I could be wrong, but I think you are misunderstanding the term. the “Right of Conquest” is not a right to go out and conquest, it is more along the lines of a “reality of conquest”. So the US did not have the power to invade Kuwait because of the Right of Conquest. However, we did have the power to turn Kuwait back over to its previous regime because of the “Right of Conquest”.
I hope I have not misrememberd that.
Yes I did read it thanks. So you think it fine to kill human shields? Typical. Whatever happens ‘it’s not our fault’! And you wonder why we’re not winning hearts and minds.
Anyway ‘people living in same village as safe house’ does not equal ‘human shields’.
Kuwait was freed under the auspices of the United Nations , Iraqi forces were retired across the border and kuwait was returned to its rightful government. At no time did the States actively rule either kuwait or Iraq.
Right of conquest is pretty much a bad terminology , better off just saying right of might and be done with it. Once you depose a foreign government , you need something to keep the infrastructure going , pay the bills , get the mail delivered and so forth.
Since the Iraqi government surrendered to the US , it becomes the defacto government , until such time as the reins of power are returned to the indigs. For the time being , Iraq is an american protectorate , no different from American Samoa , or Peuto Rico.
Declan
British newspaper coverage. I’m sorry but this looks like another awful, awful tragedy, if that’s the right word.
‘US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one’
One incident. Forty dead. Two stories. What really happened?
As villagers bury their dead, US general insists that group was not wedding party
This brings together the questions and confusion about this incident quite well.
One incident. Forty dead. Two stories. What really happened?
The US really needs to start giving proof of their story.
First of all I don’t know if they were wedding guest or terrorist. Many dopers claimed they were terrorist, if that is the case…
Your example is idiotic, terrorists don’t have armies in the first place. Then you seem to think that terrorist=Irak’s army. To make a long post short there are so many things wrong with your example that I will wait for you to provide a better one. Then I’ll discuss my POV.
regards
Estilicon
[QUOTE=tagos]
British newspaper coverage. I’m sorry but this looks like another awful, awful tragedy, if that’s the right word.
[QUOTE]
I believe the correct word is
“atrocity”
It is so much worse than even the most vile conjecture…
I always at least thought it was death from above.
I never thought they came through on foot to finish them off…
[U
Why not? It’ll give Bush a whole new thing to lie to Congress about the projected costs of…
[QUOTE=alaricthegoth]
[QUOTE=tagos]
British newspaper coverage. I’m sorry but this looks like another awful, awful tragedy, if that’s the right word.
I know what you mean. It’s like there’s some unit somwhere, deep in the Pentagon, thinking, “What more can we do to make things worse than they are already? Hey, we haven’t bombed a wedding on some half-assed excuse for a few months!”
I start to wonder if the Occupation forces are being played for chumps by the ‘informers’ of various parties.
This is a tribe of 100,000 - as noted in earlier cites. Great! that’s another 100,000 enemies.
And I’m sorry, if ‘rules of engagement’ allow this sort of shit to happen, it’s not an excuse. Get better damn rules already! Better to let hundreds of terrorists live to be whacked another day than have this shit happen, morally and practically.
Well, just saw this snippet on CNN . Its mostly about the present raid (or attack) against al-Sadr’s militia in Kufa, but it goes into a bit about the ‘wedding party’. The military is sticking to this story, and supposedly producing evidence that it wasn’t in fact a wedding party at all. No idea whats going on, who is lieing here, but thought I’d put in some of the story anyway.
Anyway, as I said before, there is a lot going on here. Its still unclear exactly what happened. However, I can’t see the military being this stuborn if they didn’t think they had a pretty good case for it NOT being a wedding. On the other hand, we have several Iraqis pretty much stating that it WAS a wedding. So. I’m going to await developments here.
-XT
:dubious:
Wait a tick, there was a horrible massacre, at the same time?
I mean, shooting in the air was the original reason to attack; this is then beginning to sound to me as complete nonsense, if that was a terrorist place and not a wedding. Why would terrorists then broadcast with shots to the air that they where there?
If the children’s deaths occurred elsewhere I only see that happening with lots of firepower in the area where that occurred, was that totally invisible to the U.S. forces?
Maybe it was a massacre at a different time. They apparently come a dime a dozen in Iraq these days.
