Apr 8th 2010, 3:15:49
TAN - How can you ignore 4 decades of previous history between two countries that are currently at war and say they're not relevant? That's like saying that the US colonists were wrong for separating themselves from the British because the Brits hadn't done anything wrong to them THAT day.....
But yeah.....wrapping up the whole genocide, human rights abuse/violations stuff, development of illegal weapons and all that was really just a bonus when Bush woke up one morning and said "Golly, who should we invade today?". I mean, are you honestly that ignorant, or just trying way too hard to prove a point? War is never caused by just 1 party....ever.
AoS - if they were gathering bodies of people who were previously assumed to be carrying weapons, wouldn't they then in fact have also been assumed to be gathering weapons then? I mean, the weapons that the dead bodies were supposed to be carrying didn't just up and walk away once the firing started, did they? I see that as an awful huge stretch to place blame on someone....especially when this is a commonly known set of events to the US military where insurgents DO come out and gather up weapons before ground troops arrive so they can be used to fight another day.
If they were honestly as "trigger happy" as you guys like to say, why would they have bothered to wait for ROE approval and just claim that they were fired on instead?
Hellz X, I'm gonna assume you've never been in a situation where someone wanted to/was trying to kill you, and your post is based on a lack of understanding about not only how it is to be in that situation, and another lack of understanding about how soldiers are instructed to identify/classify targets. I'm also gonna go ahead and assume that you have not the foggiest idea what a RPG or AK-47 looks like on a video screen from several miles away, or what it would look like in a collapsed state. So the soldiers didn't wait for the folks they thought were insurgents to fire first....would you prefer that the pilots/gunners had waited until an RPG WAS fired and one of those helicopters was shot down???? I'm not sayin it's not horribly sad that these people died...but had the situation been a little different (as it all too commonly is in Iraq/Afghanistan), we could just as easily sitting here talking about how sad it is that 2 helicopters and their full compliment of crew was shot down because they were unable to engage hostile, armed combatants.
Saying "they had to know it wasn't a weapon" is just downright foolish....these guys were looking at a black and white image from what looks to be at least a couple of miles away....as I said before, if you can stand there and tell me you can distinguish children, weapons, cameras, etc....I'm gonna stand right here and tell you you're full of fluff...there's just no way those guys could have known if that was a camera or an RPG - it was a large black metal object strapped to an Iraqi's back in a group of people who looked like they were carrying weapons. Even in the blown up images that the editors of the video used to make it look like you could see these things, it was STILL grainy and indistinguishable.
To be fair, I'm not defending the soldiers - they made a grievous mistake, and one that I hope the whole US military learns from, and makes changes because of, as I think things like this could be avoided in the future. But I'm also not reactionary enough to say it was anything more than a mistake....a mistake that plenty of other people would have made had they been in those same shoes. You guys standing here bashing them for it is nothing more than high and mighty BS based on absolutely no understanding of the situation they were placed in, and what their training dictates they do with it.
I'll at least give AoS credit though, it's nice to find one person around here who's capable of having an intelligent conversation/debate without insulting anyone.
Edited By: NOW3P on Apr 8th 2010, 3:16:08