Humane treatment of the enemy dead and of prisoners are ideals for every army, and in the case of the American essential and most often followed — but not always. Read E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed, especially his horrifying chapter on Okinawa, for what the Japanese did to American corpses, and for occasional Americans (condemned by Sledge) disfiguring or looting of Japanese corpses.
The urinating Marines will and should be disciplined, and their behavior brought up to other units as behavior to avoid; reprimand is critical, given that Afghanistan is a televised political war that hinges on public support, and such treatment will probably prove counterproductive on the battlefield anyway.
The incident, though, reminds us of the contradictions of the American experience since 9/11, warped by both technology and politics. Abu Ghraib, where a few guards humiliated Iraqi prisoners (most of them terrorists with blood on their hands), was rightly condemned as both immoral and harmful to our mission. But it was a product of poor officer command and control at the prison, and no more a reflection of George Bush’s supposedly aberrant ideology than are urinating Marines of Barack Obama’s Afghan policy — and yet Abu Ghraib was often portrayed in the media as the touchstone to the Bush follies and crimes. One of the advantages of Obama as commander-in-chief (one at least) is that we will not see the Taliban corpses on posters throughout Europe and on American campuses as conveying some existential “truth” as we did the Abu Ghraib photos.
We are in an Orwellian situation when the media seems to think that the unfortunate but common dark side of war is somehow a carry-over from the Bush administration, one that now burdens Laureate Obama with responsibilities not of his own making. We’ve seen that assumption repeatedly over the last three years, when war critic Obama campaigned on blasting the Bush anti-terrorism protocols, then decided as president that they were useful and so adopted or expanded them, and then never quite explained to the American people the turn-around, but most certainly felt he was not a fair target for the anti-war fury he had a bit earlier helped to create but which mysteriously vanished in late January 2009.
One final example of the paradox: While we must ensure that urinating on enemy dead is an isolated and one-time occurrence, it seems to me, in terms of flesh and bone, as morally ambiguous or unambiguous as sending a Predator targeted assassination drone — its use expanded sevenfold by Barack Obama — as judge, jury, and executioner, to take out suspected terrorists — and everyone in their general vicinity, in a foreign country that we are not formally at war with. Selective outrage is a dangerous thing, as most observers would worry as much (or more) about a non-combatant obliterated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as a confessed terrorist water-boarded or a dead non-uniformed fighter urinated upon.
Our cabinet secretaries understandably voiced outrage at the treatment of Taliban dead, given their worry about the reputation of the U.S. armed forces and the politics in the region and simple Western traditions accorded the dead. But just because on the Internet we do not see shocking videos of exploding limbs and charred heads of those who were unlucky enough to be sitting next to a suspected terrorist when the drone missile hits, does not mean it would not be as distasteful a thing to watch as a the current urination videos.
These Marines are warriors - they are trained, practiced and expected to kill our enemies, risking being killed in the process. Warriors have sneered at their fallen enemies since time immemorial - they have drunk their mead out of cups fashioned from the skulls of their foes. They believe they are better, braver, more accomplished at the warrior trade than their enemy - they have to believe that or fail. And our warriors are right to believe that.
When our victorious warriors stand over the fallen bodies of their enemy with triumphant scorn, they are reaffirming their invincibility, their superiority – the simple fact that you the enemy are dead and I the better warrior am not. It is an affirmation that not only vindicates the warrior’s belief in himself and his abilities, but reaffirms the confidence, will and determination to prevail in battles to come. I am superior to my enemy and I will be again.
