This undocumented vid is flying around the net. Not sure what to make of it. FYI.
Spotted by AndrewJ
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What a mess. You can see from the video how being in Iraq could bring a terrible new meaning to the phrase “Shit Happens”. Some of the warning shots looked like they were fifty percent warning and fifty percent “if this gets down to us vs. them it is gonna be them”. That may not be noble, but it is understandable. I haven’t found any mention in any article saying if all this happened on a two mile drive to pick up lunch or if this was a “best of Baghdad” series shot over weeks of months. The shooter, depending on how badly on edge he was at the time, could have been trigger happy or have been showing a good deal of restraint. One last thing, to the guy driving the Mercedes. If you take your hands off the wheel of damn near any Mercedes, in any condition and slam down on the brakes as hard as you want, it will come to a stop in a straight line and not in the trunk of a taxi. Again, what a mess.
Private military contractors (PMCs) = mercenaries. Same new speak as Pre-owned cars vs used cars. PMC is just more sanitary and PC.
This is just another example of the fact we have already LOST this arrogant blunder of imperialism for the sake of oil.
Nobody in our government has the courage to ever admit defeat, or that they we’re wrong, and more Americans have to die for their hubris.
Two observations:
1) The comments about this video lacking context are absolutely right. Is this Jimmy and Billy Merc shooting up Baghdad after a frustrating day at the war, or are these video excerpts of military operations against known or suspected opposition forces? We have no way of knowing. The author of the video, through music, scene and audio selection, clearly has an agenda in mind — what we don’t know is if what got cut out were conversations like — “No that’s not the target we are looking for…”; or “Yes commander, we are now in front of the white Toyota and will engage…”
2) The videos are disturbing because they illustrate the realities of war first-hand. Not Hollywood-style shoot-em-up — this is real — real people were shot, possibly killed in that video, real civilians were in harm’s way and likely injured because the operation took place in civilian setting. Americans are insulated from the realities of warfare — we read disproportionately little about the collateral damage that our efforts have had. We are fighting a war on terrorism, but what would we be saying about the way the war has been prosecuted if it were being fought on our soil as opposed to in the Middle East?
I’m not saying that we haven’t tried to reduce casualties — the US is increasingly effective at fighting with fewer and fewer casualties. But even so, the civilian casualty numbers are huge.
The point is, WE chose to make this a full-scale war, WE chose where to fight this war, WE chose the means with which to respond to the terrorist threat. There were and are other approaches, and the world holds the US accountable for the choices it makes.