Re: Marines urinate on dead Taliban
I agree with you, Justice.
What does piss me off is however the DOUBLE standard our western governments live after:
We send young men to war, ask them to do horrible stuff, train them to just observe and soak everything in during combat and "deal with it later" so that what they experience won't hinder their operational performance, we let them get maimed and killed, and we let them experience horrible psychological trauma, we rotate them on tours that are far too long and enduring on them. Then we largely ignore things like PTSD. And we EXPECT them to behave like civilians. Gimme a break!
What we are asking of these soldiers is inhuman. If they at least were fighting on home-turf or allied turf they'd have the benefit of seeing what they were protecting and fighting that physical ground - but now they are in "the sandbox" in a place where they have nothing in common with the locals or any real understanding of what they are fighting for other than the very abstract "our freedom".
When the people in power make it an eighteenyearold's JOB to do horrible things that would give you life imprisonment or worse in a civilian setting, how hypocritical is it to go after the very lowest-ranking members of an organization when there are people all the way up through the chain of command who's job it is to oversee that things are played by the book?
In the grand scheme of things, let's not forget that on a humanistic level it was many times worse to kill these men than to pee on their corpses. My fear of getting my corpse peed on comes pretty far down on my list of fears. Dying is a lot further up...
This is not even mentioning the covert and immoral things people in power approve with a pen-stroke from some plush office chair. Things that you or I could never get away with. Things that don't even benefit the general population that elected them. Power corrupts. And there is a lot of power in realtively few hands in the west at the moment!
Speaking of being better than our enemies: I think that the future of military service entails not only highly trained soldiers but also highly educated soldiers. Slightly older soldiers, with an understanding of what's going on, not only make better calls when it comes to preserving lives on "our" side - there tends to be less collateral damage, too.
This is far too complicated to answer simply and I don't need to throw much more at this, a few brief thoughts.
#1,, Our young men in uniform are remarkable for how they perform under impossible circumstances. The rules of engagement are borderline suicidal.
#2,, our political leaders are (IMO) mismanaging the situation. While it was far from clear cut or simple, it seems a center of gravity has been tipped, but what we have now is instability, and without clear (positive) influence that could turn out as bad as the former dictators or worse. A dangerous time for the region.
#3,, What we are seeing play out in Afghanistan is the result of telegraphing that we would withdraw no matter the situation on the ground. I have written at length about the conundrum of stabilizing Afghanistan (and Pakistan). Not enough wealth (to support) and tradition (to advise) rule of law, so in that vacuum we get what we get, Shariah and other brutal forms of local administration. Iraq has the wealth and tradition, but may need a little more time (we will see). The original plan in Afghanistan to use a relatively small force to stamp out the terrorist and mostly ignore the Taliban, seems a little wiser now. Nobody has controlled Afghanistan completely in a very long time and several have tried. Applying a successful Iraq tactic (surge) to Afghanistan, ignores the differences between the two nations.
#4 I expect many peace activists will mistake withdrawing troops, with promoting peace. I have fingers and toes crossed, hoping that Iraq can hold it together and not degenerate into civil war. I have my fingers crossed that Iran doesn nuke tel Aviv or close the straits of Hormuz, etc etc... War sucks, but sometimes the alternative sucks worse.
Sun Tzu was very wise on this topic thousands of years ago.. Let the generals wage warfare, and keep the politicians out of it. Generals want the quickest end to hostilities and lowest loss of life, politicians often interfere with the prosecution of even simple goals, by being political, as is their nature and end up with unintended consequences from the political behavior.
sorry /rant...
JR
PS: I was drafted and while I sure didn't like it at the time, I think the mechanism was relatively fair, and the negative feedback that gets applied across the entire population was useful to damp the urge to expand future conflicts casually. All sacrifice associated with service needs to be shared by us all. This will make us much more thoughtful about more adventure.
