Murder or just damage, it is collateral to the Big Mistake

It is surely gut-wrenching and disturbing -- particularly if you know the outcome that resulted in two dead Reuters empoyees and two seriously wounded (at least) children. But as I watched the video leaked to Wikileaks, I found myself getting angry, but not at the pilot and gunner in the Apache or the U.S. soldiers who arrived after the slaughter. And I don't think it was a "cover-up," in the sense of covering up for some criminal acts on the parts of the actors.

I found, instead, agreeing with this guy -- if the videos weren't annotated, it would be hard to tell if a camera's telephoto lens were an RPG. The guys in the helicopter didn't have a guide to who and who might not be planning to ambush a convoy rumbling in their direction. There were, clearly, AK47s in the picture. To that last point, many bloggers complain that it is no crime to carry a weapon in Iraq (or much of the U.S.) and that the targets seemed "relaxed." I don't know. In fact, we still don't know what was going on or why the Reuters people were there and why they hadn't alerted the U.S. military in the area.

Instead, my anger -- the anger that led me to start this fucking place -- is at the fact that our military was...is...fighting an unnecessary war, for bullshit reasons, and for an undefined mission. They are operating in urban areas, in a culture they don't understand, a language they don't speak. And 2007, when the video was taken, was during the "surge" when violence was peaking. To his credit, perhaps, I think Andrew Sullivan understands that for all his horror and disgust with the "Lies of the Pentagon," as a supporter of invading Iraq he should not now point at the men in the Apache and yell "war criminals." Unless he's willing to accept that moniker on himself as well, since he and others liked him helped to create a situation where this sort of thing is inevitable. Fallows writes,

It is right to be shocked at the violence in this footage, as we are shocked when an especially hard hit in a football game leaves a player motionless on the field. But the violence behind that hard hit is one millimeter away from what the football players are praised and rewarded for doing. The decision to gun down Iraqi civilians in real-time pressure and ambiguous circumstances ("Is that a gun?" "Are they hauling a wounded terrorist away? Can we get clearance to 'engage' right now????") is one millimeter away from the alert and aggressive warrior spirit for which troops are honored and trained. Ideally, every warrior would always know the exact line that separates just enough violence from too much. They can't know that in real time, which is why no war, even the most necessary and justified, has ever been "clean."

We could not know that this episode would occur. But we could be sure that something like it would. It's not even a matter of "To will the end is to will the means." Rather the point is: You enter these circumstances, sooner or later you get these results.

A failure of tragic imagination is what I most criticized in war supporters in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and it was much of the reason I opposed the war. We can't do anything about that decision now. But this new footage is worth bearing in mind as we face the next decision -- about bombing Iran, let's say; or extending the anti-Taliban fight into Pakistan; or how long to remain in Afghanistan.

Again, and I may be revoking my lefty blogger credentials to write this, but I think that if the Pentagon is "covering-up" this incident, they are doing so not because they think it's a war crime, but rather because it implicates the entire ends justifies the means doctrine that led to this and I'm sure many other similar incidents in the first place.