rpg, why did the gunship crew wait for all of them to gather, including the identifiable press guy, before firing? It could have killed the rpg guy straight away. They were waiting to maximise the kill, i.e. to maximise the collateral damage.

self-serving arguments to justify murder are never very endearing. It’s okay lads, occasionally admitting that your soldiers did a bad thing doesn’t make you a traitor.

theAmericanist, you are the most obnoxious, arrogant, unpleasant person I have ever seen on the internet. You really are a nasty piece of work.

LOL — yanno, after reading that I’m the “stony end of humanity” and a “nasty piece of work”, I’m just gonna repost what I said @ 108:

theAmericanist 04.07.10 at 6:49 pm
LOL —aw, Salient: you accuse American soldiers of murder, but you’re upset cuz I laugh at you when you won’t answer a simple question? When you take yourself sooooo seriously, that laughing at YOU must be the same as laughing at killing?

Something to bear in mind: not just lots and lots of Iraqis have been killed in this war. A fair number of Americans have, too.

I’ve had family there. God forbid any of ‘em should fire a shot they shouldn’t have.

And God save ‘em if they don’t fire one, when they needed to.

Salient: grow the fuck up.

Henry, if you consider theAmericanist’s conduct on this thread to be within the bounds for contributions to a CT thread, please post a comment which says so. It would be nice to know your perspective on this explicitly, rather than have to guess at it from your absence on this thread and continued participation on others.

Heur: you’re probably right that it would be an abuse — but the key to the “if”, as I understand it, is a set of facts that are not entirely visible to the public record.

I am presuming — but at least I am doing it openly — that those facts are at least sufficiently murky for the second attack that Some Officer could be put on trial for them.

So maybe the place to draw the line is that it WOULD be an abuse to have in effect a sort of fair show trial: where the facts and the law are so clear that an acquittal is certain, but you have the trial anyway.

But I don’t think this is a case like that, because of the murkiness of the facts (or more precisely, the tactical intelligence available at the time) for the second attack, and the discretion for Some Officer.

What bugs me about this thread (besides the usual gratuitious personal attacks, which I recognize that I provoke cuz I mock folks when I find their self-righteousness funny), is how resolutely these guys resist focusing on ACTUAl questions that aren’t designed and arranged to reinforce their self-righteousness.

Making your vision of your own self-righteousness the sole perspective cannot be a good idea in a war.

Daniel Ellsberg famously said about Vietnam, IIRC, that he considered it first a distraction, than a problem, and finally a crime. These guys start with the idea that Iraq is a crime, and won’t be distracted into the REAL moral issues — which all focus on problems: the most important one being how the US gets out, which IMNSHO requires winning — yet all winning really requires, is leaving.

Rejecting that is a profoundly irresponsible perspective, especially for folks who pride themselves on intellect.

Given
– all the context for why the people firing believed as they did and why the rules of engagement are as they are
– that the results witnessed through the video only came to light through a combination of chance and fanatical campaigning
– were it not for Reuters staff being among the casualties, those dead would still be counted (if at all) as insurgents fighting (what they see as) occupation

It seems fair to assume that far more civilians are being killed (by mistake, in good faith) by the US army than they themselves realise, let alone the wider public.

I also expect this to continue because of familiar processes by which we are invited to move through a multiplicity of self-presentations:
– we are the injured party
– we are responding to an irrational force and only using violence as a last resort
– we are using targeted violence which tries to spare the innocent
– the “innocent” who are killed bear some responsibility as we warned them in some way not to be where they were, or they should have realised the danger they were putting themselves in
– all this concern for the innocent… do you think the other side cares as much as we do? By making it a consideration we give them a tactical advantage and an incentive to use human shields
– we are killing fewer innocent people than would die if our opponents were in charge

I think it is within this discourse that the rules of engagement seem to end up in it not mattering who you actually kill and how, so long as you believe in your own good faith/intentions.

More cosmopolitan discourses which assume (for example) that legitimising such arguments for one side also legitimises the same arguments made by its opponents, or that an Iraqi life and an American life lost in war are equally to be mourned are probably the ones which find this video and its implications more disturbing.

@ Americanist and Salient: Leaving aside the question of who is right or wrong in the above thread, perhaps you can agree that, going forward, here or elsewhere, an effort will be made to avoid personal attacks and comments? Surely that would make for a better discussion.

