War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan

War crimes, massacres, and, as Al Jazeera properly calls it,
"collateral murder," are all part of the US involvement in Iraq and
Afghanistan since 2001.

The release last week of the Wikileaks video,
thirty-eight grisly minutes long, of US airmen casually slaughtering a
dozen Iraqis in 2007 -- including two Reuters newsmen -- puts it into
focus not because it shows us something we didn't know, but because we
can watch it unfold in real time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned
down from above in a hellish rain of fire.

The events in Iraq, nearly three years old, were repeated this week
in Afghanistan, when trigger-happy US soldiers slaughtered five Afghans
cruising along on a huge, comfortable civilian bus near Kandahar.

As the New York Timesreports:

"American troops raked a large passenger bus with
gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, killing and wounding
civilians, and igniting angry anti-American demonstrations in a city
where winning over Afghan support is pivotal to the war effort."

The Kandahar incident is only one of many, of course. Over the past
year, dozens of Afghans have similarly died in checkpoint and roadside
killings. Not one, not a single one, of these murders involved hostile
forces. In other words, when the smoke and dust cleared, in all of the
cases over the past year the bodies recovered were those of innocents.

As General McChrystal himself recently said:

"We really ask a lot of our young service people out on
checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid
decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge,
in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have
engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it
turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in
many cases, had families in it."

My question is: if so, then why aren't the rules of engagement altered?
Why is it that US forces can fire wildly at an approaching vehicle, if
in none of the cases that have happened thus far were there hostile
forces involved?

In the Iraq case, as revealed in the stunning Wikileaks video, a
group of eight men on a Baghdad street, in plain sunlight, is shot to
pieces under withering fire from above. Then, when a van carrying four
or five other men arrives to pick up a wounded man who is crawling
painfully along the gutter, the van too is blasted to smithereens when
the airmen request permission to "engage."

An analysis by Politifact takes
apart Secretary of Defense Gates' callous assertion that the murders
were "unfortunate" and "should not have any lasting consequences."
We've already investigated this, he said, so what's the big deal?

The military's rationale for the slaughter is that US forces a few
hundred yards away had taken small arms fire, and so the airmen in the
copters circling above concluded that the men they'd seen carrying what
they thought were weapons and RPGs -- although the "RPG" turned out to
be a cameraman's telephoto lens -- were bad guys who could be shot to
pieces at will. There was, of course, no evidence at all that the dozen
or so Iraqis butchered were involved in what may or may not have been a
shooting incident nearby. But, you know -- war is hell.

Politifact, to its discredit, defends Gates on these grounds, quoting David Finkel, a Washington Post reporter and author of The Good Soldiers, who writes in blase defense of the slaughter:

"What's helpful to understand is that, contrary to some
interpretations that this was an attack on some people walking down the
street on a nice day, the day was anything but that. It happened in the
midst of a large operation to clear an area where U.S. soldiers had
been getting shot at, injured, and killed with increasing frequency.
What the Reuters guys walked into was the very worst part, where the
morning had been a series of RPG attacks and running gun battles.

"More context. You're seeing an edited version of the video. The
full video runs much longer. And it doesn't have the benefit of
hindsight, in this case zooming in on the van and seeing those two
children. The helicopters were perhaps a mile away. And as all of this
unfolded, it was unclear to the soldiers involved whether the van was a
van of good Samaritans or of insurgents showing up to rescue a wounded
comrade. I bring these things up not to excuse the soldiers but to
emphasize some of the real-time blurriness of those moments.

"If you were to see the full video, you would see a person carrying an
RPG launcher as he walked down the street as part of the group. Another
was armed as well, as I recall. Also, if you had the unfortunate luck
to be on site afterwards, you would have seen that one of the dead in
the group was lying on top of a launcher. Because of that and some
other things, EOD -- the Hurt Locker guys, I guess -- had to come in
and secure the site. And again, I'm not trying to excuse what happened.
But there was more to it for you to consider than what was in the
released video."

Finkel, who apparently is not going to write a sequel to his book called The Bad Soldiers, cavelierly dismisses the deaths of a dozen Iraqis as something that happens in the "real-time blurriness of those moments."

In Afghanistan, the repeated killings of innocent civilians has angered
an embittered President Karzai, who has strongly and repeatedly
condemned the killings of Afghan citizens by American troops. In a Washington Post story today, "Shooting by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan fuels Karzai's anger," the paper reports:

"Twelve days before President Hamid Karzai denounced
the behavior of Western countries in Afghanistan, he met a 4-year-old
boy at the Tarin Kowt civilian hospital in the south.

"The boy had lost his legs in a February airstrike by U.S. Special
Operations forces helicopters that killed more than 20 civilians.
Karzai scooped him up from his mattress and walked out to the hospital
courtyard, according to three witnesses. 'Who injured you?' the
president asked as helicopters passed overhead. The boy, crying
alongside his relatives, pointed at the sky.

"The tears and rage Karzai encountered in that hospital in Uruzgan
province lingered with him, according to several aides. It was one
provocation amid a string of recent political disappointments that they
said has helped fuel the president's emotional outpouring against the
West and prompted a brief crisis in his relations with the United
States. It was also a reminder that civilian casualties in Afghanistan
have political reverberations far beyond the sites of the killings."

But I suppose Finkel can justify that one, too.