Perry: Urinating Marines are ‘Just Kids’

[Igel]

47. There was a similar Iraq episode.

It's only worth bringing up the incident in Iraq because DU was up and running at the time.

Contractor's bodies were dragged through the streets and "desecrated" (scare quotes because I personally find it difficult to think of a corpse as something "sacred", and therefore "desecratable&quot .

There was a fairly large debate over the incident.

A number of people pointed out that humiliating and defacing the bodies of those that had been killing Iraqis--Fallujans, was it?--was reasonable. An understandable expression of authentic rage.

Perhaps we think less of Iraqis. The poor dears just can't help themselves, while 18-19 year old American military volunteers are obviously superior? Nah.

In both cases the enemy is putatively "our own" and so we feel a need to separate ourselves from them. In the first case, those hurting our domestic enemies are justified; in the pissing case, we sympathize with those who were most likely trying to kill our domestic enemies just a short while before. And, should our domestic enemies be killed, we make a big deal out of it because it's politically powerful to point out poor, dear, innocent kids sent off to war.