And it's sickening.
Thanks to the website WikiLeaks, a video has been leaked to the world media that shows US troops in a helicopter firing indiscriminately onto a group of people, mostly men, walking on a Baghdad street. The 2007 footage, as filmed from the helicopter itself, clearly shows the men being fired upon by the Americans, even after some of them have fallen to the ground in a hail of bullets and are clearly in pain or dying.
It is the modern theatre of war as murder, as seen from a bird's eye view. And the bird is a heinous bird of prey in the shape of an American Apache helicopter.
About a dozen people died in this attack.
Two children were also seriously wounded in the attack, as visible in the footage. Further controversy has been fuelled by the fact that two Reuters reporters were amongst those who came under attack in this footage. Their cameras were mistaken for AK-47s. Both of these journalists died. And Reuters has been looking for answers as to what happened to their two employees for over two years. Now they (and we) know.
The rat-a-tat-tat of the firing on this video clip is a rat-a-tat-tat on our collective conscience.
Julian Assange, editor of WikiLeaks, asks the pointed question as to what constitutes an 'insurgent' in a modern war such as this. He further makes the brilliant assessment that the soldiers in this combat footage speak and behave as if they were playing some war video game. Except the body count in this particular 'game' is very real.
The gung-ho, super-cool American accents, the whirring of the helicopter blades, the aerial footage in staccato grayish black and white - it's like some surreal video playback from a day's shoot on the set of a Hollywood war film like "Black Hawk Down". Except this is all so real, so real, surreal.
The US Army has declared that the soldiers were within their 'Rules of Engagement' and, therefore, cannot be found guilty of any offences or atrocities.
The bastards.
This is sadly just one more example of what has been referred to as 'the fog of war'. This can be paraphrased as meaning "the level of ambiguity in situational awareness as experienced by combatants during a military operation..." That is, in a nutshell, war is crazy and creates so much uncertainty (i.e. the ambiguity referred to here) that heinous and unjust things can easily happen in that uncertainty (i.e. the 'fog') during a war.
War creates terrible uncertainty and in that 'twilight' of reason (as described by the Prussian military analyst, Carl von Clausewitz) decisions have to be made. War being what it is, these are decisions of life and death.
The fog of war, a fog prevalent in just about every military action, is reason enough to doubt the sanity and the validity of war itself. As if reason were needed in the first place?
This does not excuse the actions of these American soldiers. They are not victims. They are the ready and willing henchman of a war that was immoral, amoral and unjustified. Like most wars tend to be, let's face it.
I am sick and tired of soldiers in this modern era, whatever their nationality, being described as 'hero victims' when they are nothing more than paid, professional hitmen. Long gone is the era of mandatory conscription as occurred in the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War, not to mention countless wars before that. At least many of those soldiers could claim that they were forced into combat by their governments. This does not wash in this modern era of professional soldiers.
And even then there were those who refused to fight.
Now in most modern democracies like the US and UK most young men (and women) can just sit back and let others of their generation do the killing. And those who do the fighting are hailed as 'heroes' when they go off to war and as 'hero victims' when they come back in wooden boxes, all because many in these societies are so caught up in their collective guilt at not putting their own lives at risk, amped up by the endless chest-thumping nationalistic nonsense of their media.
But why this guilt? Let the professional soldiers go off and fight these unjust and cynical wars. Let them give up their lives when they get well educated and paid to do so by their military. Let them self-delude themselves into believing that they are 'fighting for their countries', when there is so much information all around them telling them just how stupid and cynical these wars really are. This is not the 'information age' for nothing. They want to be human fodder to justify their lives and possibly even live out their hero complex hang-ups, that's also their problem. I don't do knee-jerk uber-nationalistic emotionalism very well.
Sorry, the only war worth fighting is the just war, the war of (real, tangible) self-defence at the very least. The peacekeeping efforts of a UN force, even if that too at times comes with its own agendas. Fighting the type of mega-cynical, neo-imperial war that has taken place in Iraq since 2003 is simply not worth fighting. You cannot justify that which is indefensible, never mind unjustifiable.
This is not about being anti-American. It's about being pro the living and pro the true meaning of justice and democracy and being accountable for one's actions.
What is the excuse of these modern soldiers, these grunts that have at their disposal weapons of mass destruction of unthinkable destruction and barbarity? Are these the modern warriors so many in warring countries swoon over? Soldiers who see fit to fight in cynical wars, many of them acting out the fantasies and virtual realities of the sickening war video games that they grew up on. It makes my stomach turn that this is where we are as a human species in the second decade of the 21st century.
The soldiers in this disgusting and heart-wrenching video are assuredly not the exceptions in this war. Their actions speak (no, scream) of normative behaviour that is not only blessed by their superiors, but wholly embraced by many of their peers in combat.
The fog of war, in all its sub-human and alienating guise, was clearly alive and well in Iraq.
Do you get my point?
