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Aubrey Soper thinks it is right and proper for helicopter gunships to beat up on Iraqi farmers, Wednesday, October 27, 2004

All Iraqis are fair game

I COMMENT on the analysis of the footage of the farm tractor and trucks being shot up in Iraq at night.

We've learned in Iraq that unarmed civilians walking or driving along peacefully are indistinguishable from explosives-carrying, detonator-equipped human weapons systems that our troops on site cannot afford to gamble their lives on, even though these threats that are outside of our TV-viewing experience. In that locale they also plant explosives along roads to kill occupiers as they drive along, and it would be fairly reasonable, I believe, to refrain from performing this task in broad daylight..

Where you happen to see large and small trucks and a trailer drawn by a farm tractor, I see vehicles that could be used to transport weapons and explosives by the enemy. All of them have their headlights off which fits with clandestine machinations, and they're not taking cover upon the approach of a noisy aircraft which they know would be armed and not arriving to offer roadside assistance.

A typical Iraqi, just like a common footpad, would rely on simple nocturnal darkness to conceal his furtive activities, unaware that IR-equipped gunships could see him and the toasty vehicles just fine, which would explain why these people are not diving for cover.

Disabling the vehicles would leave their operators available to carry off, say, twenty kilos of cargo apiece, which no trained soldier would assume to be agricultural anything, so killing the men with heavy machine gun or light canon fire is militarily defensible, probably prudent, and reasonably efficient.

People in Iraq have cameras, so if they didn't photograph the scene when the sun came up and complain about our slaughtering civilians, I'm not interested in worst case speculation. Now that Iraq's noble knights taken to beheading civilians, I couldn't care less.

Aubrey Soper

Controversy New analysis of the graphic US army gun-camera video of Apache helicopter massacring Iraqi farmers  |  Mpeg Video | our original posting | theirs, Jan 9, 2004 | Robert Fisk

DAVID IRVING writes:

YOU seem to have little understanding of International Law, which is there for the protection of our combattants as much as theirs. You seem to hold that it does not apply to Arabs, just as in the past Americans believed that it did not apply to the Japanese and the Vietnamese. This attitude smells of killer-racism.

On your argument, all farm carts and vehicles (in Iraq that is, not on the prairies of the US Mid West) are legitimate targets, so long as the killer Apache crews are afraid to venture close enough (or even land) to make certain. That does not make for a good harvest in Iraq in the long run. As for the beheadings: the Nick Berg episode appears to have been staged, or at least exploited, by US Army Psywar to get the commander-in-chief (hail to him, on Nov 2) off the Abu Ghraib hook.

Such grisly episodes are very small beer compared to the almost daily onslaught on civilians by US-manufactured cruise missiles, Apache gunfire, and Spectre C-130 gunships firing thousands of rounds of 30mm cannon fire a minute, and the 500-pound high-explosive bombs that are launched, off camera of course, from a very safe altitude at Iraqi civilians (and for that matter at Palestinian civilians too). "Precision targeting," we are told: but then we see the photographs of which you write, and they speak a different language.

Small wonder that the American government in a short space of time has made its subjects the second most hated people on earth: Because the rest of the world sees the images that are withheld from the Americans.

The American people, who coined that wonderful phrase "what goes around..." have already found once, on Sept 11, 2001, how true it is, although they still won't admit it; and they will keep making that mistake until they stop trying to impose the Peace of the Graveyard on the oil-rich Middle East in which they have taken a predatory interest, under whatever pretext.

I guess you could not care less, as you say, because you don't have a son or grandson sent by a war-criminal government to fight the people of Iraq.

I do. And once again, when the good ol' US Army stumbles, just as it did at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, it is the British grenadier, the soldier of the Black Watch, who is now being sent for, to repair the damage (or in modern parlance, put his butt on the line).

 

* Aubrey Soper corrects me on Friday, August 27, 2004 about the armament carried by the Spectre gunship: two M61 20mm Vulcan cannons with 3,000 rounds one L60 40mm Bofors cannon with 256 rounds one M102 105mm howitzer with 100 rounds one 25mm GAU-12 Gatling gun (1,800 rounds per minute) one L60 40mm Bofors cannon (100 shots per minute) and one M102 105mm cannon (6-10 rounds per minute)