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This post by the Blogger Formerly Known as Calpundit links to a video of US soldiers in a helicopter machine-gunning three Iraqis into bloody piles of meat. You can't see the meat because it's a pixelated black and white image--looks just like a cool video game, or a Tom Clancy movie. Two of the Iraqis are killed instantly. Another crawls out from under a truck and starts a kind of agonized, flopping roll across the ground--obviously he's wounded and unable to stand. One of the soldiers calmly says "hit him," and we see him also splattered by gunfire from the helicopter.
I'm not sure which is more disgusting, the video or the fact that Kevin Drum and the majority of commenters on his blog
can't make up their minds if what we're seeing is bad or good. Since the US invaded Iraq without cause, thus making an insurgency against foreign occupiers justified in the eyes of most of the world, it's hard to understand how Drum's obviously well-educated, center-left commenters can say things like "it's war" or "they're just kids" about this cold blooded killing, especially of
the wounded man. Those pilots did have another option: it's called flying back to base and saying "I don't want to do this shit anymore." Call me naive, but there it is.