In Defense Of The Indefensible

The usual suspects on the right are working overtime in order to justify yesterday's bombshell video showing US soldiers killing two Reuters journalists in Baghdad along with civilians including children in 2007.  There's no defending this, but the Wingers try anyway.  First up:  Weekly Standard's Bill Roggio:

Baghdad in July 2007 was a very violent place, and the neighborhoods of Sadr City and New Baghdad were breeding grounds for the Mahdi Army and associated Iranian-backed Shia terror groups. The city was a war zone. To describe the attack you see in the video as "murder" is a sensationalist gimmick that succeeded in driving tons of media attention and traffic to Wikileaks' website.

Everyone was a target, you see.  Who's stupid enough to live in a war zone with kids?  They should have just moved.  Stupid Iraqis, why did you get in the way of our bullets of justice?  Cap'n Crunch also is eager to blame the Reuters journalists.

War correspondents take huge risks to bring news of a war to readers far away.  What this shows is just how risky it is to embed with terrorists, especially when their enemy controls the air.  War is not the same thing as law enforcement; the US forces had no responsibility for identifying each member of the group and determining their mens rea.  Legitimate rescue operations would have included markings on the vehicle and on uniforms to let hostile forces know to hold fire, and in the absence of that, the hostile forces have every reason to consider the second support group as a legitimate target as well.   It’s heartbreaking for the families of these journalists, but this isn’t “collateral murder” — it’s war.

The funny part is Ed bandying about rules of engagement and what constitutes a legitimate rescue operation in a city shattered by a war we started by invading the country illegally in the first god damn place.  But the cake is taken by Rusty Shackleford over at the Jawa Report:

So, the helicopter pilot and ground controllers see armed men with a convoy approaching and taking fire and .... Wiki Leak has the nerve to call this murder?

They've even embedded it on a site they call "Collateral Murder."

These people are beyond stupid, they're evil.

Worst case scenario this is a few innocent being accidentally killed in the fog of war.

But the video doesn't even appear to be worst case scenario. It appears, in fact, that the video shows armed insurgents engaging or about to engage US troops. The Reuters camera men had embedded themselves with the insurgents. This makes them enemy combatants themselves and should have been shot.

He doesn't even try to throw up a false RoE argument, he's just all for shooting journalists covering "terrorists" of which everybody who wasn't a coalition soldier in 2007 in Baghdad apparently qualified as.  Shoot them all, let God sort them out.  It's stupid and evil to consider these people anything other than legitimate war zone targets, to even question our right to end the lives of any Iraqi we choose.

And this continues in both Iraq and Afghanistan today.

And these guys can't comprehend why they hate us, only that they are the faceless, Muslim enemy.  Reuters puts a face to some of them and is summarily attacked mercilessly by those looking to justify a multi-trillion dollar quagmire.

The defense of the indefensible, indeed.  We should have never been in Baghdad in the first place.