Also, the shredded body of a child need not necessarily be due to American firepower. Roadside bombs and mortar shells fired by insurgents have been known to cause their fair share of civilian casualties. This is why www.iraqbodycount.org and other “official” estimates put the “death toll” at 10,000 - not “civilian death toll,” not “Iraqis killed by Americans” - just “death toll.” It is sometimes impossible to tell who killed who, and when someone was or was not an insurgent. They just know how many bodies pile up at the makeshift Iraqi hospitals. Sometimes they can attribute who did what, sometimes they can’t. But the generally accepted figure is non-official military deaths that were caused by the US invasion, no matter who pulled the trigger.
After all, if they drag pretty much any injured Iraqi man in, how can they tell whether or not he was an insurgent other than the words of people around him? Hell, women can most certainly be insurgents, and can certainly aid them, and so can children (there are numbers of reports of children as young as 10 firing weapons at US troops - and this is not isolated to Iraq, in parts of Africa, the adult population has been so decimated by warfare and genocide that parties draft children into military service. The Nazis started to do the same thing, if you will recall, and the Soviets did widespread militarization of women, but that was another matter entirely). So the presence of women and children does not make the target civilian.
Hand on heart on all of the above, and I’m totally against this absurd adventure in Bushland. The bodies and videotape does not make it a wedding. On the other hand, the military has not exactly earned the ability to say something and be trusted at its word in the past few weeks…
Or, I suppose it could have been footage shot earlier in the war, or even at some other time. I have no idea, it DOES sound fishy. Then again, it seems easy enough to check out. All they’d have to do is show the bodies to journalists if that many women and children were killed. I’ve seen no photos, nor any independant observers that claim to have seen them and photographed them.
It just seems that the military is sticking to this story pretty hard. Just doesn’t seem logical that they would stick so hard if there was hard evidence they were wrong about the ‘safe house’ being an actual wedding. It also seems like it would be easy to verify if it was in fact a wedding…by something other than anacedotal evidence.
I’m going to await developments on this one. To me, it sounds fishy all around, and I don’t think we have enough evidence one way or the other to make a sound judgement.
-XT
realizes something
Maybe it was a insurgent wedding.
No, seriously. Maybe two insurgents were getting married at a holding point for insurgents. Maybe they all just got drunk and started shooting into the air. This makes the stories of both sides - that it was a wedding, and that it was a terrorist safehouse - true, it accounts for the lack of “evidence” in the form of leftover food, gifts, etc, it accounts for the population being bent towards fighting-aged men…
There is a link to a video in this article from USA today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-05-21-wedding-iraq_x.htm
The video shows relatives picking the remains of what they say are traditional wedding gifts, and one child appears wounded being treated in a bed.
One thing we DO know about the government. It does not want to take a chance before an independent tribunal, even if composed of its own citizens (ie, an american jury) .
I would caution my more centrist doper brothers and sisters that we here on the gonzo fringe would really question the provenance of those sundry items of "evidence’ adduced by kimmitt (the 300 travel paks, , etc.)
I mean, the THE FUCKING WEDDING SINGER IS DEAD!
Wjhat, Adam Sandler is a terrorist? I don’t think so…
I don’t know. These guys are saying it was MOSTLY women and children, the military saying there were only a few women and no children. I watched the video btw…you can’t tell a single thing from it. It could be all from the same place, or it could be pieced together. They showed one little boy all banged up ( 
!!) and a few other people being treated, but mostly it was footage of people picking through the rubble of one of the buildings.
I didn’t see any ‘instruments’ or other wedding stuff thats claimed in the article…but then, you couldn’t really see much of anything except rubble and some tents and a few things obviously on display (looked like pillows to me).
So, again, I don’t think we know enough. Right now it seems to be that both sides stories are radically different. So, I’d say that this means someone is lieing, someone is telling the ‘truth’…or at least shades thereof. If both stories are so different, I’d say that the REAL story will eventually come out.
-XT
No, Mr. Goth…they SAY the ‘wedding singer’ is dead. But how do you KNOW that the ‘wedding singer’ is dead? Did you know this wedding singer? Who can verify that he was in fact a wedding singer? Also, was wedding singing ALL he did? I could point at a dead body too and say, ‘That guy was a wedding singer!’ to a reporter.
Look, it might be as you say. Perhaps it WAS a wedding and the military fucked up and is not trying to cover up. If they are, it will be found out in the end, so its kind of stupid of them.
However, we don’t KNOW much of anything yet. Its all mostly anacedotal evidence at this point. I know you are reflexively mistrustful of anything the military says. However, its not THAT far out for me to advocate a wait and see approach. The evidence I’ve seen thus far is a bit, er, thin, on BOTH sides.
-XT