War's dehumanizing outrages
Phoenix war worker Natalie Nickerson writes a thank-you note to her Navy boyfriend for sending her a Japanese soldier's skull he gathered as a souvenir while fighting in New Guinea during World War II. The photo appeared in a 1944 issue of Life magazine. Credit: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images/Ralph Crane
The deplorable behavior of four U.S. Marines captured on video urinating on three Afghan corpses must be rigorously investigated and punished as promised. Such callous desecration of the dead is loathsome, even in a war zone. Unfortunately, it's not all that surprising.
Such atrocities have always been a part of the dehumanizing nature of warfare.
Scalps were collected as the American West was settled. During World War II, the teeth and skulls of Japanese soldiers were taken as trophies. Photos of the macabre keepsakes were disseminated then too, but without the immediacy and global reach of YouTube. They were shown in periodicals circulated in the home front, not in the nations where we were at war. It was the same in Vietnam. John Kerry, a veteran of that war who later became a U.S. senator and Democratic candidate for president, testified before the Senate in 1971 about fellow soldiers who cut the ears and heads from corpses of enemy fighters.
People sent off to fight often demonize the enemy to harden their hearts to the killing, suffering and degradation unleashed by combat. What's different today is the widespread use of digital cameras and the Internet, which allow images to be made and whisked around the globe in cybertime. As a result, people far removed from the battlefield quickly become privy to the outrages.
Some good could come of this episode if it makes those of us viewing the video from the comfort of our homes and offices even more insistent that the nation go to war only as a last resort.
The video hit the Internet at a particularly inopportune time for the United States. Administration officials have been working toward talks with the Taliban ahead of the planned 2014 withdrawal of U.S. troops.
If there is to be a peaceful future for Afghanistan, some sort of political rapprochement between the current Afghan government and the Taliban -- which held power before being ousted in 2001 by the United States -- is imperative. The Obama administration's quiet overtures have proceeded in fits and starts over the last year, and recently appeared to be bearing fruit.
A Taliban spokesman said yesterday that the video, and the acts it depicts, are unlikely to derail those negotiations.
We hope that will remain true as news of the incident spreads across Afghanistan, where limited access to the Internet, and even to electricity, has slowed its dissemination. But the video has sparked anger elsewhere in the Middle East, and could stoke anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan in the days and weeks ahead.
It almost certainly will stain the reputation of U.S. troops in that country, where tens of thousands have served so honorably over the last decade. That's a shame.
Dehumanizing atrocity may be a fact of war, but it's one the United States should work tirelessly to eliminate.
