I don’t really understand the impulse so many people have to defend our Marines for urinating on dead bodies. But I also don’t really share the common outrage about desecration of dead bodies. In my book, riddling a live human being with bullets is more profane than urinating on a lifeless body. It’s obviously an ugly thing to disrespect the dead, but it just seems to me like a weird fetish to obsess about how a corpse is treated when you didn’t give a crap about the living, breathing person.
It’s a horrible idea for our troops to desecrate corpses, and a horrible idea to videotape it. But we ought to do whatever we can to get to a situation where our troops are not creating any corpses. I don’t believe we need to be making corpses in Afghanistan. I think we need to leave.
We can protect our country against terrorism without occupying Afghanistan. Pissing on corpses isn’t making us safer. Creating corpses isn’t making us safer.
