In Monday’s presidential primary debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry raised the issue of four Marines who videotaped themselves urinating on the corpses of their dead Taliban enemies in Afghanistan.
“They made a mistake that the military needs to deal with,” Perry said. “And they need to be punished. But the fact of the matter — the fact of the matter is this, when the secretary of defense calls that a despicable act … let me tell you what’s utterly despicable, cutting Danny Pearl’s head off and showing the video of it.”
The line drew applause, but it should not have. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta did not err in calling this incident despicable. Yes, a live beheading is more despicable than the desecration of a corpse — but can we not all agree that both are despicable?
Whatever adjective you’d like to summon — despicable, appalling, loathsome, disgraceful — this desecration also happens to be a war crime. It contradicts what our nation stands for — or what we at least hope foreigners think of when they see our flag flying.
It hands a huge propaganda victory to the terrorists we are fighting, weakening our sway over an Afghan population we have supposedly spent the last decade trying to civilize.
The outright defense of this behavior — of which Perry is not guilty, but which unfortunately did take place on Talk Radio last week — is asinine.
It cuts against our military’s standards of discipline, our Judeo-Christian beliefs about treatment of the dead, and simple humanist notions of decency that require no religious belief at all. It also represents a denial of the idea that our actions have consequences.
Thankfully, few are defending this behavior outright. But conservatives should resist any argument that tries to justify it, especially if it is cloaked as a defense of national security.
One such argument holds that Marines peeing on dead people is not the real problem — the real problem is our own collective wallowing in shame over it.
This morally bankrupt assertion implies that there is no contradiction between defending civilization from savages and transgressing the basic moral boundaries that civilization requires and preserves. Yes, there is no need to agonize over this for weeks, but let’s call it what it is — wrong.
Another semi-defense of the desecrators invokes the “they-did-it-first” and “they-behave-worse” exceptions to the Geneva Conventions — roughly the direction Perry was moving in.
The bad guys started it. They crash planes into buildings, strap bombs to children and film themselves beheading people. They are worse than we are, and therefore our less significant war crimes can be overlooked.
But if that is true, then we seem to be in Afghanistan fighting for … nothing in particular. Certainly not for our way of life. Our way of life not only prescribes felony convictions and prison sentences but also attaches a terrible stigma to those who mistreat the dead.
Aside from the evil of the act itself, there are also its consequences. It doesn’t take a foreign policy expert to understand how the pee video is going to harm America’s interests at least a little bit.
Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai reported last week in the Daily Beast that, despite grousing by the rank and file, the Taliban leadership has absorbed the insult with surprising equanimity.
Why? Because they are in the early stages of negotiations with us, ahead of our exit from Afghanistan. The Taliban aspire to return to power, so that they can go back to stoning women and destroying great monuments to previous civilizations, as they did before our invasion. Four undisciplined Marines with a video camera probably just made their job a little easier.
David Freddoso is The Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