Of course this manifests itself many ways - some appropriate, some not. Some of the inappropriate manifestations can be criminal – but very few, very seldom. That rarity of criminal acts (mutilation, massacre, etc.) is the residue of ingrained culture, a manifestation of its values that affects battlefield behavior. The non-criminal yet still inappropriate acts (such as urinating on enemy bodies) need to be dealt with too because they are inappropriate to our culture, not because they are criminal acts. Article 15 is exactly the proper and necessary resolution. More importantly, we need not vindicate our enemies' contempt for us with loud, pious politically correct outrage pabulum from our erstwhile leaders to assuage the hurt feeling of those sympathetic to our enemies. It makes you wonder whose side they are on, and what battlefield results they really expect? Spank these warriors - teach them, mature them, teach others by example - and move on. They are combat hardened WARRIORS - not battlefield grief counselors for God's sake.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDr. Mr. Davis Hanson warns against "selective outrage," blind to the irony of his statement. The reason Abu Ghraib was such a disaster was that it was an institutional failure (the entire unit charged with running the prison) that occurred during debates over torture. (I'd also like to see the proof that all of the mistreated prisoners were actually terrorists.)
The Bush Administration's overall handling of the Iraq War was a textbook case of incompetence (well personified by the overconfident and arrogant Donald Rumsfeld). Too few troops for too many years and no strategy for a post-war Iraq until very late in the game.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseVDH: "(most of them terrorists with blood on their hands)"
Kevin Moriarty: "(I'd also like to see the proof that all of the mistreated prisoners were actually terrorists.)"
Hmmm; "most" becomes "all" -- small wonder the trolls have such a hard time with us rascally denizens of The Corner.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, if some were innocent, it only makes the Abu Ghraib atrocities worse, doesn't it?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse>and for occasional Americans (...) disfiguring or looting of Japanese corpses.
All one needs to do is read "The Thin Red Line" to know that. Sheesh.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn the digital age when everybody has a camera, those Marines should have made sure no video mementos were made. Why did they do what they did? I suspect the fact that they are fighting guerrillas who, under the Geneva conventions, aren't legal fighters and as such earn no respect from military men. The Marines should nevertheless be receive non judicial punishment from their commanding officer. End of story.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFirst it is important to remember that while the scale of conflict may be less, Marines are still fighting wars essentially the same as they did in WWII. External Link
I thank the USMC for doing that.
And Allen West is spot on right about this. External Link
Included in that is the Breitbart clip where even lefties like Bill Maher and Rob Reiner say the Marine incident is no big deal (and Maher goes further and says given how bad the Taliban really is, if they were Taliban "so what?"). Debbie Wasserman Schultz in comparsion shows why Allen West was correct in calling her "vile."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnd VDH is spot on about the fake hypocrisy of all of this. Of course Sec of State Hillary is more concerned with the State Department's goals than any individual Marines on the ground. And the Sec of Defense has to parrot what he thinks his boss wants to hear.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOne important distinction, drone attacks and resulting deaths are presumably necessary to achieving our military objective. Urinating on corpses is not. It's a sign of a serious lack of discipline and a sign of a problem in our military.
Japanese in WWII and terrorists today are not the appropriate benchmarks for measuring the behavior of our soldiers. Look to other Western nations with whom we presumably share the same values for comparison. Why is it always Americans who are guilty of this sort of vile behavior, why not the Brits or Canadians or Australians? There may be some instances where they are and obviously we're out there in much larger numbers, but it seems like it's proportionally our guys who commit more of these crimes.
And you can minimize the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but what about the murder of Dilawar and the abuses at Bagram that were implicitly encouraged all the way up the line? Go all the way back to Vietnam and the Mai Lai massacre which was one of the most horrific mass murders and rapes committed by Americans in my lifetime. What was our response? One person out of dozens of perpetrators was convicted of murder, and he served all of three years under house arrest. How does that enforce discipline in our armed forces?
We have a serious problem in our military culture and discipline and should hold ourselves to higher standards. When our military leaders cannot produce those results, they should be replaced at the highest levels.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat saintly military force are you holding up as your ideal, and how have you managed to miss the British prisoner-handling scandals and the Canadian para scandal that resulted in disbanding of their para regiment. Does the Dutch cowardice at Srebenica count? What about the waves of scandals engulfing most of the UN's peacekpeeing contingents?
I'm guessing you don't read any news sources that report negatively on *other* countries' military forces, just those that report negatively on our own. And are you aware that these Marines had just been in a fight for their lives, with people who would multilate them if they (the Marines) were captured? I suspect that if you had a sense of perspective or a moral scale that returned weights other than "outrage" and "indignance," some Marines peeing on some dead Taliban wouldn't be quite so alarming to you. Yeah, it's not good, but I can't exactly equate this to My Lai for some reason.
