What folk art has always done best is caustic comment on the absurd justifications the Powers That Be expect them to swallow hook, line and sinker.
If you haven’t seen any coverage of the atrocity in Baghdad to which it refers yet, I mentioned it in Saturday Salon yesterday but there’s been really very little discussion of it in our major press. Mining accidents, while terrible, have been a staple of the industry for centuries: but they seem to have provided a great opportunity for our major news organisations to turn their headlines away from something this uncomfortable: Leaked video shows gunship killing journalists.
The attack took place in Eastern Baghdad in 2007, the US military has always claimed that the civilians were insurgents.
Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on collateralmurder.com
The video is horrific. Warning: graphic violence. [read transcript]
Also, US Forces have admitted covered up killings of civilians in Afghanistan: U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women
On Sunday night the American-led military command in Kabul issued a statement admitting that “international forces” were responsible for the deaths of the women. Officials have previously stated that American Special Operations forces and Afghan forces conducted the operation.
The statement said that “investigators could not conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence” but that they had nonetheless “concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.”
“We deeply regret the outcome of this operation, accept responsibility for our actions that night, and know that this loss will be felt forever by the families,” said Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, a spokesman for the NATO command in Kabul.
The admission was an abrupt about-face. In a statement soon after the raid, NATO had claimed that its raiding party had stumbled upon the “bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed” and hidden in a room in the house. Military officials had also said later that the bodies showed signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a knife, and that the women appeared to have been killed several hours before the raid.
And in what would be a scandalous turn to the investigation, The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”
Everybody knows that mistakes happen in the heat of the moment. But cover-ups don’t, and it’s the cover-ups that sow mistrust, resentment and a desire for vengeance amongst an occupied population.
This also (again) raises the question as to why the U.S. military seems to have so many more of these collateral damage clusterfucks than other military services. Remember those British soldiers in the first Gulf War who were 30km away from the described target on a clear day where it was obvious their armoured personnel carrier didn’t match the description of an Iraqi tank, and who were shot to pieces by U.S. fighter jets? And how the Pentagon refused to let the pilots appear in court for the inquest? Just like they refused to release key transcripts relating to the 2003 case where U.S. A-10s fired upon a British armoured convoy in Iraq?
Most prescient though were the observations of Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Larpent, who, weeks before Hull arrived in Iraq, warned that British forces should not be sent unless a system was introduced to prevent accidental attacks by American aircraft.
Larpent knew what he was talking about. Nine of his men were killed and 12 seriously injured when an A-10 opened fire on his convoy after mistaking them for Iraqi soldiers during the 1991 Gulf war. Were sufficient improvements made during the ensuing 13 years before Hull was killed? The MoD states that ‘improvements have been made since 2003′.
Certainly the army expected such deaths during the Iraq invasion, having lost 22 men to friendly fire in the first Gulf conflict. In fact Hull died at a time when the gallows humour doing the rounds was that men were more likely to be killed by Americans than Saddam’s forces. At the time of the 25-year-old’s death, five British servicemen had been killed by friendly fire, one more than the Iraqis had managed. An increasing risk of modern warfare, it proved, was knowing who was friend or foe. By contrast, just two per cent of Second World War casualties were shot by their own side.
We have even less information about the many occasions where the US military has fired upon its own personnel, especially when technology that could prevent it has been refused funding for purely budgetary reasons.
There’s something badly wrong with either the very fundamentals of the U.S. military’s Rules of Engagement, or with the way that they train their personnel to follow those Rules. Possibly both. Either way, these cover-ups make the U.S. ever less trustworthy in the eyes of people they claim to want as allies.
Thanks for that post Tigtog. Very interesting. I can’t help but think though that the main problem is not that the US covers these atrocities up, but they are there to commit them in the first place.
Chav, that too is a very good point.
How would videos such as this be rated in Australia? Would such inconvenient realities such as this be filtered out by Conroy’s filter?
desipis, in Australia Wikileaks would probably be dealt with by copyright law, or else sued for libel. The legal tools are already available to prevent the unpatriotic from interfering with the work of the authorities.
This massacre and its cover-up is shocking , but it can’t be emphasised too much that this is unlikely to be an isolated case. It’s inherent in using air power to fight a guerilla war, even with the best technology and the best will in the world (which last was conspicuously lacking anyway until even the US military worked out that surviving relatives would be likely to want to place IEDs in revenge). The Lancet studies showed an alrmaingly high proportion of Iraqis had lost relatives from US air strikes.
I’ll be 64 years old in a couple of weeks.
All my life the US govt [and cronies] have been attacking and killing people around the globe.
Lots of different countries in different continents, lots of excuses used, usually involving lovely words and phrases signifying nothing [did the guys who shot this latest lot see any WMDs?], lots [millions?] of people killed.
One day it might stop.
‘This also (again) raises the question as to why the U.S. military seems to have so many more of these collateral damage clusterfucks than other military services.’
Surely the answer is that they engage in military adventures to a hugely greater extent than other countries, coupled of course as dd says with the time-honoured US combat tactics of binging overwhelming firepower to bear from the air on anything that looks like a threat.
I’m confident the MSM will display the same terrier-like persistence in uncovering the truth and bringing those responsible to justice as it has demonstrated in the case of Australian journalists killed in East Timor 35 years ago. Heaven forfend that the moral standards applied to our Great and Powerful Friend should be any different to those applied to Indonesia.
I also look forward to a joint Rudd/Abbott demand that President Obama find and punish the guilty soldiers. After all, despite the attempts of conservatives to erase it from our collective memories, Australia was an ally of the USA in its war of aggression against Iraq and the subsequent occupation. Our government and military leaders cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for these terrorist acts.
John Pilger anyone?
“Obama and the age of permanent war.”
http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2010/03/world-war-pilger-obama-iraq
In this piece by Pepe Escobar of Asia Times he quotes McChrystal, “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.”
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LD07Ak01.html
desipis, it’s my understanding that he whole of wikileaks.org is already on Conroy’s block list. Don’ worry, you’ll be protected from any further unsettling truths.
What KL said.
If you pay taxes to the ATO (as I do) we are enablers of US military action in Iraq.
There are powerful moral grounds for demanding an end to our complicity.
More compelling for me is the observation that US military doctrine is so counterproductive of desirable outcomes. An acceptable settlement is rendered impossible.
And it’s not as if US military doctrine is unknown to us or to Australian policy makers. The US has been making the same errors for more than half a century.
When our political classes compel the rest of us to become enablers of US military doctrine, they are harming our national interests.
How dumb is that?
I vaguely recall that, at the time that British column got brassed up in Gulf War I, there was a rumour that the US pilots were flying way more hours than is proper, and kept alert with the help of medical-grade crank.
From what I heard of the cockpit conversation in this latest episode, the same thing might still be happening.
Thanks for the link Joe2, for all his numerous faults, Pilger is a master of this sort of polemic platinum:
“This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state within the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent.”
The incident appears to be a war crime. It clearly demonstrates an ‘if in doubt, kill to be sure’ approach to dealing with a situation where the pilot simply didn’t have enough information to justify pulling the trigger.
The freakiest thing about these bits of footage is often the banter, resembling the kind of mocking humour one would expect from a serial killer or a raving psychotic. Hideous.
Thanks for the Pilger link, Joe.
The US likes to keep its service people as far from the action as possible to avoid their own casualties as seen in the video. This seems to lead to a greater toll on civilians.
Perhaps it’s easier to kill when you don’t see the ‘whites of their eyes’. War to them is becoming increasingly like a computer game.
http://kcet.org/lifeandtimes/blog/?p=238
I agree that the size and “adventurousness” of the US military feeds in to this.
There is also a training issue at play, I suspect. I believe the US military tends to draw many of its personnel from the poor-and-desperate ranks of American society (they recruit in high schools, and the recruiters are infamous for lying), so they probably shoot faster than they think. It’s easy to do when you’re full of adrenalin anyway, as anyone who’s played Paintball knows. The legendary ignorance of Americans feeds in as well, I rather think: it’s all BFI with them.
Early on in the Iraq war, there was an incident where the Yanks killed a rather large number of Iraqis with no casualties to themselves. My Dad (who lived through WW2) smelt a rat, saying that either there was a massacre of unarmed/disarmed people or the Yanks were lying about their casualties. Raised it with someone with RAAF connections, who said that the Aussies believed the Americans were underestimating their casualties. Maybe my friend was wrong.
For anyone that is interested, I got this very interesting link of Chas Licciardello’s twitter feed. It shows just how much the US govt. spends on the military compared to other countries in really easy to understand graphs and diagrams…
Who really spends the most on their armed forces?
yes, those who have played group online 3D shooting games would also have a better understanding of how probable friendly fire is in a real war situation. How easy it is with even the best intents, when under pressure, to make even reasonably considered decisions which are just plain wrong.
The cover-ups afterwards however are inexcusable.
For anybody who missed it there is a comment on the Pilger item by Gideon Polya who is an Australian academic, I gather. He writes…
Chris@16 there appears to be no pressure on those who took part in the massacre, that we see in the video, except amongst themselves to get on with the turkey shoot.
The individuals below must have known quite well that the helicopter was there, but felt no fear because they considered themselves not to be in a fight. Then bang.
joe2 – perhaps I’m getting my civilian death incidents mixed up (there are a lot!) but I thought that the helicopter was supporting troops on the ground nearby (there was a dispute about just how far away they were) who were under attack by people with AK-47s and RPGs and the pilots thought that the people they saw were on their way to reinforce them. When its likely it was just the news crew on their way to film the fighting.
I watched this on SBS News last night. I couldn’t believe my eyes … or ears. The shooters’s comments were utterly callous!
Although I commend SBS for showing it largely uncensored, I was astonished that the item appeared in the bulletin at around 6.45pm – making it about the 15th in the cue. This is a typically subtle way of toning down its impact – by putting it into the less important news.
I then tuned into the ABC News specifically to see how they handled it. The item appeared about 7 minutes into the bulletin – long, long after the ‘top stories’. And, to add insult to injury – it was heavily cut (like, to about 5 seconds) because it was deemed ‘too graphic’.
