verging_on_random

Selective anguish

February 8, 2007 on 1:34 pm | In Uncategorized |

One British soldier was killed in 2003 in a so-called ‘friendly fire’ incident. It was a big news story here yesterday, an even bigger one in the UK.

Former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle accused the US military of a “cover-up” and said the airmen should be brought to justice.

“I think the pilots should be held to account, they would be under any other circumstances,” he said.

“If it was American soldiers that had been killed these American pilots would have been held to account but because of the international dimension they haven’t.

“I think it is a cover-up. There’s no doubt about it.”

Then again ‘if it was Iraqi civilians that had been killed’, the American pilots would not have rated even a mention.

I wonder how many Iraqis have been killed over the last three years because of pilot error, or intelligence error, or equipment malfunction, or just plain bad luck? Week after week we’ve seen pictures of bodies of women and children killed in air raids. I doubt that anybody holds a coronial inquiry into their deaths. No-one reviews in-flight videos to see if all due care was taken to make sure that the right people got blown away.

People in the Arab world must be aware of this repugnant double standard that values the lives of Coalition soldiers so much more highly than the lives of Iraqis. It is reinforced in news coverage every day, even in footage of the casual way soldiers kick in the doors of Iraqi homes. I wonder how often they say “Oh sorry, wrong house.”

And yet we still read the endless propaganda about how Muslims hate us because of our freedoms, or because in their eyes we’re degenerate, or because they’re maniacs on jihad. How about a much simpler explanation … they hate us cos we treat them like shit.

UPDATE: for a discussion of the use of air power in Iraq go here.