"Bad people have celebrations, too" - another chapter of winning hearts and minds

I'm not one who generally likes to watch others squirm, but watching the US revise it's denials about having bombed a wedding party now that a video of the wedding is circulating is just too much. Any tiny shred of credibility that the military may have thought it had is... merely the side effect of some medication their spokespeople are on.

How's this for an ineffectual effort? 'Wedding video' clouds US denials (bbc.com, 05/24/04)

"We still don't believe that there was a wedding or a wedding party going on when we hit in the early hours of the morning," the unidentified official was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

"Could there have been some sort of celebration going on earlier? Certainly."

(Emphasis mine.) This mistakenly implies that the world will be much more pleased knowing that a wedding party died in its sleep, rather than during an ongoing wedding celebration. Even this lame effort to pretend that this is what the military's earlier denials meant contradicts official statements, such as the one summarized here (In pictures: Iraq wedding video (bbc.com), stills from wedding video):

US forces maintain they attacked a safehouse for foreign fighters and, until the emergence of the video, insisted there was no evidence of a wedding at the location.

On Friday, US statements made it sound as if the scene was a battleground, and not a celebration with kids present:

[Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt] said earlier: "We sent a ground force in to that location. They were shot at. We returned fire." (Iraqis bury victims of US strike, (bbc.com, 05/20/04))

A little context explaining why the planes came back and bombed the site in the middle of the night might not fit in with the image being portrayed here.

Reporters who actually bothered to go to the scene (U.S. Says Iraq Attack Site Wasn't Wedding, news.yahoo.com 05/24/04) found evidence refuting just about everything stated by the US military:

"There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."

But video that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around the bombed out tent.

An AP reporter and photographer, who interviewed more than a dozen survivors a day after the bombing, were able to identify many of them on the wedding party video, which runs for several hours.

APTN also traveled to Mogr el-Deeb, 250 miles west of Ramadi, the day after the attack to film what the survivors said was the wedding site. A devastated building and remnants of the tent, pots and pans could be seen, along with bits of what appeared to be the remnants of ordnance, one of which bore the marking "ATU-35," similar to those on U.S. bombs.

A water tanker truck can be seen in both the video shot by APTN and the wedding tape obtained from a cousin of the groom.

On Monday, a senior coalition military officer said "we still don't believe there was a wedding going on" and that intelligence showed that only legitimate targets were attacked.

[Emphasis again mine.] Since reporters were able to immediately access the site and make photographic and video comparisons, clearly the military could have performed a similiar investigation of the allegations had it wanted to. Instead, it appears to be releasing conclusions of imaginary investigations performed entirely on a desk in a far-flung office, and then being called on it.

This is not a time when the US military needs to be lying and looking more wicked to the rest of the world.

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing "Bush Speech: Was It Enough?" (washingtonpost.com, 05/25/04) provides an extensive compilation of links and quotes from major media commentary about Bush's Iraq war policy speech last night, many of which are fascinating. (And yes, it includes an interpretation of Bush's pronunciation of the prison central to the abuse scandal.) The link that's making the rounds most in my peer group: a graph indicating Bush's approval rating is at an all-time low (washingtonpost.com).

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There are several very interesting quotes in another post article, primarily the perspectives of American troops in Iraq, including this one:

"I just think it's a lost cause," said Spec. Will Bromley, a gunner who sits inside the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and mans a 25mm cannon whose rounds can blast walls to pieces. "This has become harder than we thought. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein, that's one thing. Getting Iraqis to do what we want is another. It's like we want to give them McDonald's and they might not want McDonald's. They have to want it or we can't give it to them." -- from Soldiers' Doubts Build as Duties Shift, By Daniel Williams (washingtonpost.com, 05/24/04)

The article also details a raid performed by this particular unit, and the mishaps that occur along the way. Such details explain why the troops are demoralized, and why Iraqis who once were relieved at the US presence have grown eager for the US to depart.