Of course iorarua you realise that this couldn’t possibly be as important as the latest coalition dog whistle or talking point about population/immigration/school halls/ceiling insulation/interest rates etc etc.
We should never forget that we pay the salaries of these journalists, most of whom might as well be working for News Ltd for all the difference it makes.
…’it was deemed ‘too graphic’.’
The choices of what is or is not too graphic are interesting. Graphic footage of the WTC attacks was screened and re-screened for weeks. Graphic footage of the Bali bombings likewise. Atrocities only happen, the viewer would be forgiven for assuming, to People Like Us.
One element of the Wikileaks footage that has escaped comment, meanwhile, is the assumption that a vehicle attempting to help the wounded is fair game for a hail of fire. Much is made of the fact that children were occupants, but the general principle – kill without mercy those attempting to evacuate the wounded – is surely appalling. Since this is apparently the accepted standard of white hat war-making as done by troops we must support, perhaps we should be apologising to the Japanese for making such a fuss about the HS Centaur torpedoing. Clearly, the Japanese submariners were only following standard good-guy rules of engagement.
One other thing. The glee of the US aviators at the armoured vehicle running over a body deserves to be remembered the next time there is public alarm when an enemy mutilates one of our lads’ corpses. We surely have nothing to complain about, given the standard of respect for the enemy’s fallen we’ve seen displayed.
Hal9000, the firing on the van coming to aid the wounded was the part that got to me too. IANAL but I would have thought that the Geneva Conventions would have protected them in that situation, with or without visible red cross/crescent/diamond symbols. From a quick scan through, the US rules of engagement at the time don’t seem to have a relevant category (eg personnel rendering medical assistance, evacuation of wounded):
http://collateralmurder.com/en/resources.html
Anyway, my own oblique take on the film is here:
http://airminded.org/2010/04/07/intertextuality/
It is very asymmetrical, I know, but U.S. casualties overseas are big business in the States -
http://www.hillenbrandinc.com/CEO_letter.htm
Brett – thanks for those remarkable photos of an earlier Iraq aerial adventure. War from the air is something that is ok when we do it – in fact heroic – but the worst thing imaginable when someone does it to us.
Predictably, the wingnut warriors in the USA are attacking the story with frenzied rage. So far, most of the arguments take one of two lines:
– If you look at quadrant E11 of the screen at 3’41″ of the video, you can see something that clearly definitely might be a gun, so OBVIOUSLY our brave guys had no choice but to blow them all away;
– They followed the rules of engagement, aka the “Dad said it was OK” excuse.
The fact that grown people can put forward such transparently amoral arguments, let alone drivel such as “They should of painted red crosses on the van before they tried to help anyone”, demonstrates how utterly depraved many conservatives have become. Or perhaps always were.
No sacrifice is too great for America and her Allies in securing peace amongst WMD hoarders.
With courageous military form displayed at Wounded Knee, My Lai, Basra Road, and any ol’ Baghdad Street in 2007, what’s a little turkey shoot among friends?
Ken, I recall during the Falluja assault, reports that US Army snipers were targeting ambulances were dismissed as enemy propaganda. On the basis of decades’ worth of evidence, it’s usually fair to assume the US military’s version of events is bogus and the ‘enemy propaganda’ version likely accurate. When occasionally the truth gets into the MSM, the atrocities are blamed on the lowest-ranked individuals involved, who are conveniently labeled bad apples.
As others have pointed out, use of heavy weapons and air power against an irregular force inevitably causes disproportionate non-combatant casualties. Using an automatic aerial cannon firing explosive projectiles in a densely packed urban environment is like opening up with a machine gun to nab a pickpocket in a football stadium – and equally culpable.
C’mon, folks, these modern day US service personnel are much better trained, caring and psychologically stable professionals than generations in previous wars as this Australian video attests:
Um, Joe2, if you follow carefully through on his links you’ll find that he is quoting himself as authority (because his links go to his own websites) and not to authoritative medical and UN data.
Also, “Australian academic”? Whoopee!!!!!! He’s a biochemist, apparently, from Tasmania. That hardly qualifies him to be an authority on anything more than the effects of ruminant digestive juices on intestinal bacteria and macrophages, with special reference to bovine digestive tracts.
Next you’ll be quoting Mirko Baragic and Keith Windschuttle as authority on everything.
Actually, GregM I was aware of both your astounding revelations, to which I say… “big deal”.
If you have any reason to doubt what he says I am not stopping you from providing alternative figures. It certainly might be more constructive than just playing the man.
That’s a copout Joe2. You’ve asserted reliance on his “figures”
It’s up to you to produce the evidence for them and the evidence that they have any meaning at all.
Now joe2 you know the occupying forces were busy and had better things to do than count civilian bodies. Besides, that conveniently allows them to call bullshit on anyone else’s figures without the burden of having to provide any alternatives.
The weird thing is that even the most deranged wingnuts seem happy to concede that at least 100,000 Iraqis are dead as a direct result of the invasion and its aftermath. Just collateral damage and a price well worth paying for … something or other … at least in their twisted eyes.
This makes it obvious why the US won’t sign up to the International Criminal Court. They are knowingly perpetrating war crimes.
Now ,GregM, this might be hard for you. Please go again to my comment @17. Please show where I “asserted” reliance on his figures. I drew attention to them and allow others to make up their own mind.
Just like you obviously have, sweetheart.
Just chucking this in for relevance.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/croakey/2010/04/07/what-do-australians-really-think-about-violence-towards-women-a-new-survey/
“A national survey of community attitudes around violence towards women was launched this morning in Melbourne. Among its many findings are that in 2009, one in 20 people believe women who are raped “ask for it”.
This is quite a change from 1995, when one in seven people held this view.
…
The statistics are simply devastating, and demonstrate the very real need for changes in behaviour among Australians. We also have to change those aspects of our environments that tolerate an approach to women that promotes inequity, indifference or profound disrespect.”
Ken, sensible people know that if you quote facts or figures that you are going to rely on in advancing an argument then you have to produce them and defend them if you are called upon to do so.
Not to do so is unintelligent and wingnuttery (or should that be moonbattery?).
So let’s wait to see what figures Joe2 produces to back up his reference from the Australian academic icon who is his source of authority.
The last study I saw from The Lancet suggested that the occupation had augmented deaths in Iraq by about 650,000, which is not the same as the US killing that many. It was an all up morbidity figure based on deaths above what might have been otherwise expected had there not been an invasion in March of 2003 up until 2006.
So you are running away from them now? Another cop-out.
You aren’t even prepared to defend your convictions when you are challenged to do so just by being asked to produce the evidence that you have put forward.
Has it occurred to you that Australian academic Gideon Polya (and, for all you know, nemadtode respiration expert with a Nobel Prize in Medicine in the waiting) just might be right in what he says but that having quoted him you run away from looking into the basis of what he says and defending it on the basis that he has done his homework and is right?
How sad. He deserves better from you.
A journal with the same authority as The Onion.
Troll alert!
Nah, it’s not a troll. GregM’s just being a dick.
There are a complex range of factors that end up causing this sort of incident.
Commmand and control issues in terms of Rules of Engagement, Orders for opening fire, the dissemnination of them and training and compliance with them.
Cultural issues – In my peace time experience a blue on blue engagment even in non-lethal training was a sackable offence for a Tank Troop Leader. I went close once to engaging live soldiers in a live firing exercise by accident. I have also driven into an artillery and mortar barrage by accidnet and also almost been hit by another tank providing fire support onto an objective. My tank was deliberately shoy at by the infantry for a bit of fun. I was a safety officer on a combined infantry/tank assault and saw troops almost machine gunned. Safety staff were bodily dragging diggers backwards out of the zone of fire. I have seen a number of different footages which demonstrated a lack of fire discipline by US Troops and a cavalier attitude to engaging not clearly identified targets. That said, I understand just how and why this type of culture can develop and/or plain mistakes in identifying targets can occur in complex real world comabat environments.
The issue of investigating the incident is also fraught with the problems of the military investigating themselves. That said, warfare is not peace time and the rules of evidence and standards of proof that apply in a peacetime civilian court of law are not appropriate for this sort of circumstance. So who is best equipped to investigate is a moot point.
None of this is justifying what has happened in the incident discussed above but trying to give some context. If there a crime is thought to have been committed it should be investigated. If a cover up has occurred then those responsible should have the book thrown at them. Both the killing of civilians and covering it up as alleged are directly counter to the interests of Iraqis and the West and plays into the hands of our enemies.
That’s an insult to The Onion.
Reuters had a compelling reason to chase down the footage using FOI of their own journalists being murdered by US troops. Imagine if they spent such efforts in chasing down evidence of the many Iraqi, Afghan civilian deaths? Imagine if Australian journalists chased down evidence of our own troops spilling civilian blood? Trouble is they just don’t do it enough and have extraordinary obstacles put in the way of the truth getting out.
@Nana Levu,
Reuters didn’t get this footage through FOI in the end – Wikileaks only got it from a whistleblower. There are indeed extraordinary obstacles put in the way of the truth getting out, and given what whistleblowers go through when detected, it is perhaps understandable that they are more willing to leak footage of “friendlies” getting unlawfully killed than all the other footage there must be of “normal” civilians getting unlawfully killed.
I’m grateful for the risks whistleblowers are already taking. In an ideal world they’d be publicly feted, but what generally happens is that they are marginalised by their organisations amid flurries of attempts to discredit them and ruin future career opportunities. I wish it was different.
Kudos to Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. They had to enlist some high-powered computer savvy to decrypt that video.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange
Great posts from Glenn Greenwald on the Afghan killings and cover-up:
and the Wikilieaks video of the Baghdad killings:
“…but CNN either refuses outright to show the most revealing parts or treats those parts like they’re too naughty for their fragile, childish viewers to see.”
The media treatment of this incident should cause great concern. As other posters have pointed out, it has been as bad here in Australia as in the US. The news lead in Victoria over the last few days had been Christine Nixon leaving her command post to go off to dinner on Saturday night at the height of the Black Saturday bushfires. Wow! That would really have made a difference!
I’m not always on the same side as Razor, but appreciate his humane insiders perspective at 48. Very possibly it’s an irresponsible, brutal stuff-up even if the heartless comments suggest crime against humanity. But it should have been investigated. It’s the covering up and glossing over that’s the problem.
