John Kirby likens Israeli airstrike that killed civilians to US bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan: ‘We did the same thing’
John Kirby likens Israeli airstrike that killed civilians to US bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan: ‘We did the same thing’
“We owned up to it, we investigated it, and we tried to learn from it to make changes,” the White House spokesman said.
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Is he wrong?
Yes, about this in particular
“We owned up to it, we investigated it, and we tried to learn from it to make changes,” Kirby said at Tuesday’s regular White House briefing.
Meanwhile, in reality
SIMON: The military is, I think I can fairly say, proud of all the checks that they have in place, aren't they?
KHAN: Yes. So, in fact, you know, anyone who reads this investigation can easily find the military responses to the questions that we asked. They weren't able to answer everything in terms of, you know, incident-specific remarks. But they did reply to six questions overall. And what they said was that, you know, they take great care, that every single loss of life is something that is regretted and that they take cares that their enemies don't. They also say that, you know, they would disagree with this as a system of impunity. They see this as a model of accountability. Whereas the reporting showed that when you look at these documents and the breakdowns of them, only in two instances in the documents do they show them interviewing survivors and eyewitnesses. And certainly, those lessons learned were never studied in aggregate like this. So it's hard to look at this and to know that they have far more of an ability than I do, or that an organization like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty does, to go and visit these sites and investigate themselves.
[Bolding added]
If he's using it to defend what Israel is doing, yes. Even he says that what the US made were mistakes and it's trying to learn from them.
I mean, what's the positive spin on this?
We're so bad at intel/aiming that we have a 1:2 combatant/civilian kill ratio?
Also there was no actual plan, so the Taliban won in Afghanistan and occupy even parts of the country they didn't have before, and in Iraq it led to the creation of the Islamic State. And Israel itself already has a history of radicalizing Palestinians with their disproportionate responses to Hamas.
Were we right?
I don't think we can say, since it's possible (likely?) that his premises aren't even true.
Israel has already trotted out all of the same "mistakes were made" rhetoric, and certainly if they haven't already, they will state that they'll try to learn from it to make changes. So there's really no difference as far as that goes
The biggest difference I see between the incidents is only relevant to Americans - then it was our government controlling the narrative at home, and now it's a foreign government, failing to control the narrative abroad.
I have little doubt that the narrative about Gaza that Israelis are being fed now is roughly the same as the narrative Americans were being fed about Iraq and Afghanistan, which at least leaves the possibility that the actual underlying realities were and are also roughly the same. And if so, what Kirby is actually doing is not comparing the incidents and responses in and of themselves, but essentially just playing off of the differences between the version the people at home get and the version outsiders get - depending on Americans actually believing the American rhetoric then, even as they don't believe the Israeli rhetoric now. That's really the only way you end up with the notion that America sincerely did regret it and admit to it and set about making changes, rather than just, as Israel is doing now (from an outside perspective) paying lip service to all of that.
So what he's actually possibly demonstrating, certainly inadvertently, is that the US was just as full of shit then as Israel is now.
Pretty bad to admit it outright if you're supposed to lie about stuff like that.
