Because we haven't talked about Iraq enough...

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

This came up on my friend's page this morning.

followed by this .

When Rupert Hamer, the British journalist who served as the Sunday Mirror's war correspondent, was embedded with US forces in Afghanistan and was killed when an IED took out the MRAP he was traveling in, nobody seemed to give much of a shit. No general outcry, no "Those murderers!", no wailing and gnashing of teeth from blogs as different as Balko and BoingBoing.

But when a Reuters journalist is embedded with insurgents in Iraq who are approaching US armored vehicles while armed with weapons specifically designed to destroy such vehicles, and is engaged and killed in their company by a gunship crew who follows rules of engagement and directly asks for permission first, a whole bunch of people just about wet themselves in their eagerness to decry those who killed him.

Why is this?
-"Phanatic"

I have my own take behind the cut but I'm curious about what others have to say.


There is no discernible difference in my eyes, both were killed in action.

The responses to this incident reminds me of the Joker's monologue from "Dark Knight".

Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, it's all "part of the plan"...

...But if one of our Soldiers "The Good Guys", blows up a journalist everyone loses their freaking minds.

An american helicopter crew spotted a group of men gathering near an american convoy.

Weapons are clearly visible, 2 RPGs and a Light Machine-Gun. The standard AQ fire-team everywhere from Afghanistan to Chechnya for the last 15-20 years. Since the insurgents don't wear uniforms this armament and organization is the single best identifier.

They reported the situation and waited for permission to engage.

The enemy was defeated. Additional Insurgents attempted to extract the wounded before they could be captured but in doing so exposed themselves to American forces and were defeated as well.

This is war.

Support it, or oppose it, I won't judge.

All I ask is that you be intellectually honest about it.


Disclamer:
I am an Iraq War vet, and a helicopter crewman to boot, so this story hits a little close-to-home for me.

Edit:
In the interests of "citing sources" here is CENTCOM's official report on the incident.

Comments

[paft.livejournal.com]

I understand it was also invoked during the St. Bartholemew's Day massacre.

Big fan of religious genocide, are you?

[paft.livejournal.com]

In other words, your idea of warfare comes from sitting on your butt in front of a computer and playing games.

[paft.livejournal.com]

e: My idea of warfare comes from soldiers who have been in combat.

I've also known soldiers who've seen combat, and every single one of them considered the geneva conventions -- the rules of war that preclude your Nazi-like "tactics" -- a damned good thing.

[paft.livejournal.com]

The soldiers I knew fought in WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq war. They include people who not only saw active combat, but were taken prisoner.

Believe me, they considered the Geneva conventions a VERY good thing.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Edgy.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

You don't "win" by depriving yourself of the resources being fought over, even in games. Scorched-earth tactics are what you do when you're losing.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

Helped russians to win at in two Great Patriotic Wars

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I think it's also that Americans forget what the end of the Civil War, which saw these tactics unleashed by the Union Army on a wide scale in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, and parts of Virginia meant. The North brought total war to end the conflict and the South decided discretion was the better part of valour....

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

It was only a maneuver they survived the second time was because they literally packed up and moved everything they could, brick by brick and man by man, into the interior. Wasn't a whole lot left to scorch in the end. Even so it hurt them for decades to come. I dunno, a lot of people look at Stalin being ruthless and think it was him being Machiavellian because in the end he did win, but he was a pretty awful military planner who just so happened to have at his disposal the most powerful production center in the hemisphere.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

The same happened in 1812 war (which was also called Great Patriotic before the WWII)

Oh indeed.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

Stalin, being "a pretty awful military planner" still somehow managed to make it against the enemy.
Who happen to be second to none militry planner.
I absolutely enjoy every single letter of this, please carry on.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's a discredit to Uncle Joe. He was an evil bastard, but he was also one of the finest war leaders of World War II, and one of the only dictators to recognize he was a poor strategist and tactician. Stalin rehabilitaed the Soviet Army and oversaw a sweeping rebuilding of it that resulted in a change in three years from the Battle of Brody, where the Soviet military was sent packing to Operation Bagration, where the USSR revived the Deep Penetration Doctrine and dealt the Wehrmacht its single largest-scale defeat of the entire war.

Stalin also proved to be a capable and inspiring war leader who was able to use discretion and issued autocratic meddling by the middle of the war that actually worked. Hitler happened to be a Corporal that took charge of directing a Military-Industrial Complex fighting three great empires all at once and was....inadequate, is a good way to put it, at the task.

The USSR was the single greatest success story of the Allies, not least because Uncle Sam reaped the material benefits of re-armament without half the devastation that hit the UK or the USSR.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Man how did we get into military history chat, crazy.

Yeah, his unwillingness to micromanage was to his credit, something Hitler fortunately lacked. His big accomplishments that really shifted the war were in revving up Soviet industrialization and military production. They won Bagraton in large part because they had like five times the military forces the Germans did and were better supplied, which was an accomplishment in itself.

I guess you could say he was a great military commander in that he was smart enough to not worry about the actual fighting stuff so much as figuring out how to make a billion billion Mosins and T-34s using an economy one generation away from preindustrial agrarianism while his country was being actively genocided by the Wehrmacht. I've never seen or heard anything where WWII Russian military strategy was described as anything but crude, but they didn't really need finesse.

Dunno how that really ties in with the scorched-earth retreat during Barbarossa, that whole early part of the war was mostly them panicking and fucking up everything.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually, that helped the USSR and the Union win the Great Patriotic War and the US Civil War, respectively. Hitler's whole agenda for invading had been the theft of Soviet resources, which the USSR quite effectively denied him. And from a purely pragmatic rationale, there's no reason to torch places like the Shenandoah Valley, one of the breadbaskets of the pre-Civil War South. All the same, without Sherman and Sheridan the war would have creeped on still longer.