“I’m not always on the same side as Razor, but appreciate his humane insiders perspective at 48. Very possibly it’s an irresponsible, brutal stuff-up even if the heartless comments suggest crime against humanity. But it should have been investigated. It’s the covering up and glossing over that’s the problem.”
Don, we are all “insiders” on this because it is being done in our name.
If Gen.Stanley McChrystal’s experience in Afghanistan(see 49) is anything to go by this was not a one off “stuff up” but part of a wider culture of ‘over the top’ American army violence.
Seconded, Don.
From Tigtog @49
Exactly.
This insight is essential achieve an understanding of the environment in which Australian foreign and military policy are formulated.
Is it possible that Australian decision makers are unaware of US military policy?
The correct answer is “certainly not”.
Recall that the Howard government in its anti-terrorism legislation gave US Military Commissions and ONLY US Military Commissions the status of proper judicial tribunals.
The Howard government accorded US Military Commissions this unique attribution of judicial competency even though it was an undeniable fact at the time of passage of that legislation that the US military justice system employed torture in its proceedings. This too was a policy decision signed off by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
And in regard to the special status of US Military Commissions, the Rudd government has done nothing to rectify the Howard government’s abandonment of the rudimentary principles of justice.
When will Rudd grow a spine?
Facts.
A US patrol was under fire in that area, the helicopter didn’t just pick out a random group of people.
Fact: Some members of that group were seen peering around the corner towards where the US troops had/were being shot at.
Fact: The group included individuals carrying sidearms and at least one who had an RPG.
Fact: To the best of my knowledge they weren’t seen actively shooting at the US troops so may have been an alarmed group of locals “neighborhood watch”.
Fact: There were no distinguishing uniforms or other gear to show who they were.
Fact: The US after incident report stipulated a number of rifles and an RPG were found with the bodies, as well as camera equipment.
Now lets put yourself in the hands of the men on the ground, would you have held fire in that situation?
This is possibly the best and most balanced report Ive seen on the incident.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2010/0407/Killings-of-Iraqi-journalists-US-says-they-were-not-war-crimes
“..Crazyhorse 18 and 19, the helicopters in question, were on a directed mission in support of ground forces that had been taking constant fire from insurgents, according to the report. They identified “with reasonable certainty” the presence of military-age males with weapons at a location within 300 feet of the site where US forces were being attacked.
Photos included with the report show the presence of both a rocket-propelled grenade and an AK-47 automatic rifle among group members, according to the report…”
And
“..Then the aircrews saw action that they felt established hostile intent by the group. They said they saw what they believed to be armed insurgents peering around the corner of a home to “monitor the movement or activities of friendly forces.”
“At this point, [an] individual was in a crouched, firing position with his weapon pointed towards friendly troops,” according to the Central Command investigation.
However, the item that appeared to be a weapon may have been the long lens of a camera…”
Why not sheet the blame home to those who fight out of uniform? Its quite likely the blokes were “looky loos” and weren’t involved in the fight with the US patrol, however their proximity to the fight and the “long barrel” (prob a camera) around the corner makes accusations of deliberate targeting of civilians a bit shaky.
How would Prodeo commenters have dealt with that scenario?
Don @ 50 with respect I think you and Razor are missing the main point. Every time something like this happens – Abu Graib, Scott Beauchamp, Michael Leahy, the list goes on and on – people get sidetracked into dissecting the minutiae of the incident itself (see Mole @ 54 for example) which creates the impression that this was some isolated event that deserves special consideration.
The important lesson is that these kinds of incidents are an INEVITABLE RESULT of waging aggressive war and occupying other countries. Giving people a licence to kill means some will abuse it. Putting people in a prisoner/guard relationship means some appalling abuses will occur. Over-running a country and installing an unaccountable military regime means some considerable abuses of power will happen. We KNOW all this – it’s one of the reasons many of us opposed the invasion of Iraq in the first place – yet the armchair warriors who cheer on endless war refuse to admit it. American exceptionalism, la la la, SUPPORT THE TROOPS!
Treating an incident like this as something stunningly extraordinary and requiring special commissions of inquiry and the like just plays into the warmongers’ hands. The truth is that these kinds of events are just a routine part of war and occupation.
So you’re blaming the CIA? Interesting angle.
Ken Lovell
Absolutely.
100% correct.
If they weren’t there, it would not have hapened.
Ken Lovell.
So the facts on this matter dont matter?
Ive worked in prisons, appaling abuses arent inevitable. Good leadership and accountability will see abusers sacked, which is how it should be.
This particular incident is being held up as an example of US brutality, look at it closer and its not quite as clear as youd like it to be.
Any chance of someone here who was against the war posting an article on how to arrange the ‘soft” overthrow of someone like Saddam?
War is violent, people are killed, unfortunately the sanitised WW2 version doesnt and hasnt ever existed.
What Mole said. In hindsight, this may have been an unfortunate and regrettable incident, but under fire, as US troops had been, you don’t have the benefit of hindsight. The Washington Post had a balanced piece on it too, and it is hardly a tool of the wingnut right.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2010/04/06/DI2010040600750.html
What a nasty little thread this largely is. Deranged anti-Americanism running riot. If half the rabid xenophobia shown here by several participants had been deployed in, say, a thread about asylum seekers, the very people who are commenting in this vein would be outraged.
I know. I know, in a certain world-view it’s not xenophobia if it’s aimed at the evil Yanks.
“Any chance of someone here who was against the war posting an article on how to arrange the ’soft” overthrow of someone like Saddam?”
Who gave the CoW the right to overthrow Saddam? And if you approve then why stop there? There are many other dictatorial regimes in the world, many probably worse than Saddam’s.
But then they probably don’t have oil or other resources the US requires.
Wozza and Mole, unless you can answer DD’s question sensibly, viz:
then you are in Wozza’s colourful word “deranged”.
Mole’s absurd statement:
is a blanket defence against any accusation of any war crime. It gives any combatant absolute licence to do whatever he wants. A world that operated according to those “principles” certainly would be “deranged”.
I assume that Mole did not really mean to argue for absolute licence. But I do suspect that this is not the first time that Mole typed thoughtlessly.
Weazle words: “In hindsight, this may have been an unfortunate and regrettable incident…”
Yeah, ’cause it happened to them not us. If it had happened to us not them it would be splashed across the front page of every rag in the country, and people like you would be full of righteous indignation.
Katz 53 wonders of Rudd will grow a spine. I wonder if Mike Kelly will do more than stand nodding in Rudd’s background photo shots. After all he left the military and stood for Parliament is disgust at poor leadership on Iraq under Howard. http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1930336.htm
Ummmm Mole @ 58 to claim that abusers will be sacked, aren’t you conceding that abuse will occur, which was my exact point?
Yeah leadership and accountability are great things. Unfortunately you can’t buy them on eBay or create them with a few well-written memos. If you’ve studied organisational behaviour at all, you’ll know they are hard to achieve even in commercial enterprises with all the checks and balances of civil society. In war or a military occupation, orders of magnitude harder.
That they are nevertheless achieved sometimes is a great credit to the people responsible. That there will be frequent serious shortcomings is inevitable. Only a fool or an ignoramus would pretend otherwise.
Nana Levu @46, imagine if Australian journalists also did the same domestically instead of reporting every rumour and dog whistle coming from the Libtard spin machine.
Mole and Razor have valid points in that the opposition in Iraq and Afghanistan is mostly irregular and don’t wear uniforms, which makes combatants hard to separate from non-combatants, and could lead to a shoot first and ask questions later mindset.
Unfortunately, the ones who suffer most as a result of this are civilians trying to lead some semblance of a normal life.
The macabre “humour” among the pilots isn’t unusual in war zones, I understand and was common in the trenches in WW1, and among troops in WW2 and subsequent wars. It was a coping mechanism for people who had had prolonged exposure to the brutal reality of combat in a war zone.
I don’t condone the cover-up, but I imagine it’s been done because if the civilian population at home had any idea what was actually happening, (you’d hope) there’d be a huge stink and a demand for the immediate withdrawal of troops.
And that leads to another dilemma. The Coalition of the Dills should have kept their big fat noses out of Iraq as we all knew then and know now, but their overweaning arrogance and hubris had to be satisfied, no matter what the cost and without UN sanction.
So having caused the chaos that now exists in the very fragile infant democracy in Iraq, (and I’m not totally convinced that there is such an animal nor whether Iraqis want a western style democracy), are we morally right to just abandon them to their fate, because it’s inconvenient to stay?
As someone who was utterly opposed to the illegal invasion of Iraq, I’m torn about what we should do. If we leave, what will happen to Iraq? Will it sink even further into chaos and bloodletting or will it be the start of a healing process?
And does anyone believe that the Trio of Evil, Bush, Blair and Howard, will ever be called to account for their actions?
Jane @ 65,
“And does anyone believe that the Trio of Evil, Bush, Blair and Howard, will ever be called to account for their actions?”
No. Never. Though it would be wonderful to see them tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a very long time.
Wozza said:
Breathtaking. Comparing a handful of socially marginalised people with the best resourced military machine in the world as it wantonly tramples its way into other jursdictions crushing anyone in its path underfoot … It’s telling how your Weltanschauung can frame this matter for you.
It was never any business of ours to overthrow Saddam, and more than it was the business of the US to see to it that his party acquired power, as they attempted to outmanoeuvre the Nasserites from 1958 onwards, or held it by allowing them to murder rivals, as they did in 1963, or to thrash it out with the Iran (which they’d also been messing with from 1951) as they did from 1981 onwards. This is the problem with messing about in other places here you have no business being.
They should have left well alone, at several points, adopting the do no harm principle. Still, how are you going to wag the dog and boost military spending so you can help out your mates if you don’t beat up on third world countries? If there are no dangerous communists to fight, what are you going to do?
So its a moral position that a dictator should never be overthrown except by either his own people or by military force from the same region?
There is no “less harm” case for leaving Saddam in power unless you believe there was ANY likelyhood of a transition from dictatorship to another less beligerent form of government after he died.
We accepted people on the basis they would be tourtured, killed or imprisoned under Saddams rule, thats a justification for his overthrow. Would I like to see other countries with similar regimes overthrown. Yes, emphaticly yes.
