Wikileaks has a very suggestive interpretation of the event surrounding the video they are showing. I sympathize with it.
Pajamas Media has another interpretation. (Gavel bang to Adam Gurri) It is a war. People die. The soldiers followed protocol.
I posted on the Pajamas site, and provided my email address to their readers.
In this post I tried to avoid the more incendiary issues at hand.
I appreciate the more in depth reporting this post provides when compared to the wikileaks version. I understand that many readers here believe the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is justified due to the 911 attacks, and threat of WMDs. I don’t know that we can ever eradicate all terrorist threats, however, and I am inclined to believe that continued war (it has been 8+ years now) has decreasing benefits.
The incident in question is important because American public opinion may shift away from support of the war if the brutality, justified or not, is shown to them more often.
Personally, I am in favor of bringing all our boys home now. The war is too expensive. For the price we have paid so far we could have given every innocent man, woman, and child Iraqi citizen almost $20,000. If we let the oppressed among them move here they would have shown their gratitude by becoming productive citizens, as many Iraqis who have been able to immigrate have done.
Also, all our soldiers could be at work building and making things rather than breaking them and tearing them down. It could help with economic recovery.
I hope that more videos like this are leaked, and that the American public does shift against war support. I only hope that condemnation of soldiers, who have been voluntarily putting their lives on the line, does not follow. The politicians and their bad decisions are to blame, not the soldiers.
End the war now.
Bring our boys home.
ndsnow@gmail.com