James Fallows’ examines the Wikileaks footage and makes an important point:
We could not know that this episode would occur. But we could be sure that something like it would. It’s not even a matter of “To will the end is to will the means.” Rather the point is: You enter these circumstances, sooner or later you get these results.
A failure of tragic imagination is what I most criticized in war supporters in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and it was much of the reason I opposed the war. We can’t do anything about that decision now. But this new footage is worth bearing in mind as we face the next decision — about bombing Iran, let’s say; or extending the anti-Taliban fight into Pakistan; or how long to remain in Afghanistan.
The one thing I never understood about Iraq War supporters was how anyone who’s read an honest account of modern war could generate any enthusiasm for the project. Yet there was an air of almost giddy anticipation among a fair number of the pro-war punditry around the time of the invasion.
Lisa K.
A “fair” number? Try almost all of them. Not to mention 2/3 of the American population.
gex
They only know war from the movies. It’s all heroism and glory and good versus evil. They don’t want to be bothered with the details.
Kryptik
That’s because their only concept of war is via Hollywood and TV fiction. Why do you think so many goddamn punks like Scalia et. al. cite Jack Bauer as a hero and their inspiration for how to handle detainees and war prisoners?
They have no concept of reality, because it’s inconvenient.
Dollared
How can you watch the video and not understand the enthusiasm? Our guys use fabulous surveillance equipment and incredible machinery, take almost no risk, and wipe out an imagined enemy.
No cost – just send the bill to the deficit pile – and no risk – “nobody I know is in Iraq.”
Then just edit the video down to the guns, the firing, the cloud of dust, and an empty, “safe” street afterward. Send it to Wolf Blitzer, and then ask for a raise from your boss at Booz Allen. Don’t forget, kid’s soccer game over at Silver Spring tonight.
It’s a good life.
Comrade Jake
What’s interesting to me about this whole thing is the push from folks like Fallows and Greenwald to suggest that this is simply what we should expect to happen. The argument is something like “You send young kids into war, load them up with modern artillery, and you should expect that eventually they’ll do this sort of thing. We should be blaming the people who got us into this in the first place, and not the kids in the Apache.”
I appreciate what they’re trying to do, but I can’t help but feel that the kids in the Apache have a heckofa lot of explaining to do. Am I alone here?
Fergus Wooster
A “fair” number of them are sociopaths. I remember not long after the invasion when a similar video popped up – an Apache chain-gunning a van of “insurgents”, then vaporizing wounded men crawling away.
People I had considered my friends sent the link around and watched it over and over while cheering “Hoo-ah”.
Now that there’s been a mood change among the rabble, they can’t cheer as loudly or their sociopathy is exposed.
brantl
The pro-war punditry don’t know fuck-all about how war is actually fought. I bet most of the bastards have run from every schoolyard fight that they could have wound up involved in, too.
They’ve never paid any immediate price for being blood-thirsty idiots, ever. Just tax money. And it’s the only thing that they willingly pay for.
mr. whipple
And they infected the populace with this. I’ll never forget going to the bank, and the sweet middle-aged teller asking me with excitement if I was going to “watch the war tonight.”
jeffreyw
This is just a little thing, nothing like the real tragedies that unfold every day. It still hits me harder than some video or news report of collateral damage. Maybe it’s that I have more empathy for dogs. I dunno.
gex
@Comrade Jake: I look at it differently. Over the broad spectrum of human personalities and responses to situations, someone with problems will be in the war and will respond thusly. It’s a numbers game, and to suggest that there is the possibility that we can have wars like these and not have atrocities makes no sense to me. I mean, yeah, hold them to account, but I think the point about the inevitability of something like this stands.
stuckinred
@Fergus Wooster: How the fuck do you know what a “fair” number of them are?
kay
Absolutely. That’s been forgotten, so good of you to bring it up. There was a lot of that.
Zifnab
An honest account of modern war =/= Latest season of 24?
Seriously, how many war buffs do you actually know? I had a few friends in high school that were nuts for WW2 and the Cold War. They could tell you the order in which concentration camps were liberated, half a dozen ranking generals in the six major armies fighting, and exactly how the Enigma machine worked.
But that was all academics. Ask any of them what that actually thought of a current armed conflict, and the opinions just varied with ideology.
And when we look back over our last few military actions preceding the Bush Administration – The Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the invasion of Grenada – they were generally low cost, short term engagements performed for humanitarian reasons.
Modern wars conducted by the United States were about as benevolent as wars can be defined. I genuinely believe people just didn’t know what we were getting into when we charged into Iraq and Afghanistan like this.
Alex S.
I wasn’t really shocked about these revelations. War is a very dirty business (emphasis on business). Anyone who believes anything else is wrong. It corrupts and tortures people. It leaves physical and psychological scars that last for a lifetime.