Wether through military or other means, yes.
The same can be said of the regime that established Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Were you in favour of overthrowing the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Bush regime? They killed, imprisoned and tortured too.
Katz
They were restrained by the rule of law which saw many parts of their programme reversed or ruled out.
Nothing comparable existed in Iraq.
And if you hadnt noticed the Bush/Cheney regime was overthrown using a peacful process called democracy.
Again nothing like it existed in Iraq.
Thats why democracy works better for human rights, a government might get away with extreme mesures in the short term, but will be punished/reversed when enough people are informed.
I note Obama hasnt shut Guantanimo yet either.
I wasn’t in favour of the violent overthrow of the Bush clique either.
Bush, Blair and Howard never justified their invasion of Iraq on the basis that they were “crusaders” for the rule of law.
They justified their invasion with lies about weapons of mass destruction.
Our troops went to war not for the rule of law but for a lie.
Mole said:
As unpleasant as are the implications, the answer, broadly, is yes, and I’d even exclude military action from the same region. The reason is that if you don’t have that as a principle, any suitably armed state can say that some toher state is run by a tyrant and move its troops in to seize resources or get square on those they don’t like. War, andf the threat of war, tend to aid tyrants, and even when they are ultimately overthrown, as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, the consequences for the populace weren’t good, because war has huge collateral damage.
That’s not to say I would never favour military intervention under any circumstance. One can imagine circumstances in which a part (or parts) of a country might be partitioned by force so as to allow a population fleeing massacre to have safe haven while better arrangemebnts were secured. A situation such as that could be covered under CHAPTER 7 before the SC. But occupying forces ought to make it clear that their role was purely to restrain the regime from serious human rights violations rather than to interfere in the governance of the jurisdiction. Moroever, for obvious reasons, in such cases it would be very important that the intervening power was not from a traditional ethnic rival of the group in power.
Had a firm non-interference policy been adopted by all, there would have been no Suez crisis, no rule by the Shah or the Ayatollahs in Iran, no Ba’ath Party rule in Iraq, a whole host of Latin American dictators would not have achieved power, Pakistan would not have been in the condition it is in, and Africa would be in far better shape too. There could have been no Vietnam War and no Pol Pot and no Suharto and no invasion of East Timor.
There would still have been suffering — just not on the scale we have seen since the war.
So youd be fine with Saddam/his sons still being in charge then?
Thats the alternative.
There was no “easy way out”, either Saddam was removed by force, or Saddam stayed in power.
Sanctions against Iraq were innefective at removing him, and the steady drumroll of critcism against them was sure to see them dropped. Back to business as usual for Saddam.
Fran
Thank you. I think you prove my point. If you are prepared to support crap like “they are there to commit atrocities”, “legendary ignorance of Americans”, “turkey shoot”, “utterly depraved” “US Army snipers were targeting ambulances” to quote just a handful of the pearls from this thread, how exactly would you characterise yourself if anti-American or xenophobic don’t apply?
Wryly amused too that, as the original thread topic – a particular incident – becomes somewhat less black and white than some would like for their purposes, the subject morphs into a rerun of the entire rationale for the Iraq war. Nice try, but a bit obvious. I have hung around here off and on for long enough to recognise standard LP tactic #23 “change the subject quickly if it gets awkward, but try to make it something tenuously connected so as to be able to claim it hasn’t been changed”.
Mole asked:
No I wouldn’t, but the point is that unless I could be assured that my action would lead to something measurably better, (and plainly one can’t know that, especially when one considers precedent it sets) I have no business acting.
And this is nonsense too:
During the long and ugly rule of Saddam about 1,000,000 Iraqis fled their country. (It was easy to do).
During the short misrule of the US-led occupational forces about 5,000,000 Iraqis fled their country. Civil society collapsed.
How can any rational person argue that “less harm” was done by the US-led occupation than by the Saddam regime?
There would still have been suffering — just not on the scale we have seen since the war.
Pure wishfull thinking of the most purile variety.
All the examples you give, you consider the “worst” that could have happened? Yes it would be lovely to imagine thigs would have “worked out” just because you dont like the way they did turn out. But wishing isnt the same as being.
And any appeal to the UN as a independent arbiter is just foolish.
‘There’s something badly wrong with either the very fundamentals of the U.S. military’s Rules of Engagement, or with the way that they train their personnel to follow those Rules. Possibly both. Either way, these cover-ups make the U.S. ever less trustworthy in the eyes of people they claim to want as allies.’
Exactly so and because…
‘Both the killing of civilians and covering it up as alleged are directly counter to the interests of Iraqis and the West and plays into the hands of our enemies.’
Exactly and unmistakably the case. No different than what happened at Abu Ghraib! So calls for further reform are completely appropriate.
The rotten US military needed massive reform to fight the current wars of liberation as opposed to it’s previous wars to prevent democracy as in Vietnam etc etc over the previous sixty years of rotten to the core US policies.
That’s why Petraeus rather than Sanchez has been the way forward in the Middle East!
The US military required reform to restore it to the type of force that helped win WW2. Even during that war the US was an imperialist force sometimes committing war crimes like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and just as clearly those crimes required exposure but are not the principal aspect of the US contribution and neither is this murderous attack on civilians by a could care less trigger happy pilot, not in anyway under imminent attack etc. His efforts HARMED the war effort and may well have cost the lives not just of these innocent civilians but of other soldiers as this material is now used by the enemy as they see fit.
Just as Pilger and others will use it not to call for more reform but to attempt to refute the original proposition that this action harms the war effort! He says this is the war effort! This is what it is really about! Yet it self evidently is harmful and made use of by the enemy!
In this thread we see ‘former’ opponents of the liberation of the Iraqi peoples from Baathist and Jihadist tyranny desperately trying to be coherent after all their former positions have obviously collapsed.
No one legitimately disputes the free and fair nature of the recent elections and the non puppet nature of the political forces that resulted from them.
The surge worked. Obama kept the winning team on the job. The Iraq war is effectively over! The draw down timetable as approved under GWB is running to schedule or better.
The bourgeois democratic revolution is up and running in Iraq and genuinely mass based political forces are now contending for government power on behalf of all sections of the Iraqi peoples that elected them. A theocracy did not replace Baathism. The elections are real as are the massive (increasingly national) Iraqi armed forces now hunting those that would bomb the peoples for the sake of their ‘great’ god or whatever!
tigtog is not reporting on the big bombs that just went off in Iraq, and why would she? Those bombers are the main enemy even if more reform of the military is called for and who could doubt that call!
The reforming Petraeus is now speaking up for an end to the war for greater Israel and the US has NOW signed up to a timetable with the other members of the Quartet and their special envoy continues to be Tony Blair! Iraq is only part of the region change sought by US strategic policy. Again no report from tigtog.
These Jihadist bombers are exactly the same type of enemy as the enemy that all on this site oppose when they strike in Bali, London, New York, Madrid and Jakarta as but examples of places where heavily armed police forces are sufficient to deal with them.
The attacks in places like Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, etc are places where police forces are not sufficient and require the military.
So by all means tigtog call for the reform of the military forces because western military forces obviously require ongoing reform ultimately even revolutionary transformation as we eventually move from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy. The military in all these countries obviously require ongoing reform as this war goes on.
But don’t call for an end to the war because the enemy is still alive and well!
The question is are the US now on the side of the people in the Middle East etc where before the change in policy they were the greatest obstacle!
All predictions by the likes of Pilger re Iraq came unstuck because he thought it was the same old policies that led to the blow-back of 9/11. Now all that is left for the pseudo-left who thought it was all about oil is to hide behind phony pacifism.
The war goes on and the requirement for reform goes on and the military forces involved will do well provided they continue to liberate the people. Ultimately it is the liberated peoples that will win this war.
Wozza
You quote from the above as if the cited claims are wrong or irrelevant. Do you claim either of these?
You of course are the one attempting to derail, precisely because this reflects poorly on the Bush regime, which you admire.
I’m not anti-American or the least bit xenophobic. I am against retrograde actions by the US (or any other) government.
If so, you should be explicit, but if not, then you are trolling.
Why pretend its moral to have left Saddam in power then?
There was NO prospect of an eventual peacful transition in Iraq from a dictatorship to a less abusive system of government.
I would argue less harm based on the fact that Iraq is on the way to becoming a multi party democracy which will set limits on the abuse of its own citizens by the organs of the state. Thats huge.
Fran @78- “You quote from the above as if the cited claims are wrong or irrelevant. Do you claim either of these?
Er, yes, if I have to spell it out. That is the meaning of “crap”.
So what has that proved?
Depends on the time frame.
The Soviet Union, the ultimate “evil empire”, collapsed under its own contradictions.
Why should the Ba’athist regime be more immortal than the CPSU?
So Wozza is it all/partly wrong, or irrelevant? Be specific.
Katz
And how much bloodshed and fallout over that one then? Chechnea anyone?
I might point out theres a small part of the old USSR undergoing a bit of revolution and bloodshed now.
So you are comfortable with multiple generations of citizens being abused by a dictatorship?
Nice morals.
Mole please spare us the wingnut crap. It’s been recycled endlessly since about 2004, when they frantically had to invent an alternative reality to substitue for the real one, which was supposed to see a US puppet government happily installed in Baghdad, minimal civil resistance, and a permanent US military presence to dominate the evil Persians across the border. PLus a bit of energy security of course, which even Jimmy Carter acknowledged was always a US strategic goal.
What they got instead was a total clusterfuck, and they’ve been spewing this revisionist nonsense ever since. Apart from your own echo chamber, nobody buys it any more.
Show me where you called for the violent overthrow of the Soviet Union Mole.
Given I was in primary school that might be asking a bit much….
Ken. You want to cloack your lack of morals by being all for Saddam then go for it.
Id rather be labeled a wingnut than an lickspittle for a dictator.
You have no MORAL arguement for the leaving of Saddam in power. None.
Ok Mole, since you’ve typed ‘moral’ in capitals, you obviously expect us bend to the persuave power of capital letters rather than the force of your arguments.
Allow me to explain this to you very simply. It is totally irrational, not to mention verging on the deranged to suggest that the illegal invasion of a soveriegn country that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the destruction of most of the country’s infrastructure is anything other than a total debacle.
