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I think you read my comparison wrong or maybe it was just my poor phrasing of it.
What I mean is if the pilot of the attacking helicopter was an Iraqi soldier in Saddams army and the footage was of his repression of the Shias would you have a different view of the actions carried out by the pilot ?
How many hearts and minds ( I hate the propagandist term myself ) do you think you will win by slaughtering/maiming/orphaning/widowing the people whos trust you allegedly seek to gain ? It's a no brainer, imho.Using civilian casualties as a means to gain the hearts and minds of Iraqis and the Muslim world isn't noble at all, and it inevitably leads to situations like this.
To be honest I don't think Western elites who prosecuted the war/s have absolutely any concerns for ordinary Iraqis and only prize what is underneath the sand there
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. .......Aldous Huxley
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Oh dead Lord, that's not how you fight a war in my book.
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Although I disagree with your view on the actions of the US pilot in this instance , I wholeheartedly agree with your point about whether the US had a right to even be there.
To me it was and will remain another aggressive war ( a war crime ) fought by the US for control/profiteering over a massively important strategic global asset , namely Iraqi oil. I don't think it was solely about oil but predominantly about oil
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. .......Aldous Huxley
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Funny how after we fought this war for oil gas prices skyrocketed to four dollars a gallon and Bush went begging to Saudi Arabia to increase production only to be told where to go. Moreover, even the violently anti-war Justin Raimondo long ago refuted the war for oil conspiracy theory: noting the simple economic fact that bringing Iraqi oil to market would drive prices down, thus inhibiting Big Oil's profits. After all, there is a reason why the OPEC cartel restrains production in the first place: bringing too much to market restrains their profits.
Anyway, this 'Collateral Murder' video is addressed adequately here:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...ghdad-anything
Wikileaks, the website devoted to publishing classified documents on the Internet, made a splash today with a video claiming to show that the U.S. military "murdered" a Reuters cameraman and other Iraqi "civilians" in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. But a careful watching of the video shows that the U.S. helicopter gun crews that attacked a group of armed men in the then Mahdi Army stronghold of New Baghdad was anything but "Collateral Murder," as Wikileaks describes the incident.
There are a couple of things to note in the video. First, Wikileaks characterizes the attack as the U.S. military casually gunning down Iraqis who were innocently gathering on the streets of New Baghdad. But the video begins somewhat abruptly, with a UAV starting to track a group of Iraqi males gathering on the streets. The voice of a U.S. officer is captured in mid-sentence. It would be nice to know what happened before Wikileaks decided to begin the video. The U.S. military claimed the Iraqis were killed after a gun battle with U.S. and Iraqi security forces. It is unclear if any of that was captured on the strike footage. Here is what the U.S. military had to say about the engagement in a July 2007 press release:
Soldiers of 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, both operating in eastern Baghdad under the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, along with their Iraqi counterparts from the 1st Battalion, 4th Brigade, 1st Division National Police, were conducting a coordinated raid as part of a planned operation when they were attacked by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Coalition Forces returned fire and called in attack aviation reinforcement.
There is nothing in that video that is inconsistent with the military's report. What you see is the air weapons team engaging armed men.
Second, note how empty the streets are in the video. The only people visible on the streets are the armed men and the accompanying Reuters cameramen. This is a very good indicator that there was a battle going on in the vicinity. Civilians smartly clear the streets during a gunfight.
Third, several of the men are clearly armed with assault rifles; one appears to have an RPG. Wikileaks purposely chooses not to identify them, but instead focuses on the Reuters cameraman. Why?
Fourth, there is no indication that the U.S. military weapons crew that fired on this group of armed men violated the military's Rules of Engagement. Ironically, Wikileaks published the military's Rules of Engagement from 2007, which you can read here. What you do see in the video is troops working to identify targets and confirm they were armed before engaging. Once the engagement began, the U.S. troops ruthlessly hunted their prey.
Fifth, critics will undoubtedly be up in arms over the attack on that black van you see that moves in to evacuate the wounded; but it is not a marked ambulance, nor is such a vehicle on the "Protected Collateral Objects" listed in the Rules of Engagement. The van, which was coming to the aid of the fighters, was fair game, even if the men who exited the van weren't armed.
Sixth, Wikileaks' claim that the U.S. military's decision to pass the two children inside the van to the Iraqi police for treatment at an Iraqi hospital threatened their lives is unsubstantiated. We do not know the medical assessment of the two Iraqi children wounded in the airstrike. We don't even know if the children were killed in the attack, although you can be sure that if they were Wikileaks would have touted this. (And who drives their kids into the middle of a war zone anyway?) Having been at attacks where Iraqis have been killed and wounded, I can say I understand a little about the process that is used to determine if wounded Iraqis are transported to a U.S. hospital. The person has to be considered to have a life-threatening situation or in danger of losing a vital function (eyesight, etc.). Yet, even though the threshold to transfer Iraqis to U.S. military hospitals is high, I have repeatedly seen U.S. personnel err on the side of caution and transport wounded who probably should not have been sent to a U.S. hospital.
Baghdad in July 2007 was a very violent place, and the neighborhoods of Sadr City and New Baghdad were breeding grounds for the Mahdi Army and associated Iranian-backed Shia terror groups. The city was a war zone. To describe the attack you see in the video as "murder" is a sensationalist gimmick that succeeded in driving tons of media attention and traffic to Wikileaks' website.
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I opposed going into Iraq, and actually still think it's a bad idea. But a bad war, once engaged, should still be won. People who obsess over Iraq tend to be left-wing antifas, Muslims, and liberal arts majors who in their offtime from studying queer theory march against 'American genocide'.
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It's all very ambiguous to me. What we should be talking about is the standard procedures for military personnel (who aren't responsible for their politicians' decisions to deploy them wherever). It seems they squint down telescopes, trying to guess if a man's carrying a gun or some innocent object. They have to make decisions, and they get it wrong now and then. It seems cameras look too much like guns.
- This is a potentially self-defeating way of fighting a war.
Then again, when there ARE men with guns running about, it's probably not too good an idea to go running around yourself with something on your shoulder. If the soldiers seem 'trigger-happy', they probably have some reasons for it, having seen comrades blown to bits by roadside bombs. They were unable to hit back then, and want to hit back now, while they have the chance. The only way to hit an insurgent who plants bombs at night is to try and catch him when he's doing other stuff, like wandering about when there are gun fights going on.
Ultimate conclusion obviously has to remain this; don't get involved in pointless foreign wars where you haven't got a clue what the fuck is going on.
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I think the moral of the story is don't go on a cruise with the kids into a combat zone, and don't point objects that look like RPG launchers at attack helicopters. I think most people know not to do these things anyway.
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I personally think our handling of Saddam was botched even in the first Gulf War. That being said, neo-conservatives genuinely believe in democratic peace theory, and think they can bring democracy to pacify rabid Muslims. I'm very skeptical of that view.
Still, I don't doubt there is a geopolitical component. One thing Iraq has done is theoretically put pressure on other Mid-East states to democratize. Though that idea is pretty crazy too (except in Iran), as it'll bring Islamists to power, such as happened in Palestine.
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