Comrade Dread
One, it was post 9/11, so a great many of us completely lost our s*** and were eager to deal with any perceived threat to the United States with harsh and overwhelming force. Insane propaganda of mushroom clouds and secret nuclear programs cemented the deal.
Two, it should also be noted that going to war lets a lot of people beat their chests and pretend to be manly without actually, you know, enlisting, taking up arms and going to live in countries where the ambient temperature is 140 F and people who want to kill you look like the civilians who are just trying to get by.
Three, the pundit foreign policy crowd used the following logic: Some Arabs are irrational terrorists who only understand violence, therefore all Arabs are irrational terrorists who only understand violence. Thus it became necessary to gin up another war we could ‘win’ quickly in order to send out the ‘Don’t f*** with us’ message they wanted everyone to get.
However, some of us were wondering why we’re so gung-ho to jump from Afghanistan and catching OBL into the Iraq war, but we were traitors, appeasers, neo-Chamberlains, surrender monkeys who wanted women to wear burqas.
stuckinred
@Zifnab:
Come on remington raiders, don’t let him get away with that!
ed
The night the embarrassing “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign kicked off, Fox News showed the bombs blowing up and lighting up the sky and set it to music. Really. Look it up.
More from The Medium Lobster:
True as ever.
Violet
@Comrade Jake:
As far as I’m concerned, they can take a number and get in line behind the people who covered it up and the people that sent them there and orchestrated the whole thing.
I’m in no position to judge the actions of a solider because what little I know of war comes from TV, movies and video games, which aren’t the best way for me to feel qualified to judge what a member of the military should do and did do.
But I do know that the military had this video and still sent a representative out to say, “We don’t know how the kids were hurt.” They lied.
Breezeblock
Jim Henley at UO had the best (angriest and most helpless) post on this, about 2 months ago.
Right here.
Dollared
@ Fergus and Jake,
I actually don’t blame the kids. We gave them the video game. They’re 22, ferchrissakes. And where along the line do you think they got ethical training to see brown people with AK-47s as humans? The Waco public school system? The Southern Baptist Church? Watching Blackhawk Down?
I’m with Fallows – it is the job of the elite to exercise ethical leadership. They are the only ones with the resources to get the liberal arts degrees. And that is another reason why the NeoCons are anti-intellectual. Because there is not a religion or a philosophy, other than radical fundamentalism or radical social darwinism, that would justify what our helicopter dudes did – and the neocons know it, so they must eliminate those considerations from the conversation.
Zifnab
@Comrade Jake:
On day 1 of the invasion, sure. I can’t say anyone expects a 20-something kid who signed up to pay for college to become a bloodthirsty gun slinger. And if you’ve got a soldier that just hops behind the turret and starts spraying, there’s seriously something wrong.
But this isn’t day 1 or week 1 or year 1. This is year 7. We’re dealing with guys that have witnessed soldiers and insurgents killing each other. They’ve probably had a few grenades lobed their way. And that’s if they’re on their first or second tour. God knows what they’ve seen if they’re coming through Iraq a fifth or sixth time.
When you’re in a game of kill or be killed, I can’t really blame soldiers for shooting first and checking later. They saw some guys with guns and were responding to their buddies getting fired upon. So they swooped down and lite the targets up.
It was horribly stupid, but it was a reflection of the superior officer policy. And it was the inevitable result of leaving troops to simmer in a combat zone for the better part of a decade.
The was an illustration of how futile remaining in Iraq has become, and how endless the conflict is libel to be. It’s way too late to get mad at one helicopter gunner seven years into the fight.
Might as well pick sides in the Israeli / Palestinian fight. It’s the same endless “He shot me back first!” game.
El Cid
It was not for nothing that Bush Sr. and the uber-hawks celebrated the political success of the 1st Gulf War in ending the “Vietnam syndrome”, that short-lived era in which U.S. citizens had some sort of a fucking clue about what war involved and that they didn’t like it.
shecky
No “almost” about it. They were gonna get a real shootin’ war, hearts thumpin’ and excited as a schoolgirl getting her first kiss.
The scary part is how many regular folks were willing to go along and join in the fun, even though all indications outside the Administration’s reach were seriously harshing on the Iraq/Al Qaida connection. We’ve all ‘fessed up around here. I get little satisfaction remembering I was the wild eyed peacenik hippie on this very blog, openly ridiculed from the very top, when it turned out my instincts were right.
Comrade Jake
@ Dollared
I suppose I have a hard time with your first paragraph. One could explain away an awful lot of terrible behavior with such arguments. There ought to be limits.
Man I miss the fucking reply button.
BR
I still remember the night of a Bush-Gore debate in 2000.
My dad’s only reaction to the debate: “If Bush wins, we’re going to invade Iraq.”
I didn’t believe him.
jrg
I was working in the financial services industry at the time. One of the brokers in the office was thrilled because he had bought some call options on Raytheon… Ca-ching!
