Giving Our Marines in Afghanistan Their Due and a Break

In our almost infinite comfort, having been asked to make not a single wartime sacrifice, we should simply look at the video showing urinating Marines and mutter, "So, what? Our guys peed on the Taliban."

Regrettably, in the Facebook/Twitter age, comfortably sunk in the lounger in front of the 54" HD plasma, we are forced to watch ABC and the usual liberal suspects hyperventilate during their noble, oh-so-civilized broadcasts because four Marines urinated on some face-up Taliban corpses in the Afghan theater. Let’s instead celebrate the laudable discipline of our Marines. Barbarous, medieval Islamic warriors lay dead on the ground and our marines decided not to lop off their heads and hoist them up on poles. Acts like decapitation were kinds of extreme acts our fathers and grandfathers were driven to commit in Guadalcanal and elsewhere in the Pacific seventy years ago. What truly admirable self-possession these Marines displayed! These are the same Taliban that hosted Osama bin Laden a decade ago providing aid and comfort to his recruits in the Afghan training camps that produced the murderers of 3,000 of our countrymen. These are these same Taliban that apply the lash to girls who dare to go to school. These are the primitive tribesmen who destroyed exquisite 2,000-year old giant Buddhist statues despite UNESCO entreaties. If we knew what the Marines were about to do, we might have begged them not to waste their precious discharge on this kind of uncivilized vermin.

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Indeed, we should save our indignation for an administration that feels compelled to expend scant resources on providing bin Laden a proper Muslim burial at sea from the deck of the USS Carl Vinson. In contrast, Barack Obama's good friend Vladimir Putin wrapped the dead Chechen perpetrators of the Beslan massacre in pig skins and doused them in pig's blood. That's desecration. To the hyperpartisan liberal media, the urination video was devastating, not because the mediacares about American or Marine honor or about Marines living up to their semper fidelis motto but because the “utterly deplorable” conduct described by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta occurred in the middle of the Obama-Clinton outreach negotiations with the Taliban. Such harmful video is supposed to be captured and to come to light only when George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are in charge of military affairs. The New York Times filed dozens of front page stories about Abu Ghraib depicting a supposedly dehumanized Afghan occupation conceived by the evil Bush and ineptly overseen by the insensitive Rumsfeld. Some Abu Ghraib prisoners might have been humiliated by being led around on a leash by a female soldier, but at least they were never urinated on. For liberals such horrors should never occur during our holy months of Obamadan. To the Party’s credit only the Republicans seem able to put the urination scandal in perspective. Rick Perry likens the wayward Marines to kids who deserve to be chastised perhaps but not tried or punished. It seems much less condescending and more accurate to place them side-by-side with their "greatest generation" forebears in Guadalcanal. These are the best young men America produces and they are stretched to their limits in every way. Surely, it would be the rare American in 1942 that would have been outraged by bestial behavior of Marines locked in brutal combat against an entrenched Japanese enemy. Rather, Americans on the home front might have vented at FDR or George Marshall for not throwing more support and resources their way and for short-changing the Pacific war in favor of the European one. Congressman Allen West, a man without peer in Washington, is to be commended for his robust shermanesque defense of the Afghan Marines:

The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment)… As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

As to how hellish and deadly tours-of-duty have become for our combat soldiers in Afghanistan under Obama, Edwin Mora of CNS has the somber statistics. Over two-thirds of the deaths in Afghanistan have occurred under the Obama administration. Last August was the deadliest month of the war. Since Obama was sworn in as president 1,188 military deaths have been recorded--roughly one death for every day he’s been in office. If some insist on offering commentary about a handful of Marines who decide to relieve themselves and their stress in ways they find unsettling or disgusting, as Rep. Allen West might say: “Shut your mouth.”