That’s right, blame the victims. Typical response. The US attacked them, who else would anyone not blinded by misplaced patriotism blame? People are dead, women and children are dead.
“Whoops - its your own fault” is a shameful response for a nation with such an inflated view of its own goodness to take.
Went down well in the USA over 9/11 didn’t it? (& for the record that was a completely unjustifiable attack and rightly countered by displacing the Taliban IMO)
It’s their bloody country and they can celebrate weddings how they damn well please and it is completely up to the occupying power to take every effort to minimise civilian caualties. If it’s stupid, how much more stupid is it to risk losing yet more hearts and minds by not going above and beyond to avoid these incidents, particularly at this time.
Bullshit. It’s the responsibility of the AMERICANS to exercise caution while illegally occupying another country. The Iraqi people have every right to celebrate weddings however the hell they feel like without fear of trigger happy invaders murdering their children. The inability of Americans to accept any responsibility for their actions is the reason we are despised by the rest of the world.
Boo freakin’ hoo, yer breakin’ my heart. It’s a war, and acting stupidly in a war is very likely to get you killed. I don’t give a rat’s patoot about their precious customs; anyone with a spoonful of brains knows that shooting off firearms at random in those conditions is likely to draw fire. If they’re too freaking dumb to make the appropriate adaptations in their culture, that’s just natural selection in action, and those fools deserve a Darwin award.
We’re trying to win a war here, and Sensitive New Age Guys are a liability, not an asset.
And your suggestion is up and running in the UK, And a good thing too - if troops know that they can be legally be held accountable for shit, perhaps less shit will happen.
The presence of women and children prove nothing. They’ve been present in safe houses before, alongside terrorists or foreign fighters. This particular enemy often doesn’t shield it’s noncombatants from the fighting.
I’m pretty confident that weddings, even if held near a safe house whacking off AA rounds, falls into this category. We are meant to be the good guys, not trigger-happy savages and should act like it, not attack objectives with callous disregard of civilian casualties and the Geneva Conventions.
The US military had no right to “decree” a fucking thing. It’s not our country, we have no right to be there and the Iraqis have zero obligation to follow our orders.
And what is all this nonsense about “anti-aircraft” fire? Since when does firing celebratory shots in the air qualify as “anti-aircraft fire?”
Actually, the President declared that we already won the war over a year ago.
Now we are trying to win the peace (and doing a darned fine job of blowing every chance we get).
How widely spread has been the report that U.S. ground forces actually visited the wedding site and left some time before the air attack? If that is true, then the communications screw up in the WTC is nothing compared to the ongoing failure of U.S. forces to communicate in the field in Iraq.
I confess, I have trouble grasping the reasoning that would have it otherwise
Even if what is happening in iraq places us in a state of war (dubious), surely iraqi civilians are suposed to be on OUR side.
in ordinary life, if you roll over & crush a car with a steamroller, you will not be heard to say that you ought not replace the car because you were trying to pave a street for cars to use, and its just too bad about this particular car…
I knew I was wasting my breath when I posted (and I recognise you are being ironic!). It’s only a matter of time before someone makes that point seriously.
Actions are what the US is judged on, not words, no matter how fine.
Because, if you had, you would have seen that keeping women and children in a safe house for foreign fighters is prohibited by those same laws of war.
Again, like I said, I’m reserving judgement. But if terrorists were keeping women and children in the safe house with them, it’s a clear violation of the rules of war. And it is the terrorists who put the noncombatants at risk.
Take it to the Pit. Demo, linking to the pit post is fine but don’t call people assholes in GD, even if it’s the name of the thread! Everyone, chill a little.
No. If the ground forces called in an air strike after ascertaining that the firing came from a wedding, that would not be a screwup, that would be a crime.
If ground forces investigated firing (who were the targets?) and discovered terrorists trying to reveal their position (?), then they should have responded with a force large enough to contain the terrorists, then used an air strike only if it looked as though the ground forces could not safely apprehend those terrorists. Since the US. military did not break the story as an assault on a terrorist location, I figure that it is pretty safe to say that such was not the case.
There may have been no ground force investigation (in which case that aspect of the story is simply an irrelevant bit of misinformation), or the ground forces may have determined that a wedding was in progress and the word simply failed to reach the air patrols, or the ground forces actually called a strike on a wedding. So the ground force story may be false/irrelevant, an indication of a crime, or an indication that the best equipped and best trained and most technologically advanced military in history cannot figure out how to convey simple information to people who need it.
On this point I will await further information, but if there was any ground force investigation, the U.S. is clearly in the wrong.