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw: What a beautiful dog, and yes, the sad look on his face and the backstory make me choke up too. He is another casualty of this misbegotten war, no two ways about it. I sure hope that lovely animal finds a welcoming and gentle home soon. Please ask Mrs J to follow his story, and keep us posted.
PS – Congrats on your NYT fame! Mmm, omelet!
SGEW
This seems like a bad time to search through the Balloon-Juice archives.
MTiffany
Allow me to clue you in: they hate brown people, and if those brown people happen to pray to a different (which happens to be, oddly enough, the same) imaginary sky daddy, so much the better. Since we, as country, decided that we shouldn’t let these same people lynch the brown people who happen to live here, they have to go indulge the murderous urges elsewhere.
Fergus Wooster
@Dollared:
I meant “fair” number of war supporters and punditry – as referred to in mistermix’s post and echoed by Lisa K – not troops in the field. I agree completely with your assessment – videogame-trained kids put in the field under shifting rules of engagement make this kind of tragedy inevitable.
@stuckinred: What the fuck did I do to you? I’m just talking about my personal experience with the pro-war crowd per mistermix’s post. Anecdotally speaking, a “fair” number of war supporters I knew revealed sociopathic tendencies.
R. Johnston
The thing that really struck me about the video was about how completely everyone involved failed to recognize that tactics that are appropriate when fighting a uniformed opposition army in a war can be entirely inappropriate when acting as an occupying power seeking to establish internal security. As an occupying power trying to establish security, you simply can’t go shooting first and asking questions later at the slightest hint that something may be up. It’s counterproductive and grossly immoral. As an occupying force, one dealing with civilians and nonuniformed irregular opposition insurgents and trying to establish internal security, you have to accept the risks that go along with not just shooting up whomever draws your suspicion.
That incident occurred four years into the occupation, and it’s patently clear that not a person involved was actually trained at being part of an occupational force with the goal of establishing security; their training never extended beyond tactics appropriate for a battle against uniformed regular forces to seize and control territory.
stuckinred
@Fergus Wooster: Mea Culpa, I misread your post.
Tazistan Jen
@Lisa K.:
To be fair to the American populous, the majority opposed the war unless sanctioned by the UN. Once it started, that changed, because “support the troops” but most people were not giddy about suck on this while the decision was being made.
Fergus Wooster
@stuckinred: No worries.
some other guy
To me the most disturbing apologist dodge is the “I wasn’t there so I can’t say whether it was right or wrong” line. You see this same BS excuse making whenever a cop shoots yet another unarmed kid.
Our system of gov’t was set up with civilian oversight of the military for a reason. I understand moral clarity is hard to come by in the line of fire, and that’s precisely why we shouldn’t let soldiers just make their own rules when it comes to when to executing people.
The deification of the armed forces (as well as the police and security agents) is really disturbing. Heavily armed forces authorized by the state to use lethal force against fellow citizens and/or foreigners should be seen as a necessary evil, not an unquestionable force for good.
They have a hard job, one that I do not envy, and they deserve a certain level of respect for being willing to take it on, but that shouldn’t excuse them from acting within the confines of civilized behavior, nor from the consequences of acting outside of it. If anything, the fact that we allow them extraordinary power to compel action, to detain, and even to assault or kill should mean we hold them to a much higher standard of conduct than we do the average citizen.
jeffreyw
@SiubhanDuinne: I have pressed her hard on this, if she doesn’t get enough info I will go there myself. Afraid if I do, the dog will come home with me. I want to know why someone couldn’t foster the dog until the owner returns. Can’t believe he isn’t thinking about that. I just don’t know.
Osprey
Every time a writer goes into “nobody could have predicted” territory, especially about Iraq, an Angel gets punched in the throat.
But then…
Sooo…nobody could’ve predicted a bunch of innocent civilians would die, but we were pretty sure a bunch of innocent civilians would die. Thanks for clearing that up.
And Mistermix, if you don’t understand how people could’ve been enthusiastic about this war, you haven’t really been paying attention.
When you have a sizable portion of the nation that thinks Obama was born in Kenya, is a soshulist Mooslim, that the government needs to stay out of Medicare, that the new health-care bill is a complete takeover of…health-care and individual freedoms..I could go on forever…but with all these things, it’s easy to get the sheeple to believe the President and his Cabinet when they go on TV and LIE to people about WMD and Iraq being part of 9/11, and that the war will pay for itself, and be over in a matter of weeks…..
The Moar You Know
@Dollared: Between that and the video games you cite, I think no further discussion is necessary as to the cause.
As to the cure, that’s another problem entirely. One I have no idea how to begin to approach.
stuckinred
@some other guy: They were on a mission. They @Osprey:
That’s a hell of a leap!
gwangung
@R. Johnston:
Bingo.