You seem to have this notion of war as a really sterile, dispassionate affair and of American troops as uniquely bad actors made that way by idiot commanders, a not-uncommon stereotype which simultaneously vilifies our troops, removes moral agency from them, and denies their basic humanity (while slandering their leadership). Unlike the political notions of war (which you seem to hold a version of), actual war is really, really messy, many men experience hatred and searing fear and exhileration and a whole range of intense emotions during it, and both bad and good, and noble and shameful and a lot of morally neutral or ambiguous things happen as a matter of course. If you can't handle those complex facts then you probably ought to stick to video games where the soldiers are super human, their actions are easily controlled by third parties, nobody screams or cries when they are shot or goes into a murderous rage when a buddy is blown up, where all actions are measured and as proportionate as the controllers would like them to be, and the enemies are faceless non-player characters who are primarily useful as a foil to draw out the user's intents and actions. Video games, or perhaps very jingoistic war propaganda films, are the only places you are going to find the sterile war and the morally ideal soldiers you seem to be looking for.
Seriously, you're a conservative imitating a left wing troll, right?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis calls for a general letter of reprimand for these troops - a career killer. The potential optical / political downside to what they did is horrific, and this can't be allowed to stand, there must be repercussions.
On the other hand, the letters of reprimand should be accompanied by a quiet memo indicating the letters are to go in the company commander's local unit personnel file, to be destroyed upon the Marines' move to a new duty station. To ask a man to fight savagely against savages, and then to revert to Marquis of Queensbury Rules immediately upon ceasefire, is asking too much from a moral and practical standpoint.
The difficulting for the commanding general here is squaring the needs of military justice and strategy, with the practicality of managing (likely) good men who briefly committed a misdemeanor. Limiting the public damage and stopping the spread of corpse mistreatment, while at the same time not damaging Marine/soldier morale, may prove tricky.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMore fudging on Mr. Hanson's part. He writes of the Abu Ghraib prisoners that they were "most of them terrorists with blood on their hands". Really? How does Mr. Hanson know that? Did I miss it when the information about each of these prisoners was released? For Mr. Hanson to make such an assertion, he surely has read dossiers on each prisoner. Can he please direct us to where we can find these dossiers and read them ourselves? Or does Mr. Hanson just "know" that "most" of the prisoners were "terrorists", because, after all, why would they be in Abu Ghraib if they weren't? Hope Mr. Hanson never gets to sit on a jury.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI will take issue with your very first statemnet, VDH: "Humane treatment of the enemy dead and of prisoners are ideals for every army...." This is patently not true. Even in this modern age, this is generally only true of those armies that hold to a tradition flowing from Western Civilization. (Your very next sentence contradicts your statement - the Japanese had no compunctions at all about inhumane treatment or desecration of the enemy dead.)
I will also dispute your characterization of the "innocents" who sit down next to an Al Quaeda, only to be reduced to their constituent parts by missile fire from a drone. While it might be true that there are occassional true innocents killed in these actions, most everyone involved is a fellow fighter. The ones who are not are often family members - which in the Afghan mindset makes them fellow fighters. Additionally, I won't worry overmuch about the loss of innocent life that is occassioned by them hiding behind women and children. If you place an anti-aircraft emplacement on a hospital roof, expect for your sick to suffer as I eliminate it with a kinetic weapon. I *might* find another way to eliminate it, but I am not required to, and I will do so only if other priorities and risk factors allow me to. I am certain that we often do not "pull the trigger" with respect to drone attacks because of the presence of innocents.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseStrange that our so pious and squeamish media never show the stacked truckloads of mangled corpses that result from every terrorist bombing, and from every raptor drone strike.
Selective sanctity?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf the Marines had just put up a sign,"Kabul Art Institute," they could have billed it as performance art, and won a prize from Harvard or Yale. Or, they could have draped the dead Taliban in American flags, and gotten praise from Hillary, Reid, Pelosi, et al.
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