Pissing on the flag
Another day, another scandal involving United States servicemen. This time it’s four marines pissing on the corpses of Taliban fighters they’ve killed. Each time this happens we’re asked to treat it as an isolated case. What we’re expected to believe is that when US troops misbehave it’s captured on camera and everyone knows about it. When the cameras aren’t rolling they’re the honourable warriors Americans believe them to be.
Counterintuitive doesn’t begin to describe it. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, the Iraq Helicopter Video, all those instances of collateral damage, the attack on a Pakistani border post and too many others, we’re expected to believe that these represent terrible exceptions, exceptions that just happen to be caught on video.
A far more credible explanation is that there is a far deeper problem, one stemming from an increasingly inhumane culture that, in the wake of September 11th, has gripped American forces. The US military has become brutal and, dare one say it, fascist in the proper sense of the word – that it wields the power to punish and execute and sees itself as the final arbiter.
In the wake of the Vietnam War the US military drafted a ‘Soldier’s Creed’. You can see the degree of emphasis put on protection, creditable behaviour and the importance of not disgracing one’s uniform.
I am an American Soldier.
I am a member of the United States Army – a protector of the greatest nation on earth.
Because I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable to the military service and the nation it is sworn to guard.
I am proud of my own organization. I will do all I can to make it the finest unit in the Army.
I will be loyal to those under whom I serve. I will do my full part to carry out orders and instructions given to me or my unit.
As a soldier, I realize that I am a member of a time-honored profession—that I am doing my share to keep alive the principles of freedom for which my country stands.
No matter what the situation I am in, I will never do anything, for pleasure, profit, or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit, or my country.
I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from actions disgraceful to themselves and to the uniform.
I am proud of my country and its flag.
I will try to make the people of this nation proud of the service I represent, for I am an American Soldier.
In 2003, at the height of the war on terror a section of the US military responsible for the Warrior Ethos rewrote the Soldier’s Creed thus:
I am an American Soldier.
I am a Warrior and a member of a team.
I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.
I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
I am an American Soldier.
All those references to protection and honour and avoiding disgrace have been stripped out. It’s as though the task of writing the code has been handed to the teams responsible for Gears of War or Call of Duty. There’s no ethos there just a cartoonish and brutal rant. The actions of US troops pissing on their dead enemies fly in the face of the original Soldier’s Creed but they’re wholly consistent with the current version.
If the US military wants to defeat its enemies rather than see its soldiers acting as recruiting sergeants for new ones it needs to recognise that it is in the throes of an ethical and cultural crisis. If it wants to take a step back towards a US military that projects American values, values that might have been recognised as American by the four men whose faces look out from Mount Rushmore, they could do worse than scrapping the current Soldier’s Creed and replacing it with the original.
Ted, you haven’t addressed a single substantive point. All you’ve done is made clear that you don’t really care how the guys in the video behaved nor what the consequences mIght be. If you demonstrably don’t want to think about the bigger issues I wouldn’t presume to think your opinion could be changed. But if you want to post unthinking remarks you’ll hardly be surprised if you get a dismissive response. As Christopher Hitchens said ‘that which is argued without evidence can be dismissed without evidence’. But if you want to argue a point and back it up, even if it’s not one readers agree with, you’ll get the time of day.
Hey, had a thought and then I done dis: thanks for taking the time JK. I can clearly see now just how right you are and the total error of my ways. Thank goodness for the internet. You are a wind of change just like myself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SKg6-kNskw
If you continue in this rich vein, you might just change the whole world’s opinion to one you are comfortable with.
Minor point: you did say they were “Taliban fighters” in the first few lines.
Dear Ted
I was in two minds whether or not to respond to your post. As Frank Zappa once said: “Stupidity has a certain charm. Ignorance does not.”
But just to underline how unutterably dim your observations were let me lay it out for you in simple terms.
Firstly we don’t know who the dead were. If they were Taliban they may well hate Jews, have a view of women and education that understandably riles people in the West and they probably subscribe to a version of hudud law that is pretty barbaric – though perhaps not by Texan standards.
I have no idea whether education or diplomacy would have had an effect but we’re about to find out just how much the Taliban have changed because under pressure from Washington we’re in the early stages of the Taliban being brought into the political process. When they came on the scene in the late 1990s most of them were young, fanatical, with an Islamic religious education and not much else, but they saw a country in the grip of corrupt warlords and frankly a lot of Afghans preferred what the Taliban offered to what they were getting at the time. Fifteen ears have passed. The twenty somethings who stormed over the border from Pakistan are now thirty and fortysomethings. If they run in an election they’re going to have to figure just how much beeading and stoning and not letting girls attend school they can sell to the Afghan people or they’ll find themselves being sent on their way with two fingers and a clear message that Affghans don’t want what they’re selling. We’ll see.
But right now those talks have barely started and thousands of US and other NATO troops are serving there. What that charming video does is generate sympathy for the Taliban and make Afghans dislike US troops more. Don’t try and kid yourselves – even Afghans who are working with the government have said they’re damned angry about it because it’s like a bloody great neon sign pointing up the contempt with which some in the US forces treat Afghans – not just Taliban but innocent civilians. And while the ramifications of that might be lost on you they ain’t lost on Leon Panetta and on the guys at the Pentagon who know that the sort of behaviour we saw in the video gains them nothing but may well add to the number of dead Americans being flown home. So when you say it hasn’t added much to the sum of human suffering Ted I suggest you go tell that to the next ma and pa in Arkansas whose pride and joy has been blown to bits by some kid who was persauded to wear a suicide belt by a bunch of angry Afghans who showed him that video.
If you stopped to think rather than spending your time mindlessly trolling you might have worked that one out for yourself, Ted.
Oh dear, three jew hating, women hating, gay hating, education hating, music and dance hating, beheading and amputating Taliban ‘warriors’ are dead.
Maybe education would have changed them. Maybe a few more years of diplomacy would have changed them. Meantime, pissing on them hasn’t added much to the sum of human suffering out there.
Thanks for the response, Jonathan. Honest, I DO see what you’re saying, and your point is well made – it was just when I first heard the reports about this ‘outrage’ on radio 4 the other morning, it just brought me up short that nobody was mentioning the fact that here were 3 unnecessarily dead human beings, killed by a ‘democratic’ nation (which implicates us all somehow?). I have to say that honestly I couldn’t give a toss that they were being pissed on – it’s too late for them to care. The real indignity is in their being killed in the first place. As I say, perhaps it’s just me! Keep up the good work 🙂
Bill, this isn’t an article about the rights and wrongs of war, it’s an article about how democratic states behave in a war and about a shift in culture in the US military.
I’m not in any way happy that people are being killed in conflicts, but yesterday’s news story was about this particular incident and this is a response.
If one had to start every piece about a particular aspect of conflict with a preamble about how dreadful war is then expressions of such sentiments would start to become formulaeic.
Perhaps we can just take it as read that readers and contributors to Bright Green are, with the exception of the fee fie fo fum hiding under the bridge brigade, not huge fans of violence full stop.
Don’t you think the values are just a little bit skewed when it seems that everybody would be perfectly happy to see dead human beings on video, their lives cut brutally short because of where and when they happen to be born – as long as nobody ‘abuses’ or ‘disrespects’ their bodies. I ‘get’ the point you’re making, but perhaps the real outrage is that we can accept untimely death of human beings so easily. Perhaps it’s just me.