But we’ve been through this time and again. The only thing you’ve got to counter reality is capital letters.
That primary school didn’t teach you much Mole.
Declining to give into the temptation of calling for or actually plotting the invasion of Iraq is NOT the same thing as being pro-Saddam.
Mole – how about Burma, North Korea, Sudan, Somalia? I’m assuming that you’re calling for immediate military action to overthrow these regimes?
And as an American myself, I just love the wingnut propensity for labelling the universal dislike of US exceptionalism as ‘anti-Americanism’. You do know that a majority of us actually oppose it too? Why do wingnuts hate Americans so much?
Mole @ 86 the moral argument is so self-evident that only wilful ignorance or stupidity could pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s that Saddam could only be removed at the cost of destroying a country’s infrastructure, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the immiseration of millions more. There is an absolutist argument that causing the deaths of other people is always and in all circumstances immoral, and there is a utilitarian argument that our actions did more harm than good and were therefore immoral. Arguments to the contrary depend on self-serving arguments about what would have happened in some other reality; they are therefore completely speculative and unreliable.
If there was an instrumental moral argument favouring the removal of Saddam even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, it was the prerogative of the Iraqi people to make that decision. Not some ass sitting at a computer screen in Australia, confident that s/he can wallow in self-righteousness for which other people will pay the price.
I wish we were over at Catallaxy where the comments policy would allow me to use the kind of language required to describe armchair warriors who sit and play god in Australia while the actions they enable cause endless death and destruction on the other side of the world.
Fran, for heaven’s sake, the point I am making is that there has been a fair dose of knee-jerk anti-Americanism in this thread. I do not propose to get into a detailed dissection of every single phrase which bears on that. What I have quoted is what other commenters have said – it is up to them to defend their words if they believe that they are actually accurate. If you think that American snipers have targeted ambulances for example then show me the evidence (mind you, any old cobblers would be a better go at that than the outstanding piece of logic in the original comment @ 29)
Mole, don’t humour them. They have successfully changed the subject, and will now beat you down with sheer weight of numbers and prepared talking points lovingly dusted off from a long past time when they might have been relevant.
“..Declining to give into the temptation of calling for or actually plotting the invasion of Iraq is NOT the same thing as being pro-Saddam…”
Well isnt that nice, not acting gives you the ability to be not “pro Saddam”.
adrian
No I cant emphasise enough that leaving Saddam in power was an immoral action, it is also a fact that war will bring about a huge set of immoral actions itself.
What gets my goat is people calling doing nothing a moral position, it isnt. I have no problems with arguements that the outcomes of the overthrow have led to bad or immoral outcomes.
However there needs to be a bit of odium on the other side as well.
I refuse to accept equating what has happened (the overthrow) with the imaginary peacful transition of Iraq to a functional society.
I might leave that as my final post on this topic as no-one will change their mind on either side.
Heh Wozza @91, this was Mole back @ 58:
‘Any chance of someone here who was against the war posting an article on how to arrange the ’soft” overthrow of someone like Saddam?’
And you now have the gall to suggest it was everybody else who changed the subject?
Again, that primary education lets you down Mole.
You write as if invasion were the only form of action, all other actions being non-actions. That’s very poor clear thinking.
I refer you again to the Soviet example. You seem to regret the violence that has arisen in the region since the collapse of the CPSU. Do you think that the fall-out would have been less if NATO had invaded the Soviet Union at any time since the inception of NATO?
Your grasp on reality appears to be quite tenuous.
And further back than than that, Ken – @55, the post that Mole was responding to with his 58 – YOU had dragged in Abu Ghraib, opposition to the Iraq invasion and a whole lot of other generalities, on the explicit grounds that you were tired of talking about what the thread was actually about because certain facts had emerged making it a little inconvenient to continue discussing that (well, OK the last bit wasn’t quite explicit, but it was very highly implicit).
What was that you said about gall?
‘… as no-one will change their mind on either side …’
Actually quite a lot of people who endorsed the invasion have subsequently changed their minds. I don’t know of anyone who originally opposed it who now believes it was a moral act.
Wozza @95 the post was concerned to make a general point about mistakes and cover-ups and collateral damage. The thread was completely relevant until Mole decided to launch his shrill attack on the morals of anyone who opposed the invasion.
“Why do wingnuts hate Americans so much?”
Cigar to Alex@89
Wozza tried:
A fair does you say? So about the right amount of ‘knee jerk anti-Americanism’?
Perhaps you are amongst those who think knee-jerk anti-Americanism is fair?
I can’t speak for others, but I see these observations as a commentary on US policies not hatred of Americans. Your implication that opposing US policies is anti-American is the kind of Manichean logic we associate with the Bush regime.
If the observations are justified, and relevant you have no business complaining about them. You don’t want to analyse them? Fine. Don’t make claims you won’t support then. Clearly what you are saying is that when you described them as “crap” what you meant was that they offended you, rather than that they were wrong or irrelevant. Still, if the amount was “fair” then perhaps you aren’t entitled to be offended.
The broader point was this — should the US have escalated their war in March of 2003? Come to that, should they have pursued the invasion in 1991 when Saddam retreated from Kuwait? Should they have equipped Saddam with chemical weapons during the 1980s and AWAC support? Should they have supplied the regime with helicopters that could be fitted out as gunships? Should they have backed their coup in 1968 and 1963 (and given him lists of dissidents to kill) or prompted Saddam to try an uprising in 1958 and spirited him out of the country? Clearly, the answer is no on all counts. They should not have. Did they therefore have standing to complain with force of arms about what he did to his own people? No.
Mole @68, chucking Saddam out and thrusting democracy on the Iraqis was about 10th on the list of reasons for jackbooting into Iraq. The first was the stash of cardboard replicas of WMDs.
Unfortunately for the ToE, one of their members has finally confessed and confirmed what we all knew, that they knew there were none before the invasion of Iraq.
So all the misery and devastation in Iraq is down to the lies, arrogance, greed and arrant incompetence of the ToE of Bush, Blair and Howard.
As far as I’m concerned they are war criminals and should be in the Hague awaiting trial and a very long sentence, or my preferred punishment of dropping them into the main square in Baghdad to receive the thanks of the Iraqi people.
Interestingly enough, the Rodent didn’t think Saddam’s job as the Devil incarnate was reason enough to give asylum to fleeing Iraqis. His opinion seemed to be that good old Saddam was a benign ruler and the refugees were lying ingrates.
Sigh.
Fran, I should know better than this. Any argument with you always descends eventually to the semantics of your choice, and by sheer dogged persistence you will have the last word. However, against my better judgment….
If the word “crap” is too complicated for you, then substitute “wrong” or “having no validating evidence”. And if they are wrong, they are by definition irrelevant. I asked before, and you avoided, whether you believe American snipers target ambulances?. If you do, it is up to you or others who claim this to produce the evidence. It is not up to me to prove a negative – which, if you will recall arguments that you yourself have used in the context of eg climate change, is an impossibility anyway. The ignorance of Americans is legendary? How do you propose to prove that?
If these were just the odd instance from one or two individuals, you might have a point. But negative generalizations about the US military and Americans generally pervade the thread. If you don’t want to use the words “anti-American” or “xenophobic” to characterize that, then find another one if you like. We both know what I mean regardless of the semantics.
As for your last paragraph, I think I have made it clear that I am not interested in a diversion into reruns of ancient history. The post was about the facts pertaining to a particular and much more recent incident, and that – and the implications of some of the comments about it in illuminating the prejudices, if hardly unexpected ones, of their originators – is all I have been commenting on.
Wozza
they are there to commit atrocities (Chav@1)
Angular, but arguable. It is unlikely that commission of atrocities is their central purpose, but the US military surely knows that such atrocities are inevitable in practice and thinks this is a price worth paying. In a broader sense, the carnage in Iraq is a message about what the US will do, if it sees fit, and what it can get away with. Others can take note.
legendary ignorance of Americans (Chookie)
Well it is legendary. We all laughed when that woman in 2008 at the McCain rally spoke of Obama as an Ay-rab and all McCain could sputter was that he was a decent guy. If that, and the sayings of George Bush, the teabaggers etc are not the stuff of legend, I don’t know what would be. Is that a claim that all Americans are ignorant? Hardly. James Hanson, Al Gore, Barack Obama are not regarded as ignorant, at least, not by us.
The manner of the engagement was a turkey shoot as the video makes clear and when Ken spoke of conservatives as “utterly depraved” he was speaking of a subset of not only Americans but people more generally.
So really, you don’t have a case for calling xenophobia …
hey wozza, why don’t you read this and then shut up?
You have no MORAL arguement for the leaving of Saddam in power. None.
Far from being non-existent, the various argument options ought to be entirely straightforward to any rational person. I can think of at least two alternatives that ought to be addressed by those like Mole who seek to paint the invasion as the only moral course of action:
1. That leaving Saddam in power, as bad as it would have been, would have resulted in less death and destruction than his removal through invasion has caused.
2. That Saddam could have been removed through more effective and less destructive strategies, e.g. more effective diplomatic pressure and/or support for internal resistance groups.
While it can’t be conclusively stated that either of the above arguments are necessarily correct they are, at the very least, rational and moral. They exist – despite Mole’s persuasive use of capital letters – and require refutation before the current Iraq debacle can be proclaimed as the only moral course of action.
add to that, Mondo Rock, the soft power option of dropping sanctions and watching Saddam’s power unravel as his population became wealthy on oil and decadent on imported western goods. Instead of a million dead and 5 million displaced, we’d have a reduction in deaths due to the removal of the sanctions, and a long-term improvement in political freedoms.
Mole @ 86,
“You want to cloack your lack of morals by being all for Saddam then go for it.
Id rather be labeled a wingnut than an lickspittle for a dictator.
You have no MORAL arguement for the leaving of Saddam in power. None.”
OK then so what is your MORAL argument for leaving Mugabe in power?
wozza @100
In the context of video evidence of just such a policy, that’s an astounding question to ask, but since you ask it…
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/384
Nothing has changed about US military standard operating procedures since My Lai. It goes like this…
1. There was a successful military action against armed enemy.
Evidence to the contrary mounts.