@ Americanist: These men were placed in a situation where they are forced to make difficult judgment calls in sometimes ambiguous circumstances. I don’t think it fair to charge them criminally when it looks like things might be murky, so long as the decisions are within their sphere of discretion. I also don’t think it conducive to encouraging better decision-making.

Leaving aside the question of what counts or doesn’t count as “winning,” I’m less certain than you are that some type of total withdrawal would be good for anyone.

Now that theAmericanist is gone, can someone sum up the moral of this thread?

My vote is that if you find yourself writing posts composed of LOLing and ROFLing personal attacks that construe the understandably angry and indignant reactions of other commenters to a graphic video of senseless killing as “self-righteousness,” you should pause and reflect on how you might be failing, at life.

Ace trolling, theAmericanist. You’re the Red Baron of trolls. You’ve made Americanneocon look good. Congratulations, for being the most contemptible ass on this site since Abb1.

No, the relevant moral question is that, since the invasion and occupation of Iraq was immoral to begin with, is anything the American occupiers do to consolidate the occupation moral? Or, is anything the Iraqi resistance does to defend their country and evict the occupiers immoral? Rolling on the floor and laughing at the people who disagree with your self-righteous and irresponsible misrepresentations of the innocence of soldiers ordered to commit atrocities for the benefit of their military and civilian superiors is just another pathetic example of your own ignorance and immorality. A blatant attempt to intellectually intimidate anyone who disagrees with you.

Heur@238

I don’t think you can deny that the Apache crews killed a bunch of natives who aroused their suspicions. That’s just a fact. So I suppose what’s bothering you is that I liken them to colonial policemen. But their function is essentially the same as that of the RAF pilots who flew biplanes in Iraq in the 1920s, in what is commonly called a colonial policing role. The moral and tactical problems which they face are similar in many ways.

It’s not a very good defence of the army’s conduct to say that we are ignorant of many of the facts, the context, the complexity of the situation, etc. It’s no thanks to the army that we have the facts we do. To the extent that the army has released information it has done so as a damage-limitation PR exercise rather than to facilitate informed debate. That’s usually the way with armies. An appeal for trust smacks of chutzpah when combined with a policy of starving critics of information.

You mention good faith and you imply that the Apache aircrew exhibited it throughout. I don’t agree. Here’s part of the testimony of the CW3 who played the central role in this incident:

LTC: The van comes up, you engage it. Did you acquire or see at any time the size or shape of people in the van?
CW3: I saw, when they opened up the doors, three to four individuals. I saw them go in and out, extract the personnel and weapons and carry the guy back to the van. I did clear the individuals in the van.
LTC: Did you see anything in the van?
CW3: I couldn’t see inside the van, but they ran around right after I had seen them extract weapons and individuals.
LTC: As you saw on the tape, they didn’t have any weapons. So, what drove you then? What threat made you want to engage the van?
CW3: Well the friendlies were 300 meters away and from the initial report that a black car, sedan had been coming in and dropping off insurgents, taking them out, moving to different locations. That was my whole thought process.

Some of the jargon here is new to me. Presumably “clearing” people is a euphemism for shooting them. What is clear, in the more usual sense of the word, is that the CW3’s initial story was that the van driver and those who helped him carry the wounded man were picking up weapons. He says he actually saw this. When it is pointed out that his story doesn’t square with the tape, he refers to a different vehicle. I’ll accept that he was honestly confused about the two cars, but it’s overdoing charity to believe he really saw weapons being carried to or from the van, as he initially claimed. The driver and the people who assisted him didn’t live long enough to pick up any weapons, even assuming they wanted to. He knew that.

I don’t know this CW3 and I’m not passing any judgement on him beyond the fact that he clearly lied under oath and AFAICT his taped transmissions made the case for killing that group of men seem much more compelling than it appears on the video. Your preferred assumption, that all the Americans involved should be presumed to have acted in good faith unless we have compelling evidence to the contrary, is (by implication) an assumption that the Iraqi witnesses were lying. But the tape matches the Iraqis’ story rather better than the Americans’ one.

Kevin:

You write I don’t think you can deny that the Apache crews killed a bunch of natives who aroused their suspicions. That’s just a fact. So I suppose what’s bothering you is that I liken them to colonial policemen.

This implies that the sole relevant factors in the soldiers’ decision to engage was (1) the individuals were Iraqis and (2) the soldiers had “suspicions.” Such a representation paints the decision as one driven by some overarching opinion of Iraqis and some vague, generalized suspicion of Iraqis; this representation is strengthened by your comparison to “colonial policemen.”

