Wow, that's a good interview. Surprisingly good. That guy was amazingly coherent and articulate about the whole experience and how the media reported it.
I still think most of the blame lies with the officers and the engagement policy, not the pilots. I haven't seen anything that suggests these particular Apache guys were sadistic lunatics. You're in a helicopter, you've got massive firepower but are also vulnerable to some guy hiding in an alley with a shoulder-mounted RPG. You get a call on the radio to go to such-and-such address because there are bad guys with guns there. You show up . . . you know, these guys have hammers. If you send them to a location and tell them to hit everything that looks like it might be a nail, this is what's going to happen.
This is an eternal Fog Of War issue. In Vietnam, if you were getting your ass kicked or couldn't get past an enemy group out in the jungle or hidden in a village, and you called for air support . . . they torched and/or blew up the whole area. Most of the time, they couldn't really see exactly what they were doing, who they were shooting at, and they couldn't target their weapons with enormous precision. Meanwhile, some guy on the ground is calling them to come save the day. They rely on information from the ground and do the best they can. Often -- way too often -- it's a little bit heroic and a lot disaster. The soldiers who are there say That's War, and their officers tell them Good Job, and they go on.
Nowadays, we have a lot more recording and reporting of this shit. It's not so much that war has changed as that it's harder to lie about it. It's ALWAYS been this unpleasant, even if not always because of the same exact technologies. The moral is to not have wars when you don't need them, and to be sure not to use more force than you have to. Still, it's far cheaper and faster to blow up a neighborhood than to police it, and our troops are not trained to be police.
One big difference right now is that the military has a lot more information at their disposal. But making sense of it and making the best use of it remains illusive. Still, they have to do what they're told to do. I've seen several films of gunships attacking targets where, frankly, the guy pulling the trigger can't possibly be sure who that is. You've got brilliant infrared and GPS, so you know you're in the place you were told to go to and you know you're definitely hitting someone, and with heavy weapons you damned well know they're dying. But you have no way of knowing who that is. You're relying on the information given you. And day after day, you become desensitized. Hit that, kill him, blow that up, whatever.
We're doing the occupation thing all wrong. Some colonial powers have done extensive occupation successfully. The Brits and Romans, for instance. Others have done it really badly. We're not so hot at it, but we're better than the Russians. You can't afford to occupy a conquered nation unless the colony pays for its own colonization. We blew Iraq up, and did it really have much to offer economically besides oil, anyway? Could we have taxed their economy to cover our military expenditures? Forget about the cost of rebuilding their country. And what ever happened to those oil billions we were supposed to tax and recoup? I haven't heard about those in like five years.
Go figure.