2. As per 1, but it appears there may have been some collateral damage.
More evidence hits the media.
3. An investigation confirms version 2.
More evidence, preferably photographic and leaked by a whistleblower.
4. A further investigation reveals that some low-level troops have acted on their own to commit crimes. They are eventually leniently punished.
5. Nothing changes about rules of engagement.
6. In the absence of the rare compelling photographic evidence or eyewitness testimony from an English speaking and non-smearable individual, 1. universally applies.
I’ve now had the misfortune of watching that video and I really really can’t see how anyone could claim the pilots thought that group of men were valid targets. The hint is in the way they circle for ages waiting for an opportunity to strike, and in the way they obviously don’t feel even vaguely at risk during this extended period of chucking laps. Also, the way the men on the ground clearly don’t think they’re going to be targets. Compare with the way the US soldiers behave at the end, moving fast and being edgy even though they’ve got helicopter support.
If there was a weapon at the scene, it was most likely the case that in a group of 12 iraqi men, one of them will have a weapon; or the dead person in question was a bodyguard for the cameraman.
That video is a really horrible thing to watch, and the fact that the defenders of the invasion on this and other blogs are not horrified and disgusted is a real marker of where their judgement lies. It’s disgusting.
I have commented in detail at 78 (but was held up in the spaminator) but IMV at this time in particular this is a debate well worth having so please take a look. I just don’t think the issues are simple at all.
Unlike WW2 and the attack on Dec 7th 1941 that collapsed a widely held view overnight we only have the slow development of events to change peoples thinking on this war. Nevertheless these developments are relentless and a revolutionary transformation of the region is well underway.
A large scale reformation of the US military is required (as this slaughter amply demonstrates) and there are important lessons to draw from this for how Australian and US troops fight in the broader war for the liberation of the entire Middle East and we ought to be openly discussing these issues not hiding behind any form of pacifism.
wozza, further to sg link at # 103 in the massacre at Fallujah here is another article on the continuing affect of depleted uranium used in munitions in Iraq, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18278
Let’s assume that the “we had to overthrow Saddam” crowd were justified (which they aren’t – Please look up “American Enterprise Institute”, you people.) But you know, just for an exercise.
That justifies this glorified thrill-kill… how?
@78
Incorrect.
Clearly you have either not read the Constitution of Iraq or you don’t understand it. It is a theocratic document.
Here is the theocratic core of the constitution (my emphasis):
These powers, guaranteed to Islamic theocrats, disqualify this constitution as a secularist document. Imagine if only Christian scholars were entitled to sit on the High Court of Australia!
Allawi is the leader of the only multi-faith (with a small number of secularists) movement. His shaky coalition is vastly outnumbered by explicitly sectarian parties that are proudly theocratic. It is highly unlikely that Allawi will become PM.
A coalition adhering to Shiite Muslim theocratic principles will be in command of a government operating within the framework of a theocratic constitution.
George Bush set out on a crusade and achieved a jihad.
sg @103, you seem to have rather low standards for what constitutes proof. Rather my point throughout, really.
“Just shut up” is fine piece of analysis and convincing logic too.
Score another one for the well-honed debating and understanding of evidence skills of certain commenters on this blog.
So what standards of proof do you require, wozza? Corroborated eyewitness testimony is clearly below the standard you require, and yet despite a history of lies and spin including such inglorious episodes as Bay of Pigs, My Lai, Tiger Force, Panama, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and numerous incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan all following the denial/spin/reporting/resolution/move on strategy I outlined at #108, you credit the US military as a reliable source on the misbehaviour of its members.
In the current instance, it is abundantly clear from the video that both the helicopter crews and their commanders acted on the understanding that a rescue vehicle and unarmed rescuers were fair game for targeting. Now, what does that tell you? Policy, or mass delusion? Rules of engagement, or bad apples?
Richard Ackland has a piece on wikileaks in today SMH http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/leaks-pour-forth-from-the-wiki-well-of-information-20100408-ruxn.html
Hal9000 – “both the helicopter crews and their commanders acted on the understanding that a rescue vehicle and unarmed rescuers were fair game for targeting. Now, what does that tell you?”
Actually Hal, the only thing it tells me is that you haven’t read either the link that Mole attached at 54. or the one that I attached at 59. Or would prefer to ignore them.
So wozza, eyewitness accounts don’t count to you? The only “objective” evidence you would accept of snipers firing on ambulances is an admission from the snipers.
You still believe Saddam Hussein had a people shredder, don’t you?
sg this is pointless. You may regard one article, from the notoriously ideological viewpoint-prone Guardian, as incontovertible proof of a sweeping generalisation, but I don’t.
And if that’s the standard of proof you require, I think I can sell you a bridge.
so what, wozza, you’re saying that if a reporter for the guardian who was in Falluja at the time of the US assault claims to have seen something, it didn’t happen unless it agrees with your ideology? This is how you interpret the world, if it doesn’t agree with you it must be a lie made up by an ideological enemy?
Oh, and that bridge you want to sell me? Is it the same used, bullet-marked, blood-stained bridge you spent so much on in 2003? Because I think the original buyer was a gullible fool.
No use arguing with wozza. For him ideology is a prism through which he can distort reality to whichever malleable form fits that ideology.
Consequently there will never be enough proof, always some excuse for the inexcusable, some bizarre justification for the unjustifiable.
My link earlier was a report from another independent journalist, who reports much the same thing, wozza. I also note that the Guardian was in favour of the war and remained pro-Blair to the end. This apparently constitutes bias sufficient to reject anything the paper reports. Whew!
But back to our earlier exchange. Your link actually supports my concerns, wozza. The money quote from Finkel is
So it’s a debate, then. On the one hand, we have a massacre, on the other hand the military says it’s ok. Oh, well, that’s all right then.
The best he could come up with when challenged that he’s attempting to excuse the atrocity we see is
The larger context is to imply that, erm, the soldiers can be excused. For example, Finkel states that the helicopter crews probably didn’t know there were children in the van. So what? They did know the rescuers were unarmed, and had no reason to believe otherwise. The clear implication of introducing this line of argument, which was not prompted by any question posed to him, is that the crews would have been culpable had they known there were children present. From which we are invited to draw the inference that, because the crews may not have known, they weren’t culpable.
Last, Finkel makes it clear that he has seen more footage than has been released, and that this provides the ‘larger context’ that maybe excuses the crew, not that this is in any way to excuse them, apparently. Aside from the fallacious appeal to (conveniently secret) authority, Finkel’s remarks invite the reader to believe that the US military would not immediately release exculpatory footage.
As an aside, the ‘larger context’ for the much-publicised gruesome pix of the Saigon police chief during the Tet Offensive blowing the brains out of a Vietcong captive was that the captive was a member of a squad that had slaughtered members of the police chief’s family. At law, being provoked has only ever been a mitigating factor, against which shooting a restrained captive is an aggravating factor. Fortunately, we know how the public saw the incident – one of the enduring images that saw support for the war collapse.
Finkel gives the game away about the lax rules regulating the helicopter crews’ licence to kill with his subsequent comment that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome if the crews had known they were firing upon journalists.
Meanwhile, you have elided my questions about standard of proof and the reliability of the US military as a source of information about its misdeeds. Since the release of the Pentagon Papers, which documented the policy of deceit for all to see, have you any evidence to suggest the US military is now truthful?
sg, Hal, etc. Sorry guys, I’m retiring. If there is something about the conceptual difference between individual reports about individual incidents (debatable ones at that) and sweeping generalisations that you don’t get, then I can’t help you any further.
Particularly if I am now supposed to agree that the Pentagon papers prove something about Iraq 40 years later. The argument really has moved to another planet.
Wozza @59
Wozza @123
At least Wozza appears to have acknowledged the crassness of his/her comment @59. I hope [s]he applies the test [s]he articulated @123 before [s]he is tempted to commit the same error again.
Time will tell, I guess.
Katz you ought to know by now that The Left is a group-thinking monolith about whom generalisations can legitimately be made without bothering to read what one member actually writes – indeed before anyone actually writes anything at all – whereas supporters of endless war are independent critical thinkers who never say anything without carefully weighing all available evidence. As long of course as the evidence is not tainted from being published in the Liberal Media.
Katz, so there’s no difference between generalising about the tone of a blog thread – and a blog thread from LP at that, not normally and certainly not this time a place notable for many departures from group-think – and generalising to smear an entire country by extrapolating from a Guardian report and a 40 year old document about something entirely different?
I’ll bear that in mind next time.
I see, wozza. Journalist confronts US military spokesman with pix of shot up ambulances in Falujah – sweeping generalisation about dubious incidents. US military spokesman responds that the enemy are using ambulances to transport fighters, but can offer (despite constant video recording) no evidence of thie – accurate exculpatory statement from a reliable source. Black is white. Saddam’s WMD stockpile is still out there.
BTW, I’m impressed at the sober maturity of your ‘nyah, nyah, can’t hear you!’ (as it turns out) penultimate contribution. Have you considered a career in climate change denialism?
There you go again Wozza. None of what you said above is based on reality except the fact that LP is a blog.
Wozza, please point to examples of “Deranged anti-Americanism running riot.”
I don’t really know what this bloody group think is. I read more rightwing crap on LP than anywhere else, except when I pick up the Australian. Mind you, I also read a lot of left wing opinion here I find myself nodding yes to.
There was that Easter Saturday Salon stoush, where I was apparently one of the bad boys –
– (Shaken, I was, well and truly.) but such occasions are rare for me.
@ 129 “ Wozza, please point to examples of “Deranged anti-Americanism running riot.”
Katz have you actually been following this thread? I went through that ad nauseum with Fran yesterday, and, let me tell you, that was a bloody wearing experience which I’m buggered if I’m going to repeat again for your benefit.
Look, I do find this very enjoyable – no, really – in the sense of intellectual exercise and being, I hope, irritating, but there comes a point when mere repetition sets in and it is time to stop. I am retiring from this fray, properly this time.
