OK. So I am not a big fan of US Marines in Afghanistan descrating Taliban corpses by peeing on them. It's childish, dumb and not the way to win anyone's hearts and minds. And soldier, PUT DOWN THAT CAMERA PHONE!But I have to wonder at the shock and angst of news people and politicians working themselves up over dead soldiers getting urinated on, without a thought that these men had been killed on a complex battlefield. It's OK to kill, we seem to be saying, but not to pee on those you have killed. It's OK to demonize your enemy -- enough to feel OK about putting a bullet into him from long range -- but once he breathes his last, we must let the love begin.
Personally, given the chance to be killed or wee'd on, I'd pick the warm shower.
I have never been in battle, or anywhere near a war zone. I suspect that if I were, and if I was subject to the day and night terror about getting killed by some detested enemy, that I might be tempted to let loose a little if that enemy got his.
My problem is that desecrating the dead speaks volumes about what our soldiers -- and by extension, we -- think about living Afghanis. It's hard to imagine a soldier urinating on the body of a respected advserary. One might even by moved to honor the dead man in some way.
But an Afghani? A raghead? A camel jokey? These people are so far beneath us. They deserve our contempt, or at best our pity.
To reflect on the rationale for the war, or to question the violence that taks so many lives, is considered unpatriotic. Perhaps we protect ourselves against the irrationality of this war by being so appalled at the way some of our troops behave in the field. But for God's sake, war means hurting and maiming and destroying and humiliating. Yet we turn away from those realities, and worse, we console ourselves with tales of cleft palates repaired, or schools built, or puppies saved. You have to wonder what mosters we have become -- to turn a blind eye to death, grief and desolation, yet play the appalled spectator in a violent game we begged to have played.
When Moammar Ghaddafi was killed, so much righteous judgment was leveled against the Libyan fighters who dragged him out of his drain pipe, beat him, shot him and sodomized him. Barbaric! But the NATO flyer who dropped a bomb on his convoy was hardly considered. To blow up someone's ass from 10,000 feet is civilized, but to rape hsi ass at ground level is grotesque. Really.
Friends -- death and war are grotesque, unleashing evil and destruction on guilty and innocent alike. The least we can do is to be honest about it. Whether delivered at the push of a button or at the sharp end of a stick, we must try harder to own the beast within.
You have a point that killing and maiming people is just as bad (if not worse) than any subsequent abuse of the body, but the article seems to ignore the divergent reasonings for the two actions. In bombing, shooting, etc. a soldier, you can at least argue that the aggressor is serving a legitimate military interest; whether or not you think the campaign was justified on a geopolitical level, you can hardly condemn the soldier for prosecuting his duty. In abusing or desecrating the corpse, there's virtually no legitimate goal being accomplished; those Taliban soldiers weren't *more dead* because our guys peed on them.
ReplyDeleteIf it's the fact that the soldiers are present in the first place that irritates you, then you already have a wide base of support and sympathy in the civilian and political spheres. The reason that we don't condemn individual attacks by our military (in an established war zone) is because our political process has agreed to send them there, and therefore we, as a nation, implicitly assent to the violence necessary to complete their objective. This assent lasts until such time as the political process withdraws support from the mission, at which point the killing that (justly) horrifies you is considered as terrible as the abuse we're now horrified by.
The real culprit, I'm saying, would be the process and agents that sent in the troops.
Is there not a higher moral stance than the current a nation's political process? Certainly, in the eyes of a nation at war, killing the enemy is laudable. But this is not the only pespective available, even to citizens of that nation.
ReplyDeleteDoes the attitude of the soldier discharging the bombs matter? IOW, how would it compare if he said "Take that, Sandman!" as he fired on the enemy, as opposed to having a cool, professional demeanor -- just doing his job? You could argue that cooly delivering death is more problematic morally than doing so "honestly" and hot-headedly.
In any case, my point is that it's ironic to get worked up over one way of hating the enemy while funding other ways acceptable.