The troops did what they were trained to do. And what they were trained to do is exactly what they SHOULD be trained to do as soldiers.
But what they are trained to do is not the appropriate set of tactics for where they are.
Bob L
@Comrade Jake:
You never made a mistake at work?
Since we are all emphatic liberal wusses here try to projecting yourself in the position of those helicopter crews; flying around, trying to not crash, trying not to get shot down all while trying to find ground targets. This all being done in the context of that there is another group of soldiers being attacked and they need your help. And then someone says “RPG!”,…
Violet
@Comrade Jake:
The reply button is back. It appears when you mouse over it – bottom right corner of the post box.
Tazistan Jen
When Tim did his 11 books post, I was thinking that one book that influenced me was “all Quiet on the Western Front.” After reading that, nothing could convince me that war was glorious or fun or exciting. Not all the WWII buddy movies in the world. War is a meat grinder that destroys bodies and minds and spirits. You only go to war when you absolutely have to; not when your feathers are ruffled or you are offended by a leader’s lack of respect or something.
Why don’t hawks know this? I can only think they don’t want to know it. Talking to a few combat vets clears things right up, but they make sure not to do that.
I hope John comments on this post, because he is clearly warm-hearted and thoughtful, and yet I know he was very much in favor of the invasion.
The Moar You Know
@Comrade Jake: Just run your mouse over the post you wish to reply to. The new version of the reply button magically appears in the lower right hand corner of that post. Very nifty.
BethanyAnne
I was against the war from day one. I’m Unitarian, and my church is explicitly against all wars. For me, tho, I didn’t see the moral issues well. I remember saying “Right and wrong are complicated. But damn, stupid is simple. And starting a war in the Middle East for no good reason? That has stupid written all over it.”
As this awfulness has continued, I really have seen what the folk in my congregation were talking about. I see the morality now, and how serious war is. Maybe it sometimes is necessary, but it’s never a good choice, even then. The lesser of 2 evils is still evil.
artem1s
I agree that there is a video game issue here. Even when we see something atrocious it is distant and removed. It looks and feels like an X-Box game.
For 7 years we have been completely removed from any reality concerning this war. No one I know, knows anyone in a combat zone. No one I know is at risk for being drafted. We don’t see bodies on the evening news or the front page. For 99% of the American people this war ended when the fireworks were over on TV and W declared mission accomplished.
Hate to say it but the worst thing Carter may have done was ended the draft. Bring it back and make everyone, and I mean everyone, under the age of 45 eligible. If you aren’t physically capable, in the broadest sense of the word, of being in a combat zone there are millions of tasks that we are paying private contractors way too money money for. If everyone knows at the outset that they, or their kids or grandkids, gay, women, straight, Senators sons, Goldman Sachs CEO’s, is at risk of having to leave their life behind for a 12 or 18 month tour then no one votes to start the thing in the first place.
some other guy
@stuckinred:
This is the mindset I was referring to. They were on a mission to hunt insurgents so that excuses them killing the unarmed wounded, the non-combatants helping the wounded, and the children accompanying those non-combatants. Anything that happens “on a mission” is sacrosanct.
Violet
@artem1s:
Agreed. And the children of elected officials should specifically NOT be exempt from active duty in combat zones. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh, but the “my daddy has connections, so I can serve in the National Guard by not showing up half the time” way of dealing with the Vietnam war would have to be avoided.
The Moar You Know
@jeffreyw: Might not have the option.
We adopted a Marine Corp MP dog from my mom’s ex-boyfriend, who was getting shipped out to Okinawa on an indefinite basis. As it turns out, he ended up not coming back to the US for seven years. Some of these guys, especially officers or specialty enlisted, have no idea how long they’re going to be sent out for.
Best goddamn dog ever, BTW. Perfectly behaved, trained like you wouldn’t believe, and a better home defense system than a 12-gauge shotgun. I used to wrap up in towels and wrestle with her, she could throw me to the ground with ease every time, and I was at least twice her weight. God help anyone who had entered our house with real harm on their minds – I have no doubt she could and would have killed them.
She had a good life. If you have the space for such a critter (and space is needed for a dog that size) and want the best damn dog out there, this would be a good one.
EDIT: In spite of what I wrote above, what I remember most is not that she was a killing machine, but a total cuddler who loved nothing more than having us all at home. Including the cats. She was an incredible animal.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@El Cid:
This, a little bit, but I think it goes back farther than that. One of the worst things which happened to both our moral sensibility and our sense of the limits of power was to win WW2 against Nazi Germany. It was objectively good for both us and the world, but it permanently fucked with our moral sense of war as being a bad means to be deployed for hopefully good ends with caution, prudence and trepidation. Every war since WW2 has been an attempt to replay “The Good War”, and any nation that gets it into our collective heads that war is generically and by default Good is a walking atrocity waiting to happen.
wilfred
Precisely. So any one who was in the service when the war began had little choice but to go through with it, even in the unlikely event that they suspected it was trumped up bogus war to begin with.
