I'm Confused: It's Okay to Kill Afghanis, But Not Okay to Urinate on the Bodies?

[enlightenment]

7. While I appreciate the core thought of that editorial

- that the base issue is the killing part of the equation - it doesn't lessen the repulsiveness of the actions taken by those soldiers.

War sucks, but there are some rules and some standards that have stayed pretty consistent over the years. Treating the dead with some measure of civility is one of them, because yes, we do have some 'core values'.

Remember the dead Marines in Mogadishu? How did Americans react to seeing the images of their naked bodies being dragged through the streets? It made a bad situation that much worse, and I doubt too many Americans were sitting around saying, 'but they were dead, so it really isn't that bad'. The action and the photos of the action reduced the Somali's to animals in many minds - not because they had shot down the helicopters and/or killed the Marines in a firefight - but because they treated their corpses with contempt.


Ms Marcus isn't wrong to remark on the fundamental question of why we continue to send soldiers into the ME to kill and die - but she's off-target on minimizing what those four soldiers did to the corpses of the men they killed.