It's Baghdad, everyone has AKs. It's not highlighted because it's completely orthogonal to the topic at hand. The mere presence of AKs has never been carte blanche for use of force in Iraq.
>Gabriel Schoenfeld, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, said of the airstrike:
>It is precisely the presence of weapons, including RPGs, that goes a long distance toward explaining why cameramen for Reuters—pointing television cameras around corners in a battle zone—were readily mistaken by our gunships for insurgents. The video makes plain that in this incident, as in almost all military encounters in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers are up against forces that do not wear uniforms—a violation of international law precisely because it places innocent civilians in jeopardy. Responsibility for civilian deaths in such encounters rests with those who violate the rules of war. The Wikileaks videos also do not reveal the hundreds upon hundreds of cases in which American forces refrain from attacking targets precisely because civilians are in harm's way.
> It is precisely the presence of weapons, including RPGs, that goes a long distance toward explaining why cameramen for Reuters—pointing television cameras around corners in a battle zone—were readily mistaken by our gunships for insurgents.
There weren't RPGs, and even if there were, the presence of RPGs have never been a valid cause for use of force under any Iraq ROE. It's not just international law that was broken, but internal US military regulations on the matter as well.
> The video makes plain that in this incident, as in almost all military encounters in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers are up against forces that do not wear uniforms—a violation of international law precisely because it places innocent civilians in jeopardy. Responsibility for civilian deaths in such encounters rests with those who violate the rules of war.
The other side committing war crimes is not carte blanche for you to do so as well.
> The Wikileaks videos also do not reveal the hundreds upon hundreds of cases in which American forces refrain from attacking targets precisely because civilians are in harm's way.
'We should get a pass on war crimes because of all those other times we didn't commit war crimes (or didn't get caught).' I don't think they even tried that specious of an argument during Nuremberg.