Anyone who went later knew the truth. 7 years on there’s no excuse for participating in an ongoing crime.
Fergus Wooster
@Artem1s:
I hate to be this guy, but it was Nixon and Ford that ended the draft. Nixon campaigned on it in ’68, and knew that it would curb future anti-war movements if the rabble knew they couldn’t be drafted to fight.
The removal effect you speak of was a (the) feature, not a bug of ending the draft.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@R. Johnston:
I had the same reaction to that video. Using a bushmaster to rain death from the sky on an urban neighborhood is pretty much the definition of COIN failure, never mind the larger moral issues. And didn’t that incident happen after the Surge was already underway and our wise and farsighted generals supposedly knew better?
Undercover FBI Agent DougJ
I don’t quite buy that.
The Moar You Know
@Undercover FBI Agent DougJ: I don’t either. Where I live, it was more like 95%.
gnomedad
@BethanyAnne:
Excellent. Stealing this. Thanks.
AhabTRuler
I have said it before, but two good books on the subject of war are John Keegan’s “The Face of Battle” and Paul Fusselll’s “The Great War and Modern Memory.” Any of Alistair Horne’s books on WWI are good, too, although not in the same way as the above texts.
Kevin Phillips Bong
It’s been a fairly difficult thing to shift the mindset here at work from “weapons employment good” to a more counterinsurgency-suitable “protect the noncombatants first”. I was a little dismayed at the general desire to throw weapons downrange when I first got here as it was obvious to me that any insurgents killed did not outweigh the effect of collateral casualties. But then I started reading Tom Ricks’ Fiasco and it sounds like most of the DoD had and in some cases still has the same problem.
I have a lot of experience with targeting through sensors, and it’s more art than science. There’s a lot of visual interpretation, and you have to have a good idea what you’re looking for before you see it. This can lead to a lot of “wishful seeing”, so things can hinge on which direction you’re wishing. If you’ve never seen a full size video camera through your sensor then it may indeed look like a weapon. Very difficult and ill advised to second guess the Apache crew since none of us were there, other than to say that the entire Iraq conflict was poorly run once major combat operations were over. The whole thing never should have taken place, but seeing the buildup at bases in Kuwait in 2002 it was a done deal far before it started.
JackieBinAZ
@ed: They did this with Bush’s speech post-9-11 too.
Maude
A yahoo news headline:
US Military can’t find a copy of the video.
Wonder when it went missing?
Bush Jr.’s military records have been missing for a long time.
mclaren
That’s modern war. Rain death from the skies. Blast civilians apart. Children crawl across the street with their intestines trailing 15 feet behind them. Pregnant women stumble around looking for what’s left of their severed arms. Old men twitch and convulse, vomiting up arterial sprays of blood, while their burned skin unravels like rind from a scorched orange.
Don’t like it? Don’t go to fvcking war inside a modern city, ’cause that’s what happens. If you’re out in the open, you can see the enemy on a flat plain or a desert, different story…you’ve got some inkling of where to lay down fire. You’re in a city and you let off modern weaponry, any kind of modern weaponry, right down to 50 cal round or an m60, you’re going to blow buildings apart, you’ll chew right through three civilians, blast through an apartment building, and shred a baby into hamburger in a house 3 buildings over, because modern weaponry is lethal. Mini guns and chain guns and white phosphorus munitions and depleted uranium anti-tank rounds and even “simple” “ordinary” HE rounds from a tank will blow up an entire apartment building and leave not a whole lot but bone fragments and gristle and blood spatters behind.
This is Exhibit A in why you do not ever ever ever want to take a modern army into an urban environment. We should have learned that lesson from the U.S. army (and the Red Army) assault on Berlin in 1945. The fighting was so vicious troops had to blast through the walls of building and go from block to block inside the buildings because the streets were too lethal. The number of civilian casualties in the siege of Berlin in 1945 was horrific. This is why Bush 41 said, “Nuh-uh” when given the option to go into Baghdad. Wise decision.
Modern warfare is lethal enough to civilians but when you get into an urban environment, it’s just a giant meat grinder. Astronomical numbers of women and babies and old men noncombatants get slaughtered because the explosives are just too potent and the armor-piercing rounds are just too deadly, and the insurgents just hide among the civvies like fish in the sea. It’s a complete clusterfvck.
Add to this the fact that those U.S. troops are some of ’em on their 4th or 5th rotation, theyir marriages have disintegrated, they’ve lost their job stateside that they got yanked out of when the army reactivated their commissions and sent ’em to this hell-hole, they’re shell-shocked with massive PTSD, what do you expect?
