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InvisibleBlack -> RE: Suprised no one posted the new video of our military murdering Iraqis. Here it is. (4/5/2010 7:47:00 PM)
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I was against going into Iraq. I'm pretty much against any war unless there is a very clear and present danger. I absolutely do not believe in "pre-emptive warfare".
The sad and terrible fact is that even in a "justified" war, innocents are killed. There is no "neat and clean" way to fight an armed conflict, certainly not in an urban environment. Urban warfare is about the messiest, nastiest and deadliest form of conflict. You send a couple of thousand men into a foreign country and give them a batch of machine guns and rocket launchers and tell them that people are going to be shooting at them and they will react and sometimes mistakes will be made.
That's the choice you make when you go to war. That's all there is to it.
The only real question is - is the purpose you're trying to achieve worth the price that will be paid?
I don't believe that Iraq was - and I opposed it back when everyone and his brother Fred was for it.
FWIW, I was an officer in the U. S. Army, about twenty years ago. I was lucky enough to never be in active combat but I went through all the training, and the mandatory military ethics courses and all the rest of it. I can assure you that you do not get deployed anywhere without the Rules of Engagement being made extremely clear to you.
I don't know what the Rules of Engagement were in that particular engagement. I don't have the feeds from the other vehicles. I don't know what had been going on that day - whether this was a hot combat zone, whether anyone else had taken fire in the area, or whether this unit had been specifically tasked for a combat op.
I didn't watch the video at first. I just listened to the audio and thought about what I would have done. If I'd been Hotel Two-Six and been informed that there were "individuals with weapons", "five to six individuals with AK-47s", that they "have eyes on an individual with an RPG" and that "we had a guy shooting" - I would have authorized them to engage as well. I then would have had to live with the fact that I ordered the killing of a dozen or so innocent men.
Watching the video ... I'm not sure. The guy looking around the corner with a camera looks like he's got a rocket launcher or RPG. But I know he's a reporter with a camera. If I'd been in that Apache, with everything shaking and rattling around me, looking out a gun-site - if we'd been in a combat zone - and we've got a batch of guys with guns and one with an RPG - I probably would have ordered them to open up on the 'hostiles'.
From the ways these guys are acting - it's clear to me that in their minds they thought they were engaging hostiles. They believed they were following the Rule of Engagement and at no time did they have any idea these guys were civilians or that they were doing anything illegal, immoral or wrong. I don't know enough about the situation to say whether the military acted incorrectly (and if they were it was a lot higher up than the guys in the chopper or on site) or if the reporters were blithely wandering around a kill zone unknowingly.
It's easy to sit back and arm-chair general. It's easy to say "I would have done this" or "I would never do that". The reality of it is - you don't know. You just don't know. I'm not in a position to talk, really, since I've never been in combat but I'm smart enough to wonder just what I would do, how I would react, in extreme circumstances. No one wants to be in charge of an atrocity - but no one wants to be the idiot who got their own squad killed and if you'd going to err - you err towards the former rather than the latter.
Watching those men get gunned down and then the van get blown apart is an awful, ugly tragedy - but it's also an unavoidable one. Even if you could somehow have prevented that one - there's a hundred other incidents that didn't get caught on film where civilians were killed, bombed, shot or whatever - where helicopters and planes collided or crashed due to errors in judgement having nothing to do with combat - where soldiers shot each other by accident and got recorded as 'friendly fire'. I have no doubt that sometime during the war someone got drunk, fell asleep, puked while he was out and choked to death in his bunk and got recorded as 'KIA' or a 'training accident' so his family would get benefits now that he's gone. That's it. That's what happened. It happened in Iraq. It happened in Viet Nam. It happened in World War II and you know what, it or something like it happened in every war that was ever fought anywhere.
The voices you're hearing are just people doing the best they can to win in tough circumstances and trying their damndest not to get killed. They didn't get up that morning hoping to kill a journalist and his camera or to shoot up a van with kids in it and this is probably going to haunt them for the rest of their lives. If you don't like what happened, the answer is not to get pissy about a video, or to yell that these guys should be tried as 'war criminals' or bitch about their inhumanity. Pretending that somehow this could be done without any accidents - without any innocents being hurt or any mistakes being made is just that - pretending. It doesn't work that way.
The real answer is Don't engage in stupid wars. You stop the madness before it begins. You don't create a situation where these kinds of things will happen - because they do happen. Every time. They're happening right now even as we type - only you're not seeing them because they're not being reported. If you want to stop them, you need to stop the war.
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