On respecting dead enemy soldiers

At the Washington Post, Sebastian Junger points out the contradiction made salient by the news that American Marines urinated on several dead Taliban fighters:

For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad — not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living. I hope someone else knows how to explain that to our soldiers, because I don’t have the faintest idea.

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Why Americans are at war in the Middle East

Glenn Greenwald keeps unveiling stunning information about U.S. foreign policy. The following video by General Wesley Clark is jaw dropping, especially in light of the events that have unfolded since the conversations he reveals. The bottom line is that a pro-war U.S. foreign policy is repeatedly enacted without any national debate. The U.S. considers the Middle East to be U.S. property. How else can you explain that we are operating armed drones in six Muslim countries, and that politicians are actively discussing the "need" to invade Iran?

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View inside Iran

This is not the views of Iran that the American Government wants you to see. They would prefer that you see a grotesque cartoon version of Iran that makes you scream for wide scale military violence. When the Soviet Union aimed thousands of long-range missiles tipped with nuclear bombs at us, we acted with restraint and some intelligence, like adults, but we apparently no longer have that capacity.

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Inside look at collateral damage

Many of us have wondered what really happened to the Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.Look what was accidentally left behind in Iraq, as reported by the New York Times: Interview transcripts describing the conduct of American soldiers serving in Iraq. One question these interrogation transcripts raise is why these sorts of documents should have ever be considered classified. Their disclosure illustrates the abject immorality of the Iraq occupation, rather than revealing any particular strategy or tactics. Thus, it would appear that they were kept secret in order to help pretend that the United States does not do the sorts of horrific things that it does. Until their recent disclosure, the secrecy allowed us to maintain that the United States is the "greatest country in the world" regardless of the facts.

But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand. In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine. Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”
Why aren't similar records being maintained and disclosed to the public?
[Maj. Gen. Thomas Richardson]said that over the course of several weeks he had burned dozens and dozens of binders, turning more untold stories about the war into ash. “What can we do with them?” the attendant said. “These things are worthless to us, but we understand they are important and it is better to burn them to protect the Americans. If they are leaving, it must mean their work here is done.”
In your name and my name they carried on this war under false pretenses. In your name and my name they keep atrocities secret.

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