"Yes, but if they are the rules, you can and will be tried for breaking them."
Yes, but the point is that they are wholly ridiculous rules for this type of combat.
Even if we all agree the rules were stupid, they were still the rules, and I don't want the military people breaking the rules set by their superiors. That is the way to chaos.
And I'm not sure if the rules were stupid in this case, I don't know all the facts. The reason you have rules is so that you don't try to make decisions in the middle of a fight that end up being the wrong decisions, decisions that have you fragging and shooting a roomful of unarmed women and children for example.
And yes, our people DIE because of the rules, and that's an unfortunate price paid for being a disciplined and controlled military force fighting in an area where we don't want to kill people to save them.
Nobody cared if we killed all the germans in WW2, they were the enemy. But the "Iraqi people" were NOT the enemy in this war, we were "liberating them". It may well have been stupid, but we wanted to "win them over" and we weren't going to to that by shooting them.