Bloodthirsty Liberal

I see President Obama is delivering the commencement address at the Air Force Academy today, and good for him.

I just wonder if he’ll make the fighter pilots also feel “stereotyped, simplified, and used”? Maybe come across as “paternalistic”?

Interesting how he picks his opportunities for maximum political benefit, isn’t it? A women’s college, a military academy… is there a gay school? Besides Sarah Lawrence, that is? By the time this is done, he may be begging for an appearance before Bob Jones University!

PS: That three fundraisers are tacked on to the trip—one in Denver, the other two in “nearby” California—is purely coincidental, I’m sure.

I think the nation had every right and reason to celebrate the whacking of Osama bin Lyin’-in-his-grave. Part of America’s charm, it seems to me, is the belittling of our enemies, in life and death. (My favorite example being the song going “Hitler was born with just one ball. Goering had two, but very small. Himmler had something sim’lar, and Goebbels had no balls at all.”)

But I did think it was unseemly for Obama to pose urinating on Osama’s body and hold up what was left of his head to put a White Sox cap on it (at least now he can name one of his favorite players on the team—hint: Harold Baines, Mr. President!).

But maybe the president had his reasons:

The Navy SEALS aren’t going to talk? Is she deaf?

In the wake of a warm conservative reception for a web video trashing the president for “spiking the football” on the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death, the conservative group Veterans for a Strong America plans to gather Navy SEALs and Special Forces operators to criticize the White House during the 2012 campaign.

“We’re looking to [put together] a coalition, to field SEALs and operators that want to come out publicly,” executive director of Veterans for a Strong America, Joel Arends, tells BuzzFeed. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with former SEALs and current SEALs. I’ve been talking to operators in the community. There is palatable discontent.”

…

Arends released his first major ad attacking the White House on May 1, titled “Why Does President Obama Take So Much Credit for Killing Bin Laden?”

The video, which took about ten days to produce, went viral. The ad has had more than 250,000 views on YouTube and he’s received some 4,000 emails.

Presidents earn credit and blame for the events that happen on their watch. But the question of why Obama took “so much” credit for putting two in the head of OBL is valid. They had to drag him off the golf course, for goodness sake; it’s not like he was reenacting some scene out of Platoon or Apocalypse Now, stripped to his waist, camouflaged, wearing night-vision goggles.

Will Fonzie successfully jump the shark? Find out after these messages.

If they had just let the anniversary happen, without the disquieting preening and posing, the credit would have accrued to them in justifiable measure. Now, there’s this sense of almost desperate politicization over every act and utterance of this administration. If I were Romney, I’d take stock. This is not the behavior of a confident administration.

Well okay, if you say so:

The paratroopers had their assignment: Check out reports that Afghan police had recovered the mangled remains of an insurgent suicide bomber. Try to get iris scans and fingerprints for identification.

The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan’s Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held — and others squatted beside — the corpse’s severed legs.

A few months later, the same platoon was dispatched to investigate the remains of three insurgents who Afghan police said had accidentally blown themselves up. After obtaining a few fingerprints, they posed next to the remains, again grinning and mugging for photographs.

Two soldiers posed holding a dead man’s hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man’s hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading “Zombie Hunter” next to other remains and took a picture.

Don’t get me wrong: I would do it. But then I’m not over there seeing with my own eyes the evil that the Taliban and their ilk do. If I were, I too might celebrate their demise.

However:

The soldier who provided The Times with a series of 18 photos of soldiers posing with corpses did so on condition of anonymity. He served in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne’s 4th Brigade Combat Team from Ft. Bragg, N.C. He said the photos point to a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops.

He expressed the hope that publication would help ensure that alleged security shortcomings at two U.S. bases in Afghanistan in 2010 were not repeated.

Well, that sounds reasonable: a fellow soldier outs his own, whom he thinks have lost discipline. I have no complaint.

But can we put our outrage in perspective?

More than 100 schoolgirls in northeastern Afghanistan are in hospital suffering from suspected poisoning.

The health director of Takhar province said the girls fell ill shortly after drinking water at their school.

An education official in Kabul said preliminary investigations suggested the water had been poisoned.

