Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday harshly condemned alleged behavior in a video that appears to show U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. The Pentagon chief said he'd ordered a full investigation into the alleged incident, which comes amid sensitive diplomatic initiatives to try to advance reconciliation talks with the Taliban.
It is true that this incident pales in comparison to what our Taliban enemies do--or even what Afghan civilians do in their violent culture as a routine matter. That's true "inhuman" behavior. But that doesn't mean we should excuse what the Marines did.
I'm upset not so much for the action (and it is silly to worry that it will offend the Taliban) but because I don't want this to be a symptom of a loss of discipline in the unit involved. We've fought very clean wars despite some high profile incidents (that we punish, I should add).
And I'm worried about a bigger issue that I raised seven years ago:
When we have a battlefield where we see all of our troops and record all that they do, how will we treat our soldiers? Even in "good" wars that are universally agreed to be justified, such as World War II, we had our share of criminal actions and mistakes that cost lives. Civilians were killed or abused. Prisoners were shot or robbed or abused. Americans died from incompetent commanders or shoddy equipment or just bad luck.
Our military fights very clean based on any combat standards you want to apply--from a historical basis to a contemporary comparison. But war will never be completely clean. Even police commit crimes and abuse prisoners or detainees. Combat is far more stressful and so our troops will commit crimes or simply make lethal mistakes on occasion. How will we react to this? How will we make sure our troops fight even cleaner and how will we protect out troops from unfair prosecution?
Add in the problem of troops themselves recording and posting what they've done. It's one thing to post that drunken photo on Facebook that might haunt your future job interviews. Court martial and prison time is another. Especially if what the troops did was an unpleasant thing that isn't that outrageous in context and is wrong for reasons beyond the incident itself (unit discipline).
Without a video record, a unit's leadership would have the opportunity to correct such behavior without putting anything on paper and wrecking the careers of what could be otherwise good Marines. Maybe they are problem Marines. Maybe their leadership isn't leading. But with a video record that can be examined in detail away from the heat of the battlefield and perhaps years later, how do we make sure our troops will fight if they fear that even normal battlefield behavior will look criminal from afar?
I still don't have an answer to my question. And with the proliferation of battlefield video from stationary, aerial, weapons-mounted, and even home video cameras, the records have exploded in numbers, making an answer to this question even more important.
UPDATE: I will say, upon reflection, that maybe the military did come up with an answer since we haven't had war crimes prosecutions from official video. But are we a Wikileaks or FOIA request away from facing the problem of all that video of battle?
And maybe some of the periodic bouts of the Army seeming to be against soldier's posting online is related to trying to keep them from harming themselves (and the Army's reputation) by putting up home videos, thus undermining their success at keeping official videos out of the public domain?
UPDATE: Representative West has it right:
“The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.
“As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.”
I seem to recall that when some of our security contractors were killed and strung up on a bridge in Fallujah in spring 2004 by the enemy, a number of the anti-war side pretty much said that those "mercenaries" got what they deserved.
UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for the mention. I think I forgot to send the link to this post when I emailed him. Doh! Hopefully the Marines get a fair hearing and fair punishment despite the public condemnations of both Panetta and Clinton--which might influence how this is handled, no?
