Many of you are outraged over the whole Marines-pissing-on-dead-bodies incident. Here's why I think you're nuts.
Now I'm not saying that we're all a bunch of war endorsers. Take 'we' to mean our country as a whole.
War and indecency. The one exists in the context of the other. If you look at every war that's ever been waged, well, soldiers end up doing stuff not just like this, but also much worse than this.
Soldiers have to live in a different moral Universe from the rest of us out in a combat zone, and people aren't uncoordinated little machines that'll just go down some logical list and take details that no longer make sense in the context of their moral fugue. And let me reassert that being pissed on is a small, tiny, inconceivable detail next to being killed. People have to approach their reality whole. And so when we send people out to war, to kill or be killed, then we act all shocked and outraged that they've pissed on some corpses, what's really going on is that there's a pretty wild cognitive dissonance happening on our end. To debase some abstract, where that abstract manifests itself in little bits and pieces in the people you kill, is to make one's own actions OK. It's a natural outgrowth of the process of war.
Look at every war ever. Ask John Kerry what kind of shit went down in Vietnam. WWII was also pretty out of control, to put it lightly. There really is one choice. War or no. And when I see people flipping out about the tiniest, least bad consequences of that war, I see a disconnect that allows us as a nation to choose to go to wars over and over and over again. It's a disconnect from reality. A madness that lets us choose, collectively, to bring war. And with war comes just so much fucking death. ~100,000 civilians dead in Iraq because of the violence of their civil war, a civil war that probably never would have happened if we'd just left that barbarian Saddam in power.
So my question is, in the context of what we've sent people to do, why do we really care? I know I don't blame the men involved. Lets just talk about ending war. Not corpse pissing.