A local official in Takhar suggested that people opposed to education for girls were responsible.

Our soldiers poisoned no one, peed on no one, even killed no one. So, keep things in perspective.

And they’re in high places:

Israel Air Force commander Maj.-Gen. Ido Nehushtan was awarded the Legion of Merit from Commander of the US Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz last week during a ceremony in Washington.

…

In the certificate given to Nehushtan with the medal, Schwartz wrote that the IAF has over the years shared intelligence on terrorist organizations in the region with the US.

“This information assisted the United States Air Force efforts in overseas contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Schwartz wrote.

Schwartz also hailed Nehushtan’s decision to increase joint training which helped increase interoperability between the two forces.

“General Nehoshtan’s exemplary performance, dynamic leadership and exceptional devotion to duty reflect great credit upon himself, the Israeli Air Force and his country,” the USAF commander wrote.

Israel is an ally of the US in matters military and anti-terror—but not least culturally. Yet the Left holds Israel at arm’s length, at best. Those with a more realistic view of the world know the US couldn’t have a better friend.

So, when do the riots start?

An Army sergeant and father of three from Rhode Island who gave his life to save an Afghan child from being run over by a 16-ton armored fighting vehicle is being flown back to the U.S. and will be buried Monday.

Sgt. Dennis Weichel, 29, died in Afghanistan last week after he dashed into the path of an armored fighting vehicle to scoop up the little girl, who had darted back into the roadway to pick up shell casings, according to the Army. Weichel, a Rhode Island National Guardsman, was riding in the convoy in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan when he jumped out to save the girl, who was unhurt.

This image, obtained from WPRI.com, shows 29-year-old Sgt. Dennis Weichel.

“He would have done it for anybody,” Staff Sgt. Ronald Corbett, who deployed with Weichel to Iraq in 2005, said in a quote posted on the U.S. Army website. “That was the way he was. He would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. He was that type of guy.”

A father of three isn’t coming back from Afghanistan because he saved an Afghan girl. That was how he was brought up, how he was trained; he didn’t think, he just acted. The girl lived, and three children in Rhode Island don’t have a dad.

And people write plays about, and name streets after, Rachel Corrie, who died playing olé with a Caterpillar front-loader in order to save illegal Arab settlements. I’m going to be sick.

I know I’ve made the point already, but to be so perfectly validated… well, I always have bandwidth for that:

Our troops have been the target of serial sneak attacks by the Afghans with whom they are forced to “partner.” Nevertheless, our Marines were ordered to disarm before being admitted into the presence of Obama’s defense secretary, Leon Panetta. Yes, you read that correctly: Our Marines were stripped of their arms.

Panetta was at Camp Leatherneck on a “surprise” visit, hoping to calm the disastrous situation in the combat theater. Turns out not to have been much of a surprise: One of our Afghan “partners” — a contract interpreter hired to help our armed forces in deadly Helmand province — seamlessly converted to Islamist suicide assassin. His contacts clued him in on the surprise, so much so that he managed to speed a stolen truck toward the runway, just as Panetta’s hush-hush flight was about to land. He just missed smashing the contingent of Marines waiting to receive the secretary — that is to say, to whisk the secretary away to safer quarters, if there is any longer such a thing in this hell-hole, where 90,000 American troops are now stationed, compared with the 5,200 who conclusively routed al-Qaeda a decade ago, which you may recall as the mission they were sent to accomplish.

Unlike the Soviets, we actually defeated Afghanistan militarily.

Politically and culturally, however, we have met our Waterloo:

Afghans went on a murderous rampage after some Korans were accidentally burned, Korans that jihadists had used to incite each other by adding handwritten messages reaffirming hatred of Americans. Among nearly three dozen killed when the mayhem began were two American soldiers, murdered by a treacherous Afghan “soldier” they were training.

Soon after, two more U.S. officers were shot in the back of the head by Afghan “security” personnel at the interior ministry in Kabul. A few days later, two more American soldiers were killed by Afghan “soldiers” at a base in Kandahar. In fact, our “partners” have turned their guns on scores of our troops in the last five years, killing 70, wounding many more. Those are just the U.S. casualty figures. British forces and other NATO personnel are also being assassinated with regularity.

