Collateral Murder (merged)

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by tater

CCIP, I was thinking in terms of how we viewed that area generally in 2007 when I said "bad guys." Meaning that it was one of the more dangerous parts of town to be in, not that it was all, or even mostly bad guys, just that attacks were staged from there as I recall, and it was a principle area of concern.

It was (is?) walled off, after all, so clearly they had some concerns, no?

I suppose "bad guys" should have been in quotes? <S>

The problem in Sadr city was basically civil ("civil"?) conflict between local militias, not even mostly sunni vs. shia (Sadr city is mostly Shia), but just different Shia groups, Mehdi army being the most powerful of them. And yeah, they were quite happy to kill people that didn't agree with them, whether they were Sunnis, members of other militias, government representatives or US troops. At the same time, of course, the Mehdi army more or less ran all the infrastructure in the areas it controlled - and was composed of and working with the local population.

The problem, really, is that it's the kind of clusterf**k that the US should've kept out of. This is not a "battle" nor even a real civil war. It was a policing scenario and using heavy military ass[ault equipment] to tackle it was fraught with problems from the start. And like I said, the inevitable is seen happening here - instead of effective policing, you get effective killing. From civil life, it's pretty easy to tell that in order to work, the overlap between those two things should be minimal.