It’s unquestionably an indictment of the soldiers, and, more importantly, it’s completely false. It’s not that they were simply Iraqis, but that they were in an area where noncombatants were not expected, in an area controlled by hostile militia, in an area which was the scene of a 4 hour long combat operation, were armed, and were moving toward American ground elements that had been taking fire.

As to the CW3’s statements, I think you’re raising a separate issue: was he forthcoming during the interview. With respect to the engagement itself, however, are the transmissions we heard during the engagement, and what we saw on video. Based on that alone, and known context, they were acting in good faith during the engagement.

Turning to the CW3 statements anyway, I think you also mischaracterize the small excerpt above. The LTC asked the gunner what he saw; he answered very briefly, describing the entirety of the engagement with the van: individuals got out, got in, extracting personnel and weapons, and they engaged. THEN the LTC noted that, appearing to refer to the sight of the individuals as they exited the van, that they didn’t have any weapons, and asked the gunner what threat was perceived that made him want to engage; and he answered. There’s nothing that indicates deception. The questions are possibly less clear than they could have been.

Finally, as to the self-proclaimed witnesses featured on the Democracy Now! show, they made statements which are clearly false based on the video. They claimed that there simply were no armed insurgents in the area, a fact which is belied by the fact that American forces were taking fire before and after the videotaped engagement; they claimed that none of the men were armed, which is shown false by the videotape itself and by pictures taken immediately after by American ground forces upon arrival; they claimed that the body we see being run over by a vehicle was alive and moving, and was cut in half, which is yet another falsehood. Consequently I am inclined to trust what we saw on the videotape, reports as to the larger context of the operation, and pictures of the aftermath. The witnesses featured on the Democracy Now! show are completely lacking in credibility in light of these obvious falsehoods.

Kevin Donoghue@266.

“Nobody was much interested in capturing them either,AFAICT.”

There could be several reasons for this, KD, most of them having to do with the very voluble, heavy, sustained public criticism the left has made of US prisoner/detainee interrogation tactics and the increasingly cowed response to this by both the Bush and the Obama administration via increasingly treating such people as we see in this video as common criminals to be “mirandized” and read their “rights” on the battle-field, thus eliminating any usefulness they might have in providing intelligence. The until just recently modified “catch and release” policy of releasing such detainees within hours of capture without “sufficient” evidence that would in effect stand up in a court of law, (the kind of evidence normally obtained by a leisurely civilian-style CSI-like crime-scene investigation–a physical impossibility on the battlefield) only to see the released “detainees” return to the battlefield to kill and maim and create general mayhym has served to create a highly bitter and cynical fighting force at the “boots-on-the-ground” level among those at the tip of the spear.

Normally, commanders take great pains to emphasize the taking of battlefield prisoners as they can be invaluable for intelligence purposes. Historically the only time such protocols/SOPs have been ignored by the rank-and-file was during WWI and in the WWII Pacific campaign where often the attacking US/ALLIED forces lacked the manpower to transport prisoners to the rear without seriously weakening their own remaining forces (on ground just bitterly attained with the sacrifice of the lives of many of their comrades) to counter attack. The historian Martin Gilbert points out that outright killing on the spot of surrendered opponents (POWs) by the many hundreds for this reason was common on both sides during WWI in the obscene carnage that was the Western Front. Lacking this motive, the reluctance to take prisoners can be explained easily by the “catch and release” policy developed under pressure from the left if the well-documented heated complaints of the soldiers who must carry this policy are to be believed. (Just Google “catch and release”) . So in many respects, KD, a great deal of the blame for the “disinterest” of US troops in taking prisoners must fall at the feet of those on the left. Risking one’s life to capture someone shooting at one–only to see him released and return to the battlefield to try to kill oneself again–evidently (judging from their published comments) leaves a bitter taste in many of the mouths of those who actually have to carry out and put their lives in double–sometimes triple–jeopardy in carrying out this more “humane” program–so one might appreciate their increasing distaste/reluctance to go out of their way to secure prisoners of any kind on the active battlefield–a distaste cultivated by being forced to live/risk one’s life under policies driven by the pacifist, “humanitarian” left.

Of course all this is to say that such things as we are discussing are EXACTLY what makes “irregular” warfare so intractable and distasteful. One is in effect demanding that some American corporal or Sgt new to both the area and culture make, often under pressure and under fire, the sort of decision normally made by the local police and their local street intelligence apparatus ,i.e., those with long experience in the local area and often having a close personal familiarity with many of the local “actors” themselves. Many sociologists who study the military, such as Van Doorn and the late Charles Moskos, have been at pains to point out that this is an unfair burden to put on junior officers, NCOs and lower-ranking enlisted personnel by their civilian political masters.