Still, our forces are expected to trust these faithless partners. Trust them and, at the premeditated cost of American lives, protect Afghan civilians — tribal Islamists rife with Taliban and other terrorist sympathizers. There is a reason al-Qaeda was so comfortable in Afghanistan: It is nigh impossible to know who is a civilian.

…

Last weekend, an unidentified U.S. Army staff sergeant snapped. He is said to have massacred 16 civilians in a small village. In this decade-long war, the burden of which has been borne exclusively by a few hundred thousand military families while the rest of the nation yawns, the staff sergeant was in his fourth combat tour.

…

Hamid Karzai, who owes not just his presidency but his continued existence on this planet to the unwavering dedication of America’s armed forces, was barely finished demanding sharia justice for the Koran burners when he started screaming for the staff sergeant to be tried in Afghan court. (The Army has moved him out of the country, and he will eventually face a U.S. court-martial.)

This was the chaos into which Secretary Panetta descended. After dodging the assassination attempt, he was to address American forces and their Afghan trainees in a tent where the only security would be the United States Marines. Yet the Marines were ordered to disarm before entering. From on high came the directive: They were to check their automatic rifles and pistols outside the tent. Only then would Panetta appear.

…

While Panetta addressed our defrocked troops, the savages were up to their usual grisly business. Tim Lynch, a retired Marine now embedded in Afghanistan, summed it up well in an e-mail to journalist Michael Yon: “The Taliban killed 13 women and children today with an IED in Uruzgan and I think they got 8 yesterday — but that’s all cool here because they’re the Taliban and we’re the big, fat, retarded kid on the block who gets bullied everyday but still shows up to fork over even more lunch money while assuming at some point everyone will like us because we’re so [deleted] generous.”

It’s a long, complicated, even emotional piece. He lumps Iraq in with Afghanistan as a failed attempt at nation-building—with which I don’t entirely agree. (I think Iraq was already “won”, then abandoned by Obama; Afghanistan was never truly won—as in hearts and minds—and never truly could be.)

We can endure tragedies and atrocities if we are pursuing a goal, but when even the concept of a goal is long-forgotten, what point is there to the loss?

My personal Mount Rushmore has four faces, too: Robert Benchley, Caroline Glick, Pedro Martinez…and Mark Steyn. If I don’t quote Steyn every day, it’s only because I don’t want to dilute his power.

A few brief excerpts from his eulogy for America’s presence in Afghanistan:

Say what you like about Afghans, but they’re admirably straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn’t put it any plainer:

“Die, die, foreigners!”

And foreigners do die.

…

A U.S. base in southern Afghanistan was recently stricken by food poisoning due to mysteriously high amounts of chlorine in the coffee. As Navy Captain John Kirby explained, “We don’t know if it was deliberate or something in the cleaning process.”

Oh, dear. You could chisel that on the tombstones of any number of expeditionary forces over the centuries: “Afghanistan. It’s something in the cleaning process.”

…

The last crusader fort I visited was Kerak Castle in Jordan a few years ago. It was built in the 1140s, and still impresses today. I doubt there will be any remains of our latter-day fortresses a millennium hence. Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on September 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America’s longest war will leave nothing behind.

They can breach our security, but we cannot breach theirs — the vast impregnable psychological fortress in which what passes for the Pashtun mind resides. Someone accidentally burned a Koran your pals had already defaced with covert messages? Die, die, foreigners! The president of the United States issues a groveling and characteristically clueless apology for it? Die, die, foreigners! The American friend who has trained you and hired you and paid you has arrived for a meeting? Die, die, foreigners! And those are the Afghans who know us best.

The Rumsfeld strategy that toppled the Taliban over a decade ago was brilliant and innovative: special forces on horseback using GPS to call in unmanned drones. They will analyze it in staff colleges around the world for decades. But what we ought to be analyzing instead is the sad, aimless, bloated, arthritic, transnationalized folly of what followed. The United States is an historical anomaly: the non-imperial superpower. Colonialism is not in its DNA, and in some ways that speaks well for it, and in other ways, in a hostile and fast-changing world of predators and opportunists, it does not. But even nations of an unimperialist bent have roused themselves to great transformative “cleaning processes” within living memory: The Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren wrote this week that he had “conferred the benefit of the doubt” on “the grand bureaucratic project of ‘nation building’ . . . predicated on post-War successes in Germany and Japan.”

