Field executions

The URL is far too long, so a quote will have to do: (AP)“...The shooting Saturday was videotaped by pool correspondent Kevin Sites of NBC television, who said three other previously wounded prisoners in the mosque apparently also had been shot again by the Marines inside the mosque.”

My heartfelt condolences to the next-of-kin. May your brothers and sons and fathers make their way swiftly to paradise.

I realize that when Moslems are killed in battle, the next-of-kin want the bodies to be buried within 24 hours with their heads pointing towards Mecca. I am sorry for the disrespectful way in which the coalition has handled this.

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between malice and stupidity. There is an old saying something to the effect of "never ascribe to malice what is more simply explained by stupidity".

I think we have both going on here. Given a number of field executions recorded on-camera by different reporters on different days, and assuming that for each one we know about there are at least a few we don't, we can safely assume that coalition troops were at least under orders to produce some bodycount, or perhaps even given orders not to take prisoners. It has happened before, and there was a lot of propaganda before the assault on Fallujah that a high body count was considered strategically desireable, to break the spirit of the resistence.

That part is malice.

Carrying out field executions on-camera, on the other hand, is stupidity. I realize that the coalition leadership is intentionally provoking violent conflict to satisfy some sort of “clash of civilizations” type of culling of the herd, but it would make more sense for their atrocities to appear on Arab-language television, not on NBC. They're supposed to be breaking the wills of the Iraqis, not the brainwashed Americans who think we're dropping love-bombs. I expect damage control and spin from all the usual suspects over the next few days; the AP story was significantly altered within a few minutes of my having downloaded the first story.

My guess is that they were trying to get “heroic” videos for propaganda purposes, but their stunt backfired badly when the right hand didn't quite realize what the left hand was up to.

That was the consequence of another attribute of the coalition leadership: conceit.