Aside from the larger issue being debated here, I think you're guilty of operating under an outdated assumption. The US forces in Iraq have not been 'foreign occupiers' for quite some time. They are there at the will of the democratically elected Iraqi government in a deployment sanctioned by the UN Security Council. It should be possible to acknowledge this fact even while disagreeing with the presence of US forces in Iraq.
Nor do I believe the US military had an obligation to release the video, although they did have an obligation to conduct a serious and thorough investigation and make the results and key aspects of it public. I think it's clear this didn't happen, but it did not justify Wikileaks's heavily edited and flawed version of the video.
I just pointed out that calling them 'foreign occupiers' is not accurate. Although as a practical matter it's difficult for the Iraqis to boot the US out because of the power vacuum that would result, that does not change the fact that under the current legal situation the US forces are there at the behest of the Iraqi government and that they would have to leave if requested to do so.
For what it's worth I did not claim that the locals invited them in. That one's a straw man.
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Aside from the larger issue being debated here, I think you're guilty of operating under an outdated assumption. The US forces in Iraq have not been 'foreign occupiers' for quite some time. They are there at the will of the democratically elected Iraqi government in a deployment sanctioned by the UN Security Council. It should be possible to acknowledge this fact even while disagreeing with the presence of US forces in Iraq.
Nor do I believe the US military had an obligation to release the video, although they did have an obligation to conduct a serious and thorough investigation and make the results and key aspects of it public. I think it's clear this didn't happen, but it did not justify Wikileaks's heavily edited and flawed version of the video.
> They are there at the will of the democratically elected Iraqi government in a deployment sanctioned by the UN Security Council.
Please. The alternative is a total power vacuum, you can't really say that they're there because the locals invited them in.
I just pointed out that calling them 'foreign occupiers' is not accurate. Although as a practical matter it's difficult for the Iraqis to boot the US out because of the power vacuum that would result, that does not change the fact that under the current legal situation the US forces are there at the behest of the Iraqi government and that they would have to leave if requested to do so.
For what it's worth I did not claim that the locals invited them in. That one's a straw man.