SPEAKING
FREELY Afghanistan: What is truly
deplorable By Ben Schreiner
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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The posting online
last week of a video showing US Marines in Helmand
province urinating on the corpses of unknown
Afghans elicited rapid and widespread scorn from
the US government. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
described the video as "utterly deplorable",
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her
"total dismay", while chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Army General
Martin Dempsey, stated that the actions in the
video were "not only illegal but are contrary to
the values of a professional military and serve to
erode the reputation of our joint force".
The reaction from the US media
establishment largely echoed official sentiments.
As the Los Angeles Times editorialized, the
released video was "disheartening" and a "step
backwards" for the US in Afghanistan. [1]
Yet, with two of the marines depicted in
the video now reportedly identified, startled
Americans have been assured that justice will be
done. The bad apples will be removed, and
discipline and honor shall be restored to the
armed forces. The whole incident, then, will soon
begin to fade from American popular consciousness
(if it has not already), as it comes to be flushed
down the memory hole. Back to war, it is.
The truth, however, is that the video is
hardly illustrative of a few bad apples. Rather,
the incident is illustrative of a system of US
imperial militarism that is rotten to its very
core. For as despicable as the acts in the video
most certainly are, they are by no means
aberrations.
As was brought to light just
last year, US soldiers in Afghanistan have
actually hunted Afghan civilians as sport. As
Rolling Stone reported in grizzly detail, the US
"kill team" not only murdered civilians, but also
kept their severed fingers, teeth, and skull
fragments as trophies. [2]
On a much more
systemic level, the US to this day routinely fires
Hellfire missiles from its growing fleet of
Predator drones, reigning terror and sowing death
from above upon an unknown number of Afghan and
Pakistani civilians.
And let us not forget
the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq. Although,
there are an unknown number of similar atrocities
that have been committed in the web of US black op
sites and secret prisons encircling the globe.
Such barbarism by American armed forces,
it should be noted, has not been limited to
Afghans. In the past year alone, two
Chinese-American US soldiers were driven to take
their own lives while on service in Afghanistan,
after having endured race-based hazing from their
fellow Army soldiers. [3]
And yet focusing
on such incidents - as many and as heinous as they
are - threatens to obscure the larger and more
fundamental crimes occurring in the last decade of
the US "war on terror". As former US Marine Ross
Caputi pointed out, the crimes depicted in the
latest video clip pale in comparison to far more
consequential US atrocities. As Caputi, who took
part in the siege of Fallujah Iraq in 2004, wrote
in The Guardian:
I witnessed marines stealing from
the pockets of dead resistance fighters and
looting houses. I've heard firsthand accounts of
marines mutilating dead bodies, of a marine who
murdered a civilian, and of a marine who slit a
puppy's throat ... My behavior and the behavior
of others in my unit was despicable, as was the
behavior of these marines urinating on corpses.
[4]
We can certainly extrapolate out
even further from the siege of Fallujah, to the
wars as a whole in both Afghanistan and Iraq. For
both of which, we must remember, were launched by
cynically turning the criminal acts of 11
September 2011 into an act of war. This
declaration of war was then seamlessly parlayed
into feeding the insatiable US military-industrial
complex, while realizing long held geopolitical
strategic aims.
Urinating on corpses is
thus nothing but a byproduct of this calculated
decision to turn to war. After all, it is in war
that one must come to dehumanize one’s enemies. As
Sebastian Junger noted in the Washington Post:
As a society, we may be disgusted by
seeing US Marines urinating on dead Taliban
fighters (it is actually unknown whether those
in the video were indeed Taliban fighters or
civilians), but we remain oddly unfazed by the
fact that, presumably, those same Marines just
put high-caliber rounds through the fighters’
chests. American troops are not blind to this
irony. They are very clear about the fact that
society trains them to kill, orders them to kill
and then balks at anything that suggests they
have dehumanized the enemy they have killed.
[5]
Indeed, in conflict - despite the
claims of civility and professionalism coming from
the US military brass - sadism not only rears its
ugly head, but actually thrives. As Chris Hedges
writes in his book, War is the Force Which
Gives Us Meaning: In war “those who abandoned
their humanity, betrayed their neighbors and
friends, turned their back on their family, stole,
cheated, killed, and stomped on the weak and
infirm were often those who made it out alive."
Let us not, then, be fooled by the
farcical show of outrage by US officials over the
desecration of dead Afghans. For their faux moral
disgust stems only from the bad PR such a display
will likely garner. Their real unease, leave no
doubt, is whether such scenes will hinder the war
effort, that is, hinder their continued plunder
and slaughter of the Afghan people. And it is this
that ought to be deemed utterly deplorable.
Ben Schreiner is a freelance
writer living in Salem, Oregon, USA.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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