And finally, not being a mind reader–nor is anyone else who posts here–I would be loath to describe with any exactitude the state of mind to this particular Apache crew regarding the “take prisoners” v. “kill-’em-all” mind-set that may or may not have been at play. It will take a more thorough, in-depth, investigation than is possible on these pages to even come close to THAT “truth.”

This thread must be in time trouble by now so I’ll keep this brief.

Virgil,

When I think of people who exerted meaningful pressure on US policy in Iraq, the first name that comes to mind is Sistani. I’m sure some milbloggers think it’s all about teh Left, but they are delusional. I agree that this kind of warfare makes especially unreasonable demands on soldiers. A number of commenters here have drawn the obvious conclusion: don’t start such wars unless it is absolutely necessary. CT has devoted a thread or two to the question of what can reasonably be expected of regular armies in such conflicts. During Israel’s last foray into Lebanon, Daniel Davies wrote a post on what should be demanded of irregular forces. This might have been a good thread to discuss such issues, but thanks to the troll and his feeders that discussion didn’t happen. You mention the need for a thorough, in-depth, investigation. That rather surprisingly puts you in the same camp as Amnesty International. I’ll be very surprised if that demand gets anywhere.

Heur,

For me, the US army’s rules of engagement are only of interest insofar as they can help explain how things like this happen. Yglesias mentioned them, the other two linked posts didn’t. Yglesias also mentioned that “that possession of a firearm is not cause for summary execution either in Iraq or the United States” and he goes on to remark that “no matter what abuses may sometimes be perpetrated by police officers, you could never in a million years have an incident in which American police officers gun down a half dozen people, none of whom fire shots, and then the whole thing is just swept under the rug.”

So when you say that the context is combat and the rules referenced are the US army’s rules, I think you are missing the point. Maybe you think the discussion should be conducted within that frame, but the learned bloggers don’t see it that way. Yglesias quite explicitly brings policing, judicial process and punishment into the discussion. You protest when I do the same thing. Yglesias also issues what you call my indictment, to wit: US forces acted towards the Iraqis in a manner which would “never in a million years” be adopted in an American city. At least it seems to me that he is making much the same – rather obvious – point that I made, which you find objectionable. I’m really not sure what your problem is.

You really don’t perceive any relevant differences in these two scenarios?

One difference I perceive, which appears to me the most relevant, is that in one scenario the people in the gunsight are Americans and in the other they are not. Is that enough to justify the difference in treatment?

As to the Iraqi witnesses, on the day after the killings they said that there were two attacks, that a driver was killed in the second one as he tried to rescue the wounded, that the men had been walking around with the journalists and that an armoured vehicle drove over a body. They said the men were unarmed, which may not be true. Certainly most of the men were unarmed. You say “they claimed that the body we see being run over by a vehicle was alive and moving, and was cut in half.” That’s not in the version I saw, but I’ll take your word for it that somebody got carried away. So what? It was a very traumatic incident.

On the whole, the Iraqis’ account looks a damn sight more honest than the bureaucratic bilge the US came out with, about being under attack and “engaging” armed insurgents. I don’t doubt they came under attack but it certainly wasn’t from that location. The use of the term “engagement” is misleading – it’s just spin, really. It implies that those who were killed were clearly hostile and it strongly suggests that they fired shots.

That wasn’t so brief after all.

Wars of choice are immoral. Period.”

In the eyes of Steve LaBonne, perhaps. But I wonder if the good Mr. LaBonne would have screamed blo0dy murder if France had actively “invaded” the Rhineland to militarily oppose Hitler’s occupation troops as a “preventative war” measure? And German blood was spilled? And should Israel have waited to absorb the full crippling brunt of the Arab attack in 1967 before it’s own forces attacked the Arabs? What say you? “Immoral” actions?

I wonder what horseshit excuse the military and its bootlickers around here will come up with for this latest atrocity

Well, it’s clear that the soldiers perceived that it was a busload of insurgents armed with AK47s and RPGs, and felt that it posed an immediate threat to the heavily-armed NATO convoys, and so felt it necessary to cut as many passengers in half as possible. But no doubt they did so in a highly moral manner, in good faith, and consistent with US rules of engagement. And I’m sure they felt no joy whilst doing so.

“However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”
— Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal