In Fallujah the US destroyed over half the homes, displaced 100,000s of people and admitted to using white phosphorus. You are misremembering.
Here is a study into deaths during the ISIS takeover and occupation, and the counter. There was relatively little conflict when ISIS took over, so the low death rates there are unsurprising but somewhat irrelevant. The death rate in the “liberation” is significant.
To me, the point is that war tactics are always murderous to civilians, even for "good" wars -- meaning it had better be an actually justifiable war like WW2, rather than an invented threat like WMDs with the US in Iraq, or a sphere of influence war against NATO with Russia in Ukraine.
You can always find terrible individual incidents, but the systematic rape, mass murder, looting and civilian bombardment by Russia is in no way comparable to the operations of any western army.
Take the murders in Fallujah after those Blackwater guys were killed, which someone raised elsewhere on this thread. It's an appalling incident that the US should be ashamed of, prosecutions were levelled against a whole bunch of the perpetrators but it looks like they mostly got off. The Maywand district murders guys in Afghanistan were properly banged to rights though and there have been plenty of other cases of US soldiers being properly and seriously held accountable for their actions. I don't have exact numbers, but as far as I can tell about 40 US troops faced prosecution for war crimes or abuses as a result of the Iraqi invasion. I'm not saying that's enough, but it's something.
Things like that happened in almost every single town taken by the Russians. Not isolated occurrences, but systematic slaughter of men women and children. Whole families, streets at a time in some cases. Tanks driving around blasting civilian cars and buildings, then driving off piled up with the looted contents from a row of houses. The scale of it is completely out of comparison, and I'm willing to bet not a single one of those Russians will face prosecution or censure of any kind, whatsoever by the Russian authorities. In fact they're giving some of the troops accused of war crimes medals.
And Russia is absolutely committing other cruelties of war on top of the conventional war. I was also excluding that from the discussion, because it wasn't part of the article or the thread thus far. More people die from the conventional stuff too.
Systematic artillery and rocket barrages of schools and hospitals can’t be accidental. They’re not an incidental activity that sometimes happens, it’s far too systematic and ubiquitous to be that. The Russian command knows full well the on the ground massacres are in progress, but they cover them up and claim they are fabricated. That makes them complicit, that’s a tactic or even a strategy.
In comparison the US has a legal and investigative machinery primed to investigate and prosecute their own soldiers for war crimes, and they use it. Again that’s not incidental, it’s part of how they conduct military operations.
So I just flat out disagree, claiming that these excesses aren’t a tactic or part of military strategy sidelines the responsibility of the Russian command in a way I can’t support.
As for the US legal and investigative machinery, its effectiveness is massively inflated. Just like the effectiveness of pre-bombing assessments, etc. See this amazing story (but there are also plenty of more direct examples): https://archive.ph/20220122213311/https://www.nytimes.com/20... If your army involves itself in more and larger conflicts all over the world than any other force, then putting up easily surmountable administrative hurdles does not a moral military make, even relatively.
*However, there's really no point in making my argument since the scuppered talks in April. In practice today, there is no harm from thinking Russia is acting in a uniquely evil way, as there are no talks left to scupper, for various unrelated reasons.
I don't see what that's got to do with it, we are put in the position of having to deal with people like this all the time. Just look at North Korea. Unfortunately it's a political reality because ousting these people isn't always feasible, and sometimes we can in some way limit the damage they're doing by making deals with them.
Just look at Iran, where the nuclear deal was unilaterally torn up by Trump, and the Democrats were so weak and cowed by perceptions of public opinion and the supposed cost in political capital it would take to undo that perception, that they went along with imposing sanctions regardless. So there are real dangers to over-vilification.
Arguably the same already happened to NK/DPRK as well — it’s definitely a brutal place now, but the US has been demonizing it even since when it was actually relatively-speaking more free and peaceful than the US supported dictatorship in the South/ROK.
How many civilians were killed? I'm seeing estimates of only 500-800.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Iraq_...
russia is getting closer every day but they'll take a while to reach it yet. but they are comparable numbers.
If Russia had not been pushed away from Kyiv as dramatically as they were then their numbers would be a lot worse.
Also, Ukraine has better public transport, etc. and a functional government and support from the rest of Europe for its refugees, which has given civilians time and opportunities to relocate.
US Media: We're the bad guys!
US Subject: I'm confused, but I do trust this actor..
Like sure, it is better than carpet bombing, but thats about all.It's nothing like sending in a SWAT team.
> The various howitzers, mortars, and rockets that make up both light and heavy artillery are known in military jargon as “indirect fire.” Though targeting systems have become much more advanced than the days of old — allowing for both greater precision against the enemy and more careful targeting to avoid killing civilians — these weapons unleash incredibly destructive power wherever their munitions land.
...
> The campaign to eject ISIS from Mosul and its surrounding towns was destructive — Iraqis are working to rebuild their homes as they continue to count their dead.
Nobody said it was. The US obviously has massive artillery firepower, both massed fires and precision fires, and using it is of course part of its doctrine. Who are you responding to that you think said it wasn't?
Both light artillery and precision fires were used in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not remotely like in Ukraine where they are using massed fires.
(By the way we can see you editing your comments after you post them.)
I can't see the flagged post you were responding to anymore, but for your post quoted below, the argument doesn't apply to Mosul (not that you were claiming it did, you were making a specific point not a general argument).
> The US was operating a counter-insurgency, so they didn't use major artillery bombardment, and used precision strike if anything but mostly used mechanised infantry and armour on the ground. It was still extremely destructive. Russia are conducting basically conventional warfare, so they're absolutely piling artillery rounds into these cities.
The US and Iraqi forces used conventional warfare and were piling artillery rounds into Mosul, in a similar way to how Russia is using it in Ukraine.
I think this is a little unfair - as far as I understand 'surgical strike' is not a reall military term, and the terminology was used by pundits and politicians to put a spin on current events.
I don't think anyone takes issue with generals using correct terminology, but usualy they aren't the ones giving interviews.
You're debating a term I never used. If you don't like how someone else uses it, then you'll have to ask them about what they mean, because I didn't use it.
Not sure what you mean - that's exactly what it is - do you think 'conventional' has some kind of ethical meaning? If so you're just mistaken about what the term means.
It means along the spectrum it's higher intensity than something like a counter-insurgency operation, or 'sub-threshold' we might say, but it's not as far gone as a nuclear engagement.
"Conventional" means all-out war, army vs army. The problem is that russia is carrying out conventional warfare tactics against a civilian population rather than an opposing army.
What does it do to the opposing army then? And what does that army do in the meantime?
Also it's not meant to be used against human targets. In the military it's intent is as use to create cover via smoke. The smoke launchers on APC's and tanks are WP to create large areas of blocking smoke instantly. as opposed to what smoke grenades do which just kinda spill out color for a while.
Also, If it get's on you, it doesn't extinguish with water. You need to not only cool it but smother it because it will react and start burning when exposed to air.
Allegedly, the US fired such weapons from helicopters in urban areas with a civilian presence.
Do you have a source for the air delivery? I'm only seeing reference to WP artillery which is somehow kosher compared to something dropped from an aircraft.
This entire thread is a distraction though. The article is about urban combat in the context of Russia's war in Ukraine which nobody here wants to discuss for some reason.
"We hadn't yet promised not to do war crimes, so it's ok if we did."
Do you have a source for the air delivery?
There were articles about it at the time. From what I could find just now, the claim about helicopters goes back to an Italian documentary[1]. The use of Mark-77 bombs has been confirmed, but depending on the target, this can be considered justified according to international law (aside from the whole war having been started under false pretenses, of course). That same documentary claimed use of Mark-77 bombs in civilian areas of Baghdad, though (cf [2]).
> This entire thread is a distraction though.
Sure. Let me be clear: The fact that the US military has dirty hands does not absolve non-Western powers of their respective culpabilities. Russia in particular has fielded kill squads performing extrajudicial executions (Chechnya), private armies of brownshirt (Wagner group), and they are responsible for the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since WW2 (first battle of Grozny) with tens of thousand of civilian casualties, and lots of other atrocities I don't remember off-hand. Russia = bad. Satisfied?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah,_The_Hidden_Massacre
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_77_bomb#Use_in_Iraq_and_A...
And the Ukrainians, who have a rich history of manufacturing weapons, etc. have shown some extremely interesting defensive techniques, many of which would qualify as novel.
The heavy use of drones is the most dramatic example of that.
That being said, the article undercuts itself in precisely the way you’ve mentioned since it recognizes towards the end that urban warfare is not new, and further old school methods work as well, if not better, than newer tech.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/22/usa.iraq1
> On 17 May 2011, AFP reported that twenty-one bodies, in black body-bags marked with letters and numbers in Latin script had been recovered from a mass grave in al-Maadhidi cemetery in the center of the city. Fallujah police chief Brigadier General Mahmud al-Essawi said that they had been blindfolded, their legs had been tied and they had suffered gunshot wounds. The Mayor, Adnan Husseini said that the manner of their killing, as well as the body bags, indicated that US forces had been responsible. Both al-Essawi and Husseini agreed that the dead had been killed in 2004. The US military declined to comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah
> The assault was preceded by eight weeks of aerial bombardment. US troops cut off the city's water, power and food supplies, condemned as a violation of the Geneva convention by a UN special rapporteur, who accused occupying forces of "using hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population". Two-thirds of the city's 300,000 residents fled, many to squatters' camps without basic facilities.
> As the siege tightened, the Red Cross, Red Crescent and the media were kept out, while males between the ages of 15 and 55 were kept in. US sources claimed between 600 and 6,000 insurgents were holed up inside the city - which means that the vast majority of the remaining inhabitants were non-combatants.
> The city's main hospital was selected as the first target, the New York Times reported, "because the US military believed it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties". An AP photographer described US helicopters killing a family of five trying to ford a river to safety. "There were American snipers on top of the hospital shooting everyone," said Burhan Fasa'am, a photographer with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. "With no medical supplies, people died from their wounds. Everyone in the street was a target for the Americans."
> The US also deployed incendiary weapons, including white phosphorous. "Usually we keep the gloves on," Captain Erik Krivda said, but "for this operation, we took the gloves off". By the end of operations, the city lay in ruins. Falluja's compensation commissioner has reported that 36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines.
> The collective punishment inflicted on Falluja - with logistical and political support from Britain - was largely masked by the US and British media, which relied on reporters embedded with US troops. The BBC, in particular, offered a sanitised version of the assault: civilian suffering was minimised and the ethics and strategic logic of the attack largely unscrutinised.
> Falluja proved to be yet another of the war's phantom turning points. Violent resistance spread to other cities. In the last two months, Tal-Afar, Haditha, Husaybah - all alleged terrorist havens heavily populated by civilians - have come under the hammer. Falluja is still so heavily patrolled that visitors have described it as "a giant prison". Only a fraction of the promised reconstruction and compensation has materialised.
> Like Jallianwallah Bagh, Guernica, My Lai, Halabja and Grozny, Falluja is a place name that has become a symbol of unconscionable brutality. As the war in Iraq claims more lives, we need to ensure that this atrocity - so recent, so easily erased from public memory - is recognised as an example of the barbarism of nations that call themselves civilised.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/10/usa.iraq
It was very important then, as well as today, for pro-US media to whitewash and ignore what We The People have done to Iraq.