Gruesome

[q=Talus]Second and more importantly, everyone is the Mosque was an insurgent.[/q]Yep, it's a pretty dirty tactic - insurgents using a sacred site to house weapons and explosives, not to mention the murderers who use those weapons. The Marines' air attack was a pinpoint strike, aimed at the one militant stronghold alone, in order to protect the lives of all the civilians living in the area. They could have gone in with tanks and RPGs, but the protracted fighting would've inevitably cost many innocent lives. Instead, they opted for a single effective blow.

Regardless, the American military is going to get a lot of crap for that. And I guess we deserve it. The cost of those innocent lives is going to be even more criticism and opposition to our presence in Iraq, sadly. But it still had to be done.

The report I read said that there weren't any civilian casualties from the mosque strike. The most innocent lives were lost during the large-scale airstrikes; now that the fighting is almost all on the ground, it's possible to be more selective and precise about where one aims. The terrorists are killing far more innocents these days - their own people, and outsiders who're there with the intent to help.