Declare victory and get the hell out. That’s the solution. The atrocities are just going to get worse and worse and worse if we stay, because that’s what’s happens when you give any 22-year-old the world’s most lethal weaponry and blow ’em up intermittantly with IEDs and kill their best friends with sniper fire every few days and then give ’em an impossible mission — to find and eliminate the insurgents in the middle of a freakin’ modern city with millions of people whose language you don’t even speak and whose culture you don’t even know.
Morbo
Has anyone seen the full video? Apparently there is a longer version out there. The Wikileaks version shown here only is only concerned with the deaths of the Reuters journalists. Apparently there is more with the apaches firing Hellfire missiles at clearly unarmed people entering and exiting a building. See link here.
Bnad
Good RT interview with a Wikileaks editor about the video.
Found this by googling wikileaks. The #1 search result, and the only reference in US media I’ve been able to find on this video, is a Fox News apologia falsely stating that there was an RPG clearly visible in the video.
Svensker
@AhabTRuler:
I’d also recommend Chris Hedge’s “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”
jeffreyw
@The Moar You Know: I don’t think the dog is part of a canine unit, but I don’t know. I’m leaning toward the idea that this is a dog owned by a Guardsman or Reservist. Hope to know more this afternoon.
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw: Please *please* adopt that dog. Please.
wilfred
It’s forgotten now, if was ever really remembered, that the first act of this crime was an attempt to kill Saddam by B1B attack. They ended up destroying a block of flats and killing several extended families, including the inevitable women, children and old people who are part of such families.
The pilot lamented the lost opportunity. Only the Iraqis remember the names of the innocent people killed.
Also, see Gaza, or what’s left of it.
slackjawedgawker
@mr. whipple:
The first season was really good. The second season had its moments, but it really started to tail off after awhile. That’s when I stopped watching. I hear the series is still going on, but no matter how long I flip through the channels, I can never find it. Oh well. Supposedly now the show is just the same old storylines over and over anyway. Frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t been cancelled yet.
mclaren
In a country where people can wear burqas, how can you say anyone is “clearly unarmed”?
It’s real easy to judge after the fact — in a firefight, everything’s chaotic, and if you’re some 22-year-old who can’t see real well because your best friend’s head just exploded from a sniper round and you’re wiping his brains out of your eyes and people are running around screaming in some foreign language you can’t speak, how do you know those 5 guys running into that building across the street aren’t going in to get RPGs to take out your humvee?
It ain’t like a video game, folks, this is exactly the kind of sh|t that happens all the time in an urban warfare environment. If I were over there on my 3rd forced tour and if I was shell-shocked from constant IED attacks, I’d probably be lighting up some Iraqi’s ass with a chain gun too, and so would you after 3 years of PTSD and constant sniper fire and IED attacks. You’d be busting caps in anything that moved. So would I. So would anyone. That’s why we need to get the hell out ASAP.
goblue72
So when do we just call it was it is? – free-fire zones.
scarshapedstar
You seem to be implying that the pro-war punditry had read honest accounts of modern war. I don’t think Victor Does Thermopylae fits that bill.
Dollared
@Comrade Jake: Jake, I agree. But there is an insanely aggressive element of our society that believes that killing brown people is OK. They have made a vocation of controlling local school boards in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and then insisting that the curriculum be cleansed of any preaching of international understanding and mutual human tolerance.
Again, the damage is done by people with enough time and money to learn better, but instead they use that time to control and intimidate others.
And that reply button appears if you scroll down to the lower right hand corner of each comment. It’s magic!
V.O.R.
“The one thing I never understood about Iraq War supporters was how anyone who’s read an honest account of modern war could generate any enthusiasm for the project.”
The online community I was most familiar with in the run-up to the war was hardcore wargamers.
And being wargamers didn’t seem to mean a bit of difference. I’d expect them to be very aware of the full horrible cost of war… nada. The liberals and Europeans (yeah, almost redundant) were all at most very wary of war. (ATM I can’t think of any who were actually in favor of attacking Iraq.) The conservatives, almost to a man, were utterly pro-war.
No failure of imagination for those guys – they’re all military history buffs. They didn’t have to imagine. They *knew*. And they didn’t give a damn.
AhabTRuler
Svensker: I’ve read it and it thought it a little weak. Hedges offloads many of his personal motives for reporting on war onto the nameless reader. My response to the constant invocation of “we do this and that” is “what do you mean by we, kemosabe?”
Suffice it to say, I got nothing from Hedges’ book that didn’t get from Fussell and Keegan, and I thought the former two works to be better written.
Violet
@Bnad:
The New York Times had an article about it on Monday.
