A video of U.S. marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan went viral yesterday. But instead of hiding their faces in shame, this is an occasion for U.S. government officials to hold their heads high.
Let me hasten to clarify. No doubt this is an unpardonable desecration. And it is bound to incite paroxysms of moral outrage in the so-called Muslim world.
But you’d be hard-pressed to find a single foreign government official, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has condemned it more categorically than Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.
(Panetta, Associated Press, January 12, 2011)
It is absolutely inconsistent with American values… Anyone found to have participated or to have known about it … must be held fully accountable.
(Clinton, The Star, January 12, 2011)
By contrast, I challenge you to cite an instance where any government official in the Muslim world uttered a single word of condemnation when Muslims desecrated the corpses of U.S. soldiers by dragging them in the streets then hanging them in a public square in Somalia. Not to mention that even the beheading of U.S. soldiers alive by insurgents in Iraq incited no moral outrage.
Still, because U.S. officials were so aggressive in prosecuting and imprisoning the soldiers involved in the infamous mistreatment of Muslim prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, nobody can doubt their word when they promise that the heads of those involved in this desecration will roll with equal dispatch.
But, with apologies to the Jackson 5, even a few bad apples don’t spoil the whole bunch here.. There is not, indeed never has been, a more professional military force on the face of the planet than that of the United States of America. And this incident cannot, indeed should not, diminish this fact.
The number of documented occasions when U.S. marines risked their own life and limb to save the lives of enemy fighters are legion. Of this not just U.S. officials but every American citizen can be justly proud.
All the same, there is no gainsaying the folly of this war — complete with the infighting among putative allies, undefined mission, comedy of errors and other misadventures that George Orwell presaged (i.e., warned about) in Homage to Catalonia….
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