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.
