…”on my defense of the Marines.”
They’re not anti-war, they just hate our military.
Oh, and if anyone is curious as to what I think, I think that it was almost criminally stupid (the same thing I thought about the morons at Abu Ghraib), but I didn’t think that George Bush was responsible for that, and I don’t think that Barack Obama is responsible for this. Sometimes, in war time, (and in peace time) people do stupid things. And like Dana, I’ll take the leftists’ outrage seriously when they show some concern about the real atrocities that the enemy (with whom we’re negotiating to surrender to) commits.
[Update a few minutes later]
An open letter to the armed forces, from Andrea Harris.
[Late morning update]
Allan West: “Shut your mouth. War is hell.”
Allen in 2016.
My opinion is that this sort of thing happens all the time in every war, on all sides. Few people are totally immune. Most people’s worst stress day is about 1/10000000th of the stress of a week in the field at war, with death stalking you every instant and the knowledge you could be killed or horribly maimed in the next instant and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
I read/hear people saying this never happened in WWII – they are woefully ill-informed. Happened all the time and WWII vets who have written about their experiences say so. It’s simply the way it is in war.
Do you want to have a military?
Do you want to win?
Then you have to have an organization where the normal levels of civilized behavior (like not killing on a daily basis) have been lowered.
A side effect of this is behavior we’d normally find distasteful at the chardonnay and brie parties. Since there are all kinds of people, and since the military is a big organization you will get various ranges of behavior under wartime stress.
I bet if you told Eisenhower that some of his troops were committing atrocities in the field he would have replied, “Appalling”.
And then do nothing but get on with the war.
Now this does generate a diplomatic PR problem. So I expect State and Defense to say what they are saying.
I would even say that I think Allen’s punishment is a little too strict except that the troops need to learn not to be so stupid as to film it.
Where are the legion of liberal psychologists lining up to explain that this is simply an example of male primates both marking their territory and leaving a musky Marine urine scent to flag the corpses as “not-food”?
If it had been artists instead of marines and the Taliban corpses had been in jars would it have been okay?
Only if they were shaped like Crucifixes before they were embalmed in a Urine Jar Andrea! That would be HIGH ART!!!!
Perhaps they were radical Pisslamists whose funeral rites include a golden shower, symbolizing both the golden rays of the sun, warm spring rains, and their first request to the 72 virgins who are going to torment them in the afterlife.
The bodies were on fire, we had to do something.