The current situation was in a war zone. The one you speak of was not.
The point is, it's not the military situation that's the problem: it's the political situation. What happened at this checkpoint took place in a DMZ under combat conditions. Those pilots were flying in friendly times and in a friendly country, when they deicided to go hotdogging (highway to the danger zone, right?) and ended up killing a lot of innocent people in a particularly gruesome fashion. They did it, they had taken a video of it, destroyed the video after the fact, and got off. What happened then was a lot worse than this situation. When somebody does swing for this, it's going to be more about the event of 1999 than some journalist getting shot at at some checkpoint in Iraq.