The MSNBC panel also discussed it.
jeffreyw
@SiubhanDuinne: damn you :) Mr j sez the staff is not gonna let him go to a schlub, rules me out
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@V.O.R.:
Military history is rarely if ever written from the point of view of the civilians, or even pays much attention to them even in cases where they outnumbered the armed and uniformed combatants on the field of battle as it was taking place. See Okinawa, Battle Of for just one example.
mclaren
The other big issue here, the elephant in the room so to speak, is that America’s military is a 2nd generation warfare outfit. We put fire on target. That’s what we do. That’s all we do. 2GW armies put fire on target. 3GW armies use maneuver warfare, but the U.S. army has never mastered that, let alone the even more advanced art of fourth generation warfare, 4GW, involving counterinsurgency.
COIN is like Riemannian tensors and our army is still stuck at basic arithmetic — we’re a 2GW military, we put fire on target, that’s it, that’s the U.S. military answer to evcerything, put fire on target.
Well, if you’re in an urban environment and your target is 3 square blocks where insurgents are hiding, somewhere, whaddaya gonna do?
You’re gonna put fire on target. Say hello to mister bushmaster with his friend mister chain gun. Say goodbye to those three square city blocks.
If America’s military had ever moved beyond the crude outdated 2GW warfare model of putting fire on target, we might have other options, but as it is, we’re stuck with the army we have, not the army we want. As a result (as gwangung pointed out):
Most of all, ThatLeftTurnInABarBQ really nailed it with this one:
Most of America’s wars have been meatgrinders. Bloody ugly hideous slogs where huge numbers of innocent noncombatants got slaughtered. The Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, the Mexican War, the Phillipine campaign against the Moros, WW I…all brutal grinding bloodbaths.
Then along comes WW II, and presto! Change-o! Americans suddenly forget all the horror and the waterboarding (yes, American troops systematically waterboarded Philippine insurectos in 1901, they called it “the water cure”) and the slaughtered civilians and we tell ourselves, wow, America is a great big benevolent force for peace in the world and this war thing isn’t really so bad after all.
Then we jumped right back into the grinding brutal slog — the Korean War, Viet Nam, and then we got 3 more really bad examples that deluded us into thinking war was really cool and fun and easy: Panama, Desert Storm and Clinton’s “immaculate destruction” campaign in Serbia.
America is like a guy with cirrhosis of the liver who’s forgotten the hallucinations and the screaming and the DTs and the Korsakov’s Syndrome and the shakes and now thinks, wow, that liquor stuff is really cool and fun so I’ll just have one more drink and it’ll really be bitchin’.
SiubhanDuinne
@slackjawedgawker: That was . . . fucking . . . BRILLIANT.
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw: (assume you mean *Mrs* j there)
A. You are not a schlub.
B. Even if you *are* a schlub, that’s a personal lifestyle choice. How dare the staff violate your civil rights like that?
C. It is a well-known fact that dogs, given the option, will select the schlub over the non-schlub 78.3% of the time (MOE +/- 2.4%).
D. Hey! It was *MRS* j who brought the picture home in the first place! She didn’t *have* to do that, you know . . . .
jeffreyw
@SiubhanDuinne: @jeffreyw: (assume you mean Mrs j there)
A. You are not a schlub.
B. Even if you are a schlub, that’s a personal lifestyle choice. How dare the staff violate your civil rights like that?
C. It is a well-known fact that dogs, given the option, will select the schlub over the non-schlub 78.3% of the time (MOE +/- 2.4%).
D. Hey! It was MRS j who brought the picture home in the first place! She didn’t have to do that, you know . . . .
a. am too!
b. path of least resistance
c. pfft…facts
d. yes she did, I told her to
SiubhanDuinne
@NYTOmeletBoy: LOL. But still, y’know. Pleasepleaseplease.
Jose Padilla
You start a war, you’re gonna get war crimes.
Paul in KY
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Some people in positions of power may not want COIN strategy to work in Iraq. Think about that.
Triassic Sands
Clearly, we’ve learned our lesson and nothing could possibly go wrong if we bomb Iran.
Persia
@gex: This. This is what happens in war, and you can’t believe otherwise. This is why war shouldn’t happen. (I’m not a total pacifist, but how can you look at shit like this and start babbling on about ‘just war’?)
jake the snake
Tragic failure of imagination is a great way to express it.
In the late stages of the Vietnam War when POW bracelets were popular, even my liberal friends thought I was crazy when I said I would only wear one if it was for Lt William Calley. My point being, that without Vietnam, Calley would just be another guy in America. He was a prisoner of war as much as John McCain. Without war, it is extremely unlikely that Calley would have shot anyone, or ordered anyone shot, much less massacred a whole village of Southeast Asian rice farmers.
Things like Song My and the Wikileaks video happen in war.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that is in denial.
Nutella
We invaded Iraq. We sent soldiers over there to shoot civilians from helicopters. Yes, they did a terrible thing in this video incident by choosing the wrong civilians to shoot down on the street, but the vast majority of the blame for this and many similar horrific events of the invasion is that we (the US government, almost all the press, and a lot of the populace) sent those soldiers to Iraq to shoot civilians on the street.
