It couldn’t have come at a worse time for the United States. Just when peace talks with the Taliban were beginning in earnest, a YouTube video emerges that reportedly contains images of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters. As many nations around the globe are beginning to question the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan, the sudden appearance of the video is a public relations catastrophe for U.S. officials. For the Taliban and other regional sects however, the video is a virtual gift from the heavens, giving them an apparent moral high ground from which to wage their verbal war against the United States.
According to a CNN news story, a parade of high ranking U.S. military officials have already stepped forward to condemn the video. According to CNN, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated that, “I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”
Also according to the CNN piece, the Taliban is having a field day with the news of the video, with Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi stating, among other things, that…”This inhuman act reveals their real face to the world.”
And all of this before the video has been proven to be authentic. Even if it is proven to be authentic, it’s appearance on the internet at such a critical time in the peace process has got to raise some eyebrows. If it is authentic however, we are left to question what would lead U.S. Marines not only to take part in such an act, but what happened to their collective senses when they decided to video it, and then release it.
Maybe, just maybe…we are all overlooking something here. Perhaps it simply isn’t possible to have a war like the ones we fight in John Wayne movies, where the good guys are always right and just and the bad guys are always wrong and despicable. Maybe when we unleash the dogs of war and ask young people to cross psychological boundaries and take the lives of other human beings, we are left with something in many of them that is slightly less than the human being that they were before we sent them abroad.
It’s a crazy thought of course; that we, the people, might not be able expect the men that we have trained to kill to always be on their best behavior when they aren’t killing or being shot at. After all, we have laid out some pretty basic and easy to follow values for them to adhere to. For instance, it’s okay to kill someone, but it isn’t okay to urinate on them. As if given the choice, any one of us would choose to be killed instead of dampened with urine. Likewise, it was perfectly acceptable for the men who were killing Gadhaffi to impale him in the rear with a knife because he was still alive at the time. It all makes perfect sense if you think about it.
War is an ugly thing. It always has been and always will be. It takes our best and brightest and removes a piece of their soul. It causes good men on both sides of every conflict to commit unspeakable acts and gives bad men an excuse to behave in ways that no society would ever otherwise accept.
The Taliban and Islamic Clerics in the region will use this video to produce ten thousand more combatants just like the dead ones shown. Their veiled concern for the respect of the bodies shown in the video is a thousand times over the concern they ever had for the lives of those now dead men. Covered in urine or not, the men, after all, are just as dead. But neither the Taliban, the clerics, nor the Pentagon seem the least bit concerned about that aspect of the video.
The U.S. Government will conduct a thorough investigation. They will bring the young men responsible for the video to justice (if the video proves to be real), and they will be punished to the fullest extent. Soon thereafter, we will recruit a hundred new young men to take their place and train them and send them off to kill other men who are fighting to avenge the atrocities in a video they have never seen.
Perhaps what is most striking about the entire ordeal is the indictment against us all that can easily be made in the light of such a story. Yesterday, according to a Carmi Times piece, America’s military death toll in Afghanistan has hit 1,750. According to a Fox News Latino article, the drug wars in Mexico has left over 45,000 people dead. And according to the Columbia Journalism Review today, the Haitian government has released a death toll total for their earthquake last year at 316,000 souls. All of that was from one news cycle. Just one. And do you know what is trending right now? What we are reading and talking about? What raises our eyebrows the most? We, collectively, have skimmed past all of those other headlines to get to the one about a video that allegedly shows a handful of Marines urinating on dead Taliban.
Long after the urine has evaporated into the dry Middle Eastern air, the young U.S. Marines in the video will be serving their sentences. The Afghanistan men will still be just as dead. The pentagon will still be sending men and women to kill and be killed, but in a kinder and gentler manner, and we will still be skimming the really horrible stuff in the news to find out what just happened to Justin Bieber and who in the world, is urinating on who at the moment.