CBC 2 news led with the following story all day yesterday:
U.S. Marines fleeing an ambush/suicide bombers indiscriminately fired on civilians yesterday in Afghanistan, killing 23…
The wilful and ingenuous ignorance that fuels this tendentious spinning top of a story is mind-blowing. Later on in the story we find out that it was a “convoy” that “barreled down the road”, shooting at random passers-by.
What, exactly, is a “convoy” supposed to do in the event of an ambush? Stop, suck it up and keep taking punishment?
The correct tactic when confronted by an ambush — as has been known for at least the last four thousand years or so, ever since the Hittites swept through the Middle East with their shiny new chariots — is to keep moving. To counter-attack, and if you’re guarding a convoy with some kind of important materiel, like, say, fuel, or food, or medical supplies, to say nothing of self-important journalists, to get the hell out of Dodge. To stop and sit still is simply suicidal.
As for killing civilians, it is very clear under the laws of war that those who hide behind civilians to do their dirty work bear the blame for the civilian casualties that result when their targets have the temerity to fight back and/or use suppressing fires to allow their convoy to escape an ambush. The record of the Taliban and associated types has been a continuous tale of using human shields and outright slaughtering civilians. The record of the U.S. Marines, while by no means perfect, has in general been one of extraordinary professionalism and discipline in adhering strictly to the law of war.
Later in the story, we hear the claim that journalists on the scene had their pictures deleted by military investigators. First of all, given that the media in general seem to have made it a priority to expose sensitive details of military operations even if, nay especially if, they could result in harm to Coalition soldiers, I’m not exactly shedding tears for those “journalists”. Which leads to the second point: how do we know they were “journalists” at all? How did they know to be on the scene? How do we know they weren’t taking pictures so as to document the effectiveness of the ambush & weapons, and the Marines’ tactics in response? They don’t seem to have been detained or harmed in any way — they’re front & center on CBC — it’s just that their pictures, which could have contained such interesting military information, were deleted. I say they got off easy.