DPirate
It’s Win-Win for the average schmuck. First he gets to be all patriotic-like and kick sand in the face of the 90-pound weakling, then he gets to blame the inevitable failures failures on the damn bleeding heart liberal hippie faggots.
ExtremismInTheDefenseOfLiberty
Ditto. This exactly states my view during the runup to the Iraq war. The proposed war was being seen in the context of its political effects, and the necessity of those effects. But war cannot be waged without having the kinds of tragedies exposed by the wikilieaks film. Therefore, an honest appraisal of the need for the Iraq war required that we weigh the supposed benefit of the political effects against the certainty of the unavoidable tragic effects.
No matter how much I held my thumb on the scale, I couldn’t find that the proposed war was justifiable. Even if the WMD stories were true … and that was a big if …. the idea that the Hussein regime presented a large enough threat to the interests of the United States to justify the horrors that were sure to result from a war … seemed just impossible to believe. If the moral question did not rest on that issue, then what did it rest on? And if the answer was grounded in emotion, rather than fact, emotion that was mostly a carryover from 911, then how could it not be that the only prudent thing to do was to step back, wait, increase the inspections, and continue to ask questions?
And if one wonders why I would question the WMD threat, the answer is simple. We had almost barrel-by-barrel intel and recon tracking the sale of oil by the Hussein regime, knowing where every truckload of oil was going. But we didn’t have similar detailed intel about the WMDs. How in the hell could that be? Why didn’t we know exactly where the WMDs were and know the history of how they got there? Either we were so fascinated by the oil that we didn’t bother to track the WMDs, or else the WMDs weren’t there. No other explanation was plausible.
If a private citizen baking in the Arizona heat could come up with those questions, then it would be hard to believe that the “experts” in Washington D.C. couldn’t come up with those kinds of questions … even better questions. And if those questions were on the table, then why weren’t they being addressed in public? The whole thing made no damned sense then, and makes no sense today.
Ruckus
@BethanyAnne:
War is always an abomination. Yet war is sometimes necessary, the last resort of a people. It should never be the first.
People die in war. Usually lots of people. Almost always lots of innocent people.
A good leader works at never going to war, fights very hard to avoid war. A great leader works very hard to avoid having any of his or her citizens killed without absolute necessity.
But there are always people advocate for war. They lead the shouting for war. And never intend to fight. Or heaven forbid take any actual risk of dying. They advocate that others should do the fighting and dying, just because. They shout for other people to be the victims because they don’t have the courage of their convictions.
These people are cowards.
Or ask Digby
Lumpenprole
I’m really not all that outraged about the video. This is what happens when you send young men with guns to persuade people to change their behavior. That’s why war can never be glorious or easy. You should have a good reason to bring a fuckton of misery into this world. In 2003, we didn’t and here are three reasons why I think a lot of Americans were not bothered by the fact that this would happen to innocent people.
1. Two generations of TV techno wars. The first Gulf War was a family-friendly show. Neither the audience nor the troops saw dead Iraqis. I was startled when I saw footage of the bombing campaigns in Serbia. I’d heard about bombings for what seemed like years before I finally saw Serbs fleeing from exploding high rises.
2. Several generations of using military force on 3rd world countries. It’s just okay with most of us and the racists LOVE IT.
3. The professional military works as both a de facto welfare state and a perpetual war machine. Many people have no contact with the military and it really doesn’t concern them. They see it on TV (1) and the show is almost always the same (2).
It’s hard to write in this window on this phone, but this bothered me enormously in 03 and to this day. Troops kill people. They’re young, they’ve been abused by their leaders and stranded on the wrong side of the planet. Not surprised or any more disgusted than I was before. Americans aren’t expected to ask themselves if the deaths of those innocent people was worth it.
George
on the topic of germane books on war and the current American view of war and the military: everyone should Andrew Bacevich’s ‘The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War’ and ‘The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism’.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
The US population is in the situation the Commonwealth population were in at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the term “jingoiism” was coined from a music-hall song.
Before Passenchendaele. Before Ypres. Before Gallipoli.
Before Crete and Monte Cassino and Normandy and Kodaka.
WWI and WWII were experienced differently by Europeans than by Americans. Two generations turned into meat and mud inoculated much of West Europe from seeing war as glorious. Vietnam came closer to grinding American noses in the obscenity, but (as the pundits have been celebrating) , those lessons have been “overcome”.
Americans are going to love war for as long as war remains a video game to the population in general.
slippy
@Zifnab:
I’m sorry I don’t give them the benefit of that doubt. War means killing on a large scale, and folks who don’t get this are too immature to be allowed out without an escort. It is not and never has been a fucking GAME.
Nancy Irving
“an air of almost giddy anticipation among a fair number of the pro-war punditry” –
I wonder how many of them actually got a charge out this video.