Dear Shadow minister,

You wrote;

“For example the soldiers shooting at protesters outside a school, were the protesters shooting at the soldiers? The hospital in Fallujah was purportedly being used as a base by the insurgents, and given that most of the civilians had evacuated and that there were 50 000+ heavily armed combatants trying to kill each other, I doubt that normal operations there were possible.”

What a bloody lame response.

I know a typical tactic of yours is to kick the can down the road as fast as you can when it gets the least bit sticky but this is pretty woeful.

Let me draw you back to the fact that the US occupied the school and used it as a military base and did the same with the hospital. This is something you said was a war crime when Hamas supposedly did it. These were both operational decisions not spur of the moment.

Why is it legitimate for the US forces to act in a way that would normally have them condemned as war criminals in your eyes?

Dare we mention the "fracas" visited upon our not too distant neighbours the West Papuans ? Many soirees, cross border incidents and skirmishes over the past 30 years or so into their territory by our own AustCam clad forces and SFA said about that...just a "good training environment" within a short C130 flight from Darwin or Townsville. Good value for the taxpayers too I'd reckon.

Maybe it's that decapitated & disembowelled activists with fuzzy hairdos aren't the 'flavour of the month', or kids burnt alive in their haus sak saks just simply aren't as newsworthy as places with kids living in 'other' places with lots of oil to fight over getting their limbs removed by surgically precise bomb strikes?

Certainly money well spent by the likes of the Indonesian government, & the miners in Freeport and its environs.

SAS doesn't stand for Saturdays And Sundays either...

But Aunty can't or won't report anything about that, perhaps it's just too sensitive or politically inconvenient to touch...nothing like the smell of hypocrisy in the morning...the smell of: Caaarnbra at its finest !

SteeleRedux, while we're on things military, bullets, ordinance & stuff, why is it that most Australians are unaware that several Australian jurisdictions state/territory police forces within the Special Operation/Tactical Response wings still use ammunition of a type banned under the Geneva Convention?

Simple answer: because policing in a domestic environment is not a "warlike activity" thus they are not bound by Geneva Convention or Hague Convention rules & principles, therefore they can use expanding type projectiles in "operations" as deemed necessary by the relevant police commissioner of the day.

So at the end of the day it's not ok for civilians (or enemy combatants either) to be shot by soldiers using expanding bullets in warfare or whilst on military operations...say overseas - but it is ok for your local TRG sniper to ventilate you (a civilian) with an expanding bullet if you're holding up the local Westpac branch.

Funny you might say, peculiar even that the silence from Human Rights groups, various basket weaving & rainbow flag wavers etc & The Greens for one instance, on this matter is deafening...how is that ?

As a pacifists I am always intrigued how the warmongers of this world have devised a "civilized" set of rules (the Geneva Convention) as to how state sanctioned murder should be conducted.

Thou shall freely blow his head off in a civilized manner, but they shall not gas him with poison gas, that being extremely uncivilized. Interesting.

SR,

I shrugged off the comparison between Hamas hiding munitions and soldiers in a school full of children as human shields and the US using school buildings (devoid of children) as barracks, as I seriously didn't believe you could be that stupid.

Do you seriously think that the Geneva convention covers buildings?

For god's sake grow up. I have yet to see one shred of evidence from you that Molan committed war crimes.

I have been following the Middle East situation as I am sure most of the contributors here. i usually, that is, more than 50% of the time, disagree with the Greens over matters of Defence policy or general administration of borders, immigration and policing - finding them invariably idealistic. But in the case of Jim Molan I find myself on their side. The general has kicked an own goal by tweeting from a right wing blog which Trump did but apologised for. This sort of thing aids Islamic fundamentalists and extremism. Secondly, I hate Islamic extremism very much and think the Greens have traditionally been too soft on it but the actions of Jim Molan while he was leading and conducting and now ideologically defending the 'coalition of the willing's' actions in Iraq has done more to lead to the very Islamic extremism he so condemns in all his and his party's posturing. Like Nixon and Kissinger in Cambodia during the 1970s extensive bombing of Cambodia leading to the genocidal, iconoclastic Pol Pot and the Kymer Rouge, the actions of the US, the UK, Australia and allies in the ill-fated war in Iraq have created the conditions for the rise of Islamic State. Well bloody done Jim!! i'm glad you aren't my boss and I wouldn't want my kids to serve in the military with bloody idiots like you in charge and now you want to go in and create havoc generally in the government of this country as well.