Oh, and re the leaked video. I’m sure if I trawled through the ancient and medeieval history texts, or the copious accounts of 17/18/19/20C wars I have on my bookshelves (excluding WW2, Ruanda, Pol Pot and 1990s Bosnia/Serbia/Croatia,and Darfur, just to be fair to the Americans), I’d find heaps of similar incidents. War is war. Unlike life it is brutish and long.
Wozza,
The difference is the evidence both indicates individual instances, as well as the systematic support and cover up of such actions. If the US had publicly acknowledged the screw up and taken actions to minimize the chances of it happening again then there wouldn’t be such a huge out-cry. Instead they chose to lie and cover up the reality of the event, indicating an intent to carry on supporting slaughtering of innocent civilians.
Put simply, the Iraq “war” ended very quickly. What we have had since then has been a police action in densely population civilian areas undertaken by the military. It is the responsibility of those enacting the police action to put the lives of the civilians above their own. Deflecting the bloody cost of political goals from your own military onto innocent civilians is downright evil.
so wozza, the Guardian reports in 2006 that the US were shooting up ambulances. Then in 2010 you appear on a thread about video footage of a US helicopter shooting up an ambulance to complain that we’re anti-American for decrying the American practice of shooting up ambulances.
I suppose you think that these 2 incidents, 2 years apart, the latter of which was covered up for 2 years and only revealed after a leak, are somehow completely isolated? Even though the guy embedded with the troops at the time claims that the latter incident fitted inside the US rules of engagement?
This is the same delusional thinking that led you to believe Saddam Hussein had a people shredder, isn’t it?
Wozza maaaate you still don’t get it, but I can understand that a couple of blog exchanges with Fran constitute ‘ad nauseum’ and would be ‘bloody wearing’ for you, given your tenuous grip on reality.
But as teachers used to say (maybe still do): I’m not calling you moronic Jimmy, I’m calling your behaviour moronic. Usually the average 12 year old gets this distinction without further explanation.
In this case certain posters have used certain adjectives to describe American actions in a particular situation. This does not constitute (except in your hyperbolic imagination) ‘anti-Americanism running riot’ and is certainly not ‘deranged’, any more than the teacher is calling Johnny a moron.
Oh,f#@& it, I really did mean to retire but I can’t let sg repeat his fantasy about a people shredder without calling crap.
Would you like to point out,sg, where I have said anything about a people shredder?
I mean if you think rational argument is just about making shit up as you go along, feel free, but don’t expect to be taken seriously.
See Wozza, sg didn’t say that you had mentioned a people shredder, he is just asking you if you believed in it at the time when we were told this particular lie to add to all the others. A question that you have failed to answer of course.
“In Minnesota, Mistah Speaker, Saddam’s even got human shredding machine testers!”
MAV: 15+
I’m taking the piss, wozza, because anyone who believes this war was justified has to be just about gullible enough to believe Saddam had a people-shredder – which is what your deputy sheriff hero believed.
If you can believe the kind of transparent lies being spun about Iraq at the time, and if you can still believe it was a good idea 1 million dead Iraqis later, and if you refuse to believe the quite reasonable evidence to the contrary, then of course you’ll think that this charming video is an example of the superb restraint and professionalism of our fighting forces, instead of noticing that it’s an atrocity. You’ll also, of course, willingly believe that any criticism of the US’s rules of engagement is anti-Americanism.
You are, in short, deluded from woe to go about the war. So why not throw a people shredder into the mix? It’s no less believable than any of the other tosh you’re spouting.
The intertubes used to be full of Wozzas.
Where have all the Wozzas gone?
Darwinian processes, I guess.
Where have all the Wozzas gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the Wozzas gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the Wozzas gone?
Had brain explosions every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
Gloating is unedifying, don’t you think?
Yes indeed, but quite enjoyable.
Mate if you’re going to gloat, take a leaf out of patrickm’s book and the lastsuperpower crew—that’s how it’s done.
(And might I say in all sincerity how good it is to see you still consistent with the bourgeois democratic revolution line; I salute you).
Can I gloat too?
After all, when the opposition is reduced to this sort of level of argument, at least a small smirk and a query to oneself about which heads have actually exploded are permitted surely?
Nah, my job around here is to irritate the shit out of people with diametric opposition to whatever the general view is – which I seem to have done rather successfully – so if youse are gloating I must anti-gloat.
Gloat away, Wozza. You’ve excused probable war crimes, you’ve ignored or rejected evidence, and you’ve demonstrated the kind of cavalier disregard for both facts and the lives of others that qualifies you to get a lucrative job spruiking the health benefits of tobacco smoking. Congratulations.
I see Hal’s head is one of those that’s exploded Aders. Is that your doing?
I await with bated breath Wozza’s use of the “I know you are, but what am I” defense which will win him the intertubes for sure.
I don’t think that it was Hal9000 who claimed that he would depart this thread twice, the last time, ‘properly’, and yet keeps on returning like some slightly deranged Jack In The Box.
Got me there Aders. Has to be first time for everything I suppose.
My excuse is that my recent self-reinstatement is only for purposes of gloating, not for purposes of pursuing the actual argument, given that that was clearly a points victory to the good guys, sorry guy, so in that sense I did indeed depart nearly on schedule..
Curiously, the most apt historical parallel for Wozza’s gloating I can think of was good old Saddam’s victory celebrations in 1991. A truly detached observer is our Wozza.
Closer to home, however, Dame Nellie Melba’s iterated farewells echo Wozza’s reluctance to leave the stage.
Having done some further investigation this appears to be a clean shoot. The journalists were with insurgents. The pilots were engaging targets that behaved like and matched reports of insurgents.
The fact that some of the dialogue upsets the sensibilities of the more sensitive is neithe rhere nor there.
Razor your moral blindness is staggering. “The rules said it was OK, therefore it was OK.”
Anyone who objects is just over-sensitive.
What a first-class little soldier you must have been.
No Ken, what he said is that the targets were insurgents. What he says is that they were therefore under the rules of engagement and the laws of war legimitate targets and could be lawfully killed.
The helicopter pilots therefore killed them, which in an army is their job.
What he is saying is that if there are some “civilians” who have attached themselves to the insurgents they have to take their chances.
Even if they are journalsts looking for a story.
What part of that do you not understand?
GregM you and Razor really cannot understand why people are outraged by this. It’s like listening to a police officer defend a car chase in which a few kids died on the grounds that he was following the approved procedure. The “Dad said it was OK” excuse as I noted way back @ 27.It’s amazing, but obviously no point wasting any more time trying to explain that our outrage is directed at the politicians and generals who say it’s OK, not at the soldiers. Although their apparent pleasure at killing helpless people in the street is sickening.
Out of interest, since you rely on the laws of war, can you explain who the US was at war with in Iraq in 2007?
It’s easy to understand GregM@154.
By your definition anyone who is taken aim at, by the yanks, immediately becomes an “insurgent” and can accordingly be lawfully killed.
And let’s not forget how ridiculous it has mostly been for the US to be referring to Iraqis as ‘insurgents’.
Ken,
War is an ugly business. In Iraq the insurgents don’t wear uniforms. If you move out of cover carring AK47s and RPGs dressed in civilian clothes in the vicinity of an engagement then you can expect to get brassed up. If you are a journalist and decide to hang out with insurgents then you are rolling the dice. Not that the insurgents run a very active multi-media campaign so any civilians filming with insurgents are likely to be engaged as insurgents. The injuries to the children were unfortunate. It is amoral of the insurgents to take children into combat with them, but not suprising given their reord of murdering innocents. No doubt they are now revlling in the wailingand gnashing of teeth of the useful idiots today. The pilots were not to know the children were in the vehicles.
Rules are put in place to provide boundaries – in this case the engagements were clearly within the Law of War, the Rules of Engagement and the Orders for opening Fire. Armed men in civilian dress were moving towards a ground engagement and the unmarked vehicle was roviding logistical support. The Journalists took huge risks being with the insurgents (there is no proof they were anything but insurgents). They rolled the dice for a Pullitzer and lost.
We will have to disagree on Police Pursuits, too. If you attemt to evade Police then you should be pursued. I think that anyone who breaks the road rules trying to evade Police in a vehicle should be given an equivalent sentence to attempted murder. Also, I don’t think there should be concurrent sentencing and once you have been in jail you should be on a double or nothing sentencing regime.
Yes we will have to agree to disagree Razor but you’ve evaded my question @ 155: who was the USA at war with in Iraq in 2007?
For the last half-century, the US military have blasted into a pink mist countless folk all over the world. Naturally, these killings have been “within the rules of engagement”.
And naturally, the family, friends, neighbours and communities to whom that pink mist once belonged have come to their own conclusions about the “rules of engagement” of the US military.
Meanwhile, Australians are fortunate enough to live in a country where those “rules of engagement” have never applied. Inevitably, this luxury enables philosophical debate on the themes of “morality” and “the mist of war”. Fascinating, of course.
But Australian opinions don’t carry much weight. The opinions that do count are those of the family, friends, neighbours and communities to whom that pink mist once belonged. They learn hatred and contempt of the Americans. And they learn how to bide their time.
On the other hand, the Americans never learn. They continue to brutalise their victims within their own “rules of engagement”.
And they keep winning engagements but losing wars.
Hats off to YouTube and to Wikileaks for accelerating that education of the oppressed.
This should probably be answered in a separate thread but anyway …
Razor said:
The answer to this is:
a) not necessarily
AND
b) not necessarily in a car
One has to consider prospective collateral damage and also the broader desire not to harm the offenders, if that is possible. Killing or maiming someone, or someone’s friend because they have been reckless or in the wrong place at the wrong time is not rational policy. The aim of lawful authority should be to minimise harm rather than impose it as sanction for socially miscreant or criminal conduct.
Sometimes harm is an inevitable consequence of attempting harm minimisation, but that doesn’t subvert the above point.
“Hats off to YouTube and to Wikileaks for accelerating that education of the oppressed.”
It’s unfortunate that the footage is now behind a YouTube (not here, as tigtog already had entry rights) wall that requires viewers to be over eighteen.
Most strange when you consider those around that age are the most vulnerable to army recruitment.
No war crime, no “cowboy” behaviour by US forces. Just plain old blasting of the enemy & some who mixed with the enemy.
