Excellent excellent read that explains what happened that day in a part of Iraq. A few uneducated comments of this poster who has never been in the military:
1. Most people here need to pay heed to R. Scott's posts. He is terse, terser than me and I am terse, but he is on point if you think about what he is saying.
2. Everyone also needs to understand that 9 April is the beginning of a change in Iraq. For month up to then things were calmer and calming down. Then the situation exploded.
3. Per the point that Poohbah and R.Scott were making, it is likely air support was dealing the possibility of colalition troops losing control in al Najaf and other places where Sadr's supporters were causing even more problems. As I remember the Italian or Spanish troops were in very serious trouble and they had trouble defending their base?
4. Newbomb Turk I agree we are paying now for minimizing Iraqi civilian casualties. Had we put these people in the position of post WWII Japanese or Germans where their main worry was getting enough food to survive the winter, they would be much more docile. But this time we want to act as if the problem was the leader not the citizens. In WWII we blamed the Germans and Japanese. I also agree with IDontLikeToPayTaxes that we may be back in Iraq with unconditional surrender demands in two decades as was the case with Germany from 1918 until 1941. I am not saying this is not a risk the US should not have taken, but it is a risk associated with minimizing civilian causualties.
A very interesting post and thread. Too bad old media is not able to cover the war on terror and we have to rely on new media to cover it.
I disagree. See the second to last paragraph of the above reply. All air assets go to the unit actually being over run, which was this convoy at this time.
…WWII Japanese or Germans where their main worry was getting enough food to survive the winter…
Even with this there were problems with the German “werewolves” after the occupation started. It wasn’t widespread, but there were attacks on occupation troops, some were sizable firefights. One was large enough that a town was destroyed because of it.
Our current crop of reporters have little experience with warfare and I doubt any have studied military history. They cover and offer commentary on what they know - blood and atrocities. They are unable to put any story or commentary into a true context, so much is missing.