I read a lot of the comments on internet and on this forum before watching the video. And when I finally did get around to watching it, my reaction was, “this is it?” Frankly I can’t understand what all the hoopla is all about.

I'm sorry if my post required too much mental agility, moving from one aspect of a topic to another one with a pause of only five days.
It’s not that your posts require mental agility, I think the problem is that your argument seems to shifting. It’s like a defendant arguing in court, “hey I’m innocent, but if you really think I committed the crime, then I’m mentally ill and if you don’t believe that then it was self-defense.”

Keep in mind that the French Gendarmerie has combatant status and belongs to their ministry of defence & military, for example. I have a suspicion that France would have been able to raise a military force of 100,000 troops that can handle such tiny groups of armed suspects more police-like in Iraq if they had tried hard (if they had done the mistake of participating in the war of aggression and subsequent occupation).
You can have all the suspicion about how the Gendarmerie would’ve performed in Iraq but since they’re not there, we’ll never know.

A policeman also needs to do snap judgments sometimes and may be tired.
Nevertheless, we expect him not to kill without a reason that withstands a judge's curiosity - or else he faces and deserves serious problems.
What you seem to be missing is that police officer’s actions are not judged in hindsight after all the facts come out but based on their perception at the moment they had to make the snap judgment. And 99% of the time the police officers are cleared of criminal liability in internal investigations and in court. The average juror might not have a “full working knowledge” of police work but that’s why expert witnesses are brought in to explain laws, policies and realities.
People have been shot by the police for reaching for their wallets, under their seat, etc. A toddler was killed by a SWAT team when her father was using her as a human shield. Another SWAT team raided the wrong house and killed the resident who grabbed his gun probably thinking he was about to be burglarized.

I agree with those that have stated that you can’t use LE policies in a war zone. But if you want to use a police analogy then the pilots can only be judged based on their perceptions at that moment… not based on an obviously edited, enhanced and captioned video. They perceived a threat and they took action.

On a few nice sunny Southern California days, I was stuck conducting tours for guests at the police academy. It was usually some sweet old ladies (and sometimes kids) with nothing better to do on a weekday. And every single time we got to the practice range, I was asked the same question… “why don’t you teach your police officers to shoot suspects in the arm or the leg?” (and one lady asked, “why not shoot the gun out of their hand?” ) And our answer was, “because the officers don’t want to go home in a casket.” See, it’s not that their lives are more important than anyone else’s but they’re also not any less important. They are not throw away people that have the luxury of second guessing themselves when that split second could mean their lives of their partner’s.

Well, SWAT teams would disagree.
They're not allowed, not supposed and not used to go killing people at the next block because there was a shooting incident.
Are you seriously making this analogy? Which SWAT teams are you surveying? Also a great deal of police officers are former military. For instance, LAPD SWAT is like 80%+ former Marines (many from Recon).

A force of roughly 130,000 personnel taking only about two KIA on an average day cannot claim to be in a war that justifies the treatment of 30,000,000 people like "sentenced to immediate death on mere suspicion" because of maybe 50,000 insurgents and at the same time fulfill a mission that IIRC required providing "security".
Yea, I’m gonna go ahead and disagree with your characterization here. And also 50,000 fighters… that’s like a couple of divisions even in a conventional fight. But the fact that they utilize insurgent tactics acts as a force-multiplier.

Also, you keep referencing "low" casualties to define this as not being a war; so what's the magic cut-off number? And how long do these numbers have to be sustained?

You’ve made your disdain for the US clear a long time ago and it seems to me that you had already convicted all American soldiers as war criminals long before this video was released. So, I think we're all just going in circles here.