I'm going to preface this comment by a brief statement on my background, because, as you will see, it's quite relevant to the discussion.
I personally campaigned against the US + allies invasion of Iraq. I even stood for election in Australia with that as part of my platform. I door-knocked with petitions to not invade - without much success. I also spent 9 years in the Royal Australian Air Force as an officer, and as such I have had to study the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Armed Combat - officers need to know what is a legal order and what is not a legal order to give.
The thing is, if you are talking about combatants that aren't in uniform, the Geneva Conventions no longer apply - a uniform is the sine qua non of the treaty.
The idea is that combatants put on uniforms - yes, this makes them easier to identify, but the uniform makes it easy to discriminate combatants from non-combatants, thereby protecting non-combatants. When combatants choose to not wear a uniform, they are every bit as responsible for civilian casualties, as those that mistakenly fire upon civilians.
This engagement is a classic example - are the people in the van combatants aiding combatants? or are they good samaritan civilians aiding other innocent civilians? Or are they civilians aiding combatants, or of course, I guess it's possible that they were combatants aiding civilians. The point is that we don't know - even with hindsight we are unable to identify exactly who was who. Soldiers that think they have an RPG that might by lining them up certainly aren't going to be willing to give the people in question the benefit of the doubt. That is the fog of war.
You can complain about the US being in Iraq, but honestly, looking at the video, I don't find anything much that is shocking about the actions of the soldiers - they are perhaps a touch insouciant about the bloody mayhem that they unleash, but I suspect that a lot of that comes from the relief they are feeling at having neutralised what they perceived as a deadly threat. No, I really am not seeing a lot that was wrong in that video. What was wrong was the fact that the US was there in the first place...
One minor quibble followed by more disucssion (please correct me if I'm wrong, poor eyesight kept me out of the military so I never had to learn this for real): legal combatants "put on uniforms", but the threshold for this is fairly low, a distinctive armband is sufficient.
As you note, the rules of the game drastically change when combatants decline to be "legal", although from what little I know the Geneva Conventions do apply, just not in a way an illegal combatant will find appealing.
They are deliberately set up to so that there are strong incentives to stay within them, to not be an illegal combatant ... e.g. as far as the Conventions are concerned (not talking about what our Uniform Code of Military Niceness (UCMJ) or your equivalent says), as I understand it they can be executed out of hand if captured on the battlefield (I assume some due process is required, but only to establish their status).
E.g. as I recall, when we captured around a dozen non-uniformed Nazi saboteurs who'd been landed by sub? in the NE of the US during WWII, they were tried on that basis and then executed.
Similarly, in the GWOT, we are not obligated to treat captured illegal combatants as POWs, and have the option to interrogate them (e.g. Gitmo), something you're not allowed to do to a POW.
I personally campaigned against the US + allies invasion of Iraq. I even stood for election in Australia with that as part of my platform. I door-knocked with petitions to not invade - without much success. I also spent 9 years in the Royal Australian Air Force as an officer, and as such I have had to study the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Armed Combat - officers need to know what is a legal order and what is not a legal order to give.
The thing is, if you are talking about combatants that aren't in uniform, the Geneva Conventions no longer apply - a uniform is the sine qua non of the treaty.
The idea is that combatants put on uniforms - yes, this makes them easier to identify, but the uniform makes it easy to discriminate combatants from non-combatants, thereby protecting non-combatants. When combatants choose to not wear a uniform, they are every bit as responsible for civilian casualties, as those that mistakenly fire upon civilians.
This engagement is a classic example - are the people in the van combatants aiding combatants? or are they good samaritan civilians aiding other innocent civilians? Or are they civilians aiding combatants, or of course, I guess it's possible that they were combatants aiding civilians. The point is that we don't know - even with hindsight we are unable to identify exactly who was who. Soldiers that think they have an RPG that might by lining them up certainly aren't going to be willing to give the people in question the benefit of the doubt. That is the fog of war.
You can complain about the US being in Iraq, but honestly, looking at the video, I don't find anything much that is shocking about the actions of the soldiers - they are perhaps a touch insouciant about the bloody mayhem that they unleash, but I suspect that a lot of that comes from the relief they are feeling at having neutralised what they perceived as a deadly threat. No, I really am not seeing a lot that was wrong in that video. What was wrong was the fact that the US was there in the first place...