US soldiers destroy a mosque, videotape it and cheer.

[theweaselking]

See the video, here

quoth benchilada, who I got it from:

Watch this--and thank city_of_dis for bringing it up--and discuss. Stick with it for the completely superfluous moment at 1 min. 45 seconds. Now pretend that's your church. Your tiny little Methodist church. And that's what they're talking about. Your church. Or your house.

And don't give me any "these are isolated jackasses" comments. How many times do we need to hear that bullshit excuse? What are the odds that they needed to do that? What are the odds that we just HAPPENED to come across "isolated jackasses" in the sky and on the ground at the same time?

How many videos of this shit do we need to see?
How many videos of this shit do we NOT GET TO SEE?

Someone later suggests taking the audio from this and dubbing it over the video of the planes hitting the World Trade Centre. I think that would make the point nicely, yes.

Comments

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

I don't buy into the 'fight them there or at home' crap, which seems to completely miss even the vaguest understanding of guerrilla strategy, especially when you come right out and tell them that's what you're doing, but there's no shortage of good reasons to blow up a mosque. And plenty of bad ones too.

It's a significant tactical position - centrally located; almost always solidly built when the surrounding village may well be currogated-iron shanties that won't stop a sneeze let alone sustained 5.56mm fire; they've got loudspeakers, large central spaces perfect for housing a command center or munitions dump, electricity and water if any place in the town does, and most of the time those cool little towers that make very nice forward observer positions for the entire outlying area; they're emblematic for the resistance (moreso than a church for us - think if our soldiers could protect themselves from shells by wrapping up in a giant American flag, or maybe a mother bearing apple pie); and best of all under the RoE our soldiers cannot touch them. Even in wars where there's no holding back - any of the countless muslim-on-muslim fights that have occurred in North Africa and West Asia in the past fifty years, where one side won't think twice about blowing another side's mosque all to hell - they're treated as nearly ideal logistical centers. We've got it even worse, right now a rebel in the middle of a gun fight can pretty much just run into one and yell 'Base!' in Arabic and our troops will, at the very least, be slowed down by having to get bureaucratic permission before they can chase 'em or shoot at 'em. They're a gigantic liability even before the rebels inevitably stock them full of mortar rounds, because CI warfare is all about what you know and where you can go, and ther current position of mosques makes adds yet another huge limitation to what we can know and where we can hunt the enemy. There's one in every town, and the rebels aren't dumb - if there's rebel activity in a town, odds are they're taking full advantage of the priveliged position of mosques.

Now, keep that in mind, and also the fact that the US Army cannot even search a mosque, let alone blow it all to hell, without a very good reason. To the Iraqis, sure, maybe they're holy sites, but to our troops they are enemy bunkers. Is it really so shocking that, once they've ascertained it's enough of a threat to warrant not only attack this highly regulated, highly politically awkward site, but blowing it up from the air rather than risk the losses they'd take moving in ground troops, they decide to do a thorough job instead of just kinda halfheartedly shoot at it and hope they get lucky and bullseye the enemy emplacement or whatnot on their first try? Is it really so disturbing that some poor Okie who's gone in a year from tuning his dad's tractor on weekends to spending his days at the gun on the moving steel coffins we call Strykers is gonna see a cool explosion and go "whoo!"? Because, let me tell you, that's pretty much my reaction when I see a cool explosion at close range. And I haven't even spent a year or so in the worst place in the world, deprived of any kind of stimulation and getting nearly murdered over and over and over again by the people we can assume to be in that mosque.

This war's fucked-up and should never have happened. But you're not going to convince anybody of that if you go atrocity shopping and pointing out every shot fired as some kind of titanic war crime. And you're certainly not going to win over anybody in the military, or who knows anybody in the military, or knows anything about the military, by hyperventilating over what appears for all the world to be proper execution of military tactics, or making out some poor hick kid who thinks explosions are cool to be an evil monster.