Oh, but a fair bit of wailing on web forums by those who’ve never had the balls to conceptualise themselves defending their country, thus don’t have any moral barriers to prevent them from sympathising with the enemy. They walk among us, unimprisoned, unexecuted, undeported.
Fascinating juridical point SATP.
Please provide references to the Australian statutes and/or the case law that would support the imprisonment, execution and deportation that you appear to recommend.
those who’ve never had the balls to conceptualise themselves defending their country,
Hell yeah! It takes so much courage to cruise around in a helicopter taking potshots at photographers, children and people trying to take injured people to hospital!
SATP @ 162,
You’d be surprised how few people are unimaginative dolts. It just because people can empathise with civilians being killed, etc, when they watch this horrifying video, ie is conceptualise … oh, hell, I don’t see the point. You’d never get it.
btw, I spend my entire life as a military historian conceptualising the feelings of soldiers and civilians in battle on both sides. It has nothing, repeat, nothing to do with sympathising with the enemy. And everything to do with trying to gewt as wide a picture as possible.
And I’d be very very worried about the Australian Army if it didn’t have people in intelligence who spent a lot of their time sympathising with the enemy. How else are they going to be able to work out what they will do when our boys are fighting them.
The idea that a bunch of yanks flying around in a helicopter in one of the most dysfunctional countries on earth, shooting up the local citizenry, are ‘defending their country’, demonstrates how far into a fantasy world the warmongers have drifted in their defence of the indefensible.
I note SATP is the third (out of three) warmonger who has neatly sidestepped the question of what war the yanks were supposed to be fighting in Iraq in 2007.
I think satp at 163 wins the internet. You are a nasty piece of work, satp.
This may be a bit OT, but the financial cost to the taxpayer of maintaining these ruinously expensive wars gives rise to some interesting contradictions in the right wing political positions of the war boosters. They’re against taxes, at least the ones they have to pay. And yet there is no way of funding wars other than through taxation, at least since the Golden Horde’s heyday of pillage-based war funding. So, in order to pay for wars and simultaneously lower taxes, all non-military public expenditure has to be questioned. Better by far to kill people in some far-off country with whom we have no quarrel than to provide better education or health care for the lower classes at home. As can be seen in the US, the social and economic consequences of de-funding and neglect are decline, poverty, social tension and waste of lives and resources. Throughout history, the expense of foreign wars has eventually led to political instability at home, and the defeat of the warmongering factions. This was the lesson of Vietnam, although the US military’s conclusion seems to have been to make sure the public doesn’t learn what is going on.
On the contray Sg, I am dead right.
Being called a “nasty piece of work” by an inferior is hardly going to worry anyone!
Ken Lovell, I have sidestepped nothing. It matters not to the troops. They were there to keep the peace in Iraq.
Helen, your jejune statements trivilise only yourself, not the actions of the troops involved. Flying in a helicopter is quite terrifying when below there are RPGs & other weapons that can bring you down. Plenty of tougher people than you have been reduced to babbling basket cases at flying in such conditions. It is no walk in the park.
Paul Burns, hehe, I have no doubt that plenty of the population are unimaginative dolts. The ratio would be much lower among the users of this site. (Though many of those would be lacking ability to pragmatically transform imagination into physical achievement)
You’d be amazed how many people don’t understand the solving of a TV “whodunnit” unless the show includes a re-enactment.
Another issue here is that events such as the one depicted in the video are made much more likely by the shift to robot drones as the preferred method of aerial warfare by the US military. If a helicopter crew hovering half a kilometre away can’t tell the difference between a camera and an rpg, a controller sitting in front of a screen half a world away most certainly can’t. But of course, we are less likely to see the evidence of lethal errors, so it won’t matter…
Hal9000 @ 69 wingnuts like Mark Steyn have openly opposed universal health care for that exact reason: that it will require tax revenue to be reallocated from the military to domestic spending and the USA’s global dominance will therefore be in jeopardy.
Lest ordinary Americans might be tempted to wonder why global hegemony is so important to their interests, the wingnuts have to sustain this endless hysteria about long wars and jihadists and how the rest of the world either hates America or has fallen into spineless degeneracy. As plenty of others have pointed out, wingnuts and terrorists are united in their goal of keeping the American people in a state of permanent fear.
I’m curious as to the basis of Razor’s uncontested claim – accepted without hesitation by SATP – that
Could this ‘investigation’ consist of ascertaining the US military’s version of events perhaps? The video shows a group of unarmed individuals, aware of but unconcerned by the presence of helicopters, being mown down. If they were insurgents, they weren’t behaving like it, which is not surprising really, because it appears they weren’t. As Mandy Rice-Davies noted about another public lie, ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’
Ken – if you do not understand who the enemy in Iraq are yet then I doubt I can educate you on the facts.
Razor – the enemy in 2003-5 were the same people that have been in government and our allies ever since: friends of Iran, who are apparently our enemy. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, our chosen government bites the hand that feeds and wants to treat with the Taliban enemy. Soldiers and civilians continue to die. Be so kind as to educate us on the ‘facts’.
No no Razor, that kind of slipperiness really won’t do. No education is required, no complex explication of facts. I asked who the USA was at war with in Iraq in 2007. Surely that shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer?
Because you see your whole justification for this act of murder is that the people who committed it are soldiers in a war. According to you, special rules apply in wars that mean their conduct was acceptable. But most of us were under the impression that the war finished in 2003. I distinctly remember the commander-in-chief of the US forces announcing the fact proudly to the world on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
And if it’s true that there was no war in 2007, your whole argument falls to the ground, and your clumsy attempt to avoid answering demonstrates pretty conclusively that is where it belongs.
Ken, I think you’ll find that the answer would be the Global War on Terror (TM)
Apparently some people never twigged that it was a propaganda line
Ken Lovell clearly has a problem. It runs deeper than any correction on this site can go toward fixing his issues.
If the war was over (as apparently declared on the deck of an aircraft carrier) why were attacks being carried out against allied forces?
When allied forces come under attack, retaliation is NOT illegal, it is an obligation.
Journalists mingling with combatants take their chances.
Journalists in proximity to enemy combatants (as in this case) are subject to copping what is meant for the combatants.
It is the same reason one must take care when standing near Salman Rushdie.
Unfortunately TonyD it’s been a lot more than a propaganda lie; it’s used as legalistic smoke and mirrors to justify all kinds of conduct that would otherwise be blatantly criminal, such as wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, and most recently, authorisation of the assassination of an American citizen by Obama on the grounds that he’s an enemy combatant (without, needless to say, even the pretence of natural justice).
The U.S. seems to be locked into an endless war mindset. It goes hand in hand with its ambition to control the world.
I guess it finds that war is profitable and it allows the building of more military bases across the world.
How will the world stop this violent nation before we all become its peasants?
By 2007, the date of the video in question, sovereign power had been handed back to the government of Iraq.
Theoretically, military actions of foreign military forces in Iraq were under the command of the government of Iraq. Indeed, theoretically, foreign soldiers could be tried and convicted by Iraqi courts.
The year 2007 was the high tide of the ethnic cleansing by the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq and its associated militias and murder squads of the Sunni minority, especially in Baghdad, the location of the video in question.
Theoretically, the government of Iraq could prosecute the participants in the video for war crimes.
But that would be counterproductive. After all, US forces were acting in the interests of the Shiite theocratic government of Iraq at the time. In all likelihood, the Iraqi victims in the video in question were Sunni and therefore enemies of the Shiite theocracy.
Why would the Shiite theocracy prosecute their own US murder squad and ethnic cleansers?
The US soldiers enjoyed their work and the Shiite theocracy got what they wanted.
It’s a win/win situation.
Ken: Yup and it just keeps on coming from the Obama admin too; Hillary said the GWoT was over* last year. Or something. Somehow I doubt this latest incident will change the ‘calculus of risk’ behind Australia’s policy of appeasing the US regardless of their actions. Or the US’s apparent preference for war as a tool of 1st resort in international relations.
* FOX News link warning
Because someone disbanded the Iraqi Police and Armed Forces instead of co-opting them. Because once Saddam was gone AQ moved in, ironically killing Ba’athists enabled AQ-I’s growth (they hate each other and have opposed ideological goals). Because someone forgot to plan for what happened after Saddam was gone. Or was that the point all along?
IMO if you think there’s a war on in Iraq then you’re an appologist for a brutal military occupation. Remind me why we went to Iraq again? Personally I advocated following the sanction and containment route instead – UNSCR:1409 wasn’t perfect, far from it, but attempting it or something like it was an viable alternative to military action. We disagree on that I suspect.
(still using friends’ computer)\
\
Tigtog:
Thanks for raising this issue.
Basic rule in soldiering: Identify target THEN squeeze the trigger (not the other way around).
I agree in part with Ken Lovell [post 6] about the Americasn obsession with g.d. firepower. Seems they have forgotten their American Revolution heritage …. one very well-aimed shot from an American long-arm was worth more than a volley from the English or the Hessians troops.
I’m holding my own judgement for the moment on this particular incident though. I remember well lurid false propaganda where we were supposed to have burnt a village to the ground – yet in reality, the only thing that went up in smoke were our cigarettes!! Don’t be taken for suckers; instead, take a good hard forensic look at everything presented on this incident and how and why it is presented.
IF the propaganda turns out to be true then it is not only incompetent troops who must be punished but the people who trained them too.
SATP
Actually, no. Retaliation is not an obligation. Occupying forces may defend themselves, but are restrained by the laws of war from retaliating in other than circumscribed ways. The case in point illustrates this point wonderfully: occupying forces are not free to engage in indiscriminate retaliatory adventures resulting in the deaths of non-combatants. Do do so is not an obligation, it’s a crime.
The fact that the ‘other side’ may not abide by the rules does not excuse criminal activity. This was a point that was clear enough to allies capturing Japanese soldiers in the 1940s, but seems to escape SATP.
Ken Lovell, your question @155 has gone unanswered on this thread, because it was already answered long ago on the Western Front during the Great War, where troops sang to the tune of Auld Lang Syne:
“We’re here because, we’re here because,
We’re here, because we’re here!
We’re here because, we’re here because,
We’re here, because we’re here!
We’re here because, we’re here because,
We’re here, because we’re here!
We’re here because, we’re here because,
We’re here, because we’re here!”