It wasn’t that long ago, was it? Except that, as Warren says, the times are “so utterly changed.”

I’ll stop there, but you should read the whole thing.

I especially agree with the part I highlighted. We came to Afghanistan with a clear military purpose to destroy Al Qaeda’s safe haven. We did that, and we could have left it at that, with just enough military presence to see that Al Qaeda couldn’t reconstitute itself. But since we suck at colonialism, we just thought the Afghans would adopt our free-spirited ways. Who doesn’t love sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll? (Or sex, drugs, and chamber music?) Our attempt at nation-building has been a failure. A noble failure, but a certifiable, grade-A cluster[bleep]. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying—though it might mean that, not sure—but enough is enough.

As long as they’re not plotting to bring down the Sears Tower, they can blow up all the Buddhas and slice up all the women they want. Let the Buddhists and the women deal with them if it’s so bad. They did bugger-all to help us, maybe they’ll help themselves.

Not so kind, not so gentle:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Ali Abd Al-Fattah, a Muslim Brotherhood leader in Egypt, which aired on Palestine Today TV on February 19, 2012:

The time has come for the entire Egyptian and Arab people to unite against the Zionist-American enterprise. We can do without all the foreign aid and dictates, and we can liberate Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, by means of our determination and our capabilities.

[…]

Egypt was isolated from the Arab camp. The time has come for restoring Arab unity and reestablishing Arab interests, and for Israel and the US to stop meddling in the Arab world, because the Camp David Accords have brought us nothing but disasters. The time will come when all the Arab peoples will strive to realize their aspirations, and Arab Jerusalem – both East and West Jerusalem – will become the capital of the State of Palestine, the accursed Jews will return to wherever they came from, and all the Palestinian rights will be restored, like the Right of Return of the refugees, and the Arab land will be completely cleansed from Zionist filth.

You ever notice how obsessed the Arab smack-talkers are with filth? And microbes? Like they want to wash their hands every three minutes? I wonder what that’s all about? Freud would wonder how things went during their toilet training.

No such problems for this guy:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Adel Al-Gazzar, a former Guantanamo inmate, which aired on Al-Rahma TV on February 16, 2012:

Interviewer: You said that some American soldiers in Guantanamo would cry and send letters to their mommies and girlfriends…

Adel Al-Gazzar: Right.

Interviewer: The American soldier looks strong, but is he really that strong?

Adel Al-Gazzar: Like the poet said, he has the body of a mule and the dreams of a bird. Some brothers even wrote a poem that goes: “This American, the real idiot. He resembles a donkey, in body and in stupidity.” This is just one part. This poem had many stanzas. He is a real idiot, and he resembles a donkey in his body and stupidity. Indeed, they have awesome bodies. They practice sports, and have muscles out to here, like Rambo. The US soldier thinks he’s a Rambo. The cinema has made him believe that. But the truth is that he is no Rambo.

[...]

The US soldier cannot fight at all. During the first Gulf War, the Egyptian and the Syrian armies moved in, and the Americans stayed behind. When it was all over and all the “dispensable” soldiers killed or wounded, the Americans would come and take pictures.

[...]

They would serve us breakfast that does not suit our nature. They would give you cornflakes and yogurt. People, we want falafel and broad beans… That stuff doesn’t cut it for us. It would never fill us.

No offense, Adel, but it would take a lot of falafel and broad beans to fill you up. You look like you survived just fine on corn flakes and yogurt. That diet served Americans well enough for those “idiot donkeys” to have captured and held your sorry a** for the better part of a decade.

Here’s a poem for you:

Corn flakes are golden,
Yogurt is white.
They’re all you can eat
When you’ve no teeth left to bite.

This is one person’s account, but it’s representative of my understanding of the situation:

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.

From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency…

In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.

As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

You know my feeling: Afghanistan was barely worth saving once (and that was only