The video that was released yesterday by WikiLeaks of a July 2007 shooting of two Reuters journalists and several unarmed individuals is receiving over-due attention about the ongoing criminal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq by America. Although the pilots are not guilty of any criminal intent, since they were convinced that the men below them were insurgents with RPGs and AK-47’s, it’s too easy to just dismiss them as being immature and trigger-happy. What these pilots did is out of the playbook of modern warfare. Any area of the city is a battle arena, and anybody who poses any inkling of a threat is gunned down mercilessly. Going after particular cases of innocent blood-letting and holding specific pilots or soldiers responsible for needless deaths is not going to accomplish anything, nor does it serve justice. If Justice is to be done, it must be done to the leaders who send these war-possessed pilots into battle.
Perhaps the greatest lesson that can be learned from watching this video is that this act of unintended murder of innocent civilians was not an accident. It was run of the mill murder. Another reminder of the stupidity and recklessness of war. As Glenn Greenwald writes:
A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars.
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The value of the Wikileaks/Iraq video and the Afghanistan revelation is not that they exposed unusually horrific events. The value is in realizing that these event are anything but unusual.
Hilary Worden said in her article “Modern War and Civilian Casualties,” that technological innovations and new instruments of combat “often leaves innocent civilians dead for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Sooner or later other civilians who witness the casualties, wreckage and blood on a daily basis decide to become resistant fighters, and shoot at the fly-by-warriors in the helicopters and their workhorses on the ground. And those types of civilians are called terrorists.
But this incident must also be put in context. At that period in the US surge, American soldiers were dying more than usual, so the pilots were obviously on edge and wanted revenge at every turn. I’m not saying what they did is acceptable, but ignorance and carelessness can be defended. In order to discourage future incidents of this type, tougher training and strict discipline of Apache helicopter pilots is the obvious thing to do. First on the list is a no-brainer: understand the rules of engagement before heading into battle. Do some of these Call of Duty soldiers realize that “shoot to kill” is not always warranted? The object is not to kill as many terrorists as there are bullets. As Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer told MSNBC:
(via Raw Story) “First rule is, you may engage persons who commit hostile acts or show hostile intent by minimum force necessary,” he said. “Minimum force is necessary. If you see eight armed men, the first thing I would think as an intelligence officer is, ‘How can we take these guys and capture them?’ We don’t want to kill people arbitrarily; we want the intel take.
The blowback of this leaked video is not yet clear. But it will more likely influence public opinion within the United States than in the Middle East since people there see these types of images and stories repeated on a nightly basis. If the intent of publishing the video was to discredit the US military, then there’s a reason to be concerned, because blaming the armed forces for the massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan is like blaming an unleashed mad dog for attacking a child. The real blame lies with the owners, and decision makers in Washington. Once Bush let the leash go, all hell broke loose. Getting mad at pilots for shooting up what they thought were armed insurgents is misplaced anger. Killing thoughtlessly is the nature of modern war, and the American military is clearly the best at it. This video is just another vindication.
WikiLeaks: Collateral Murder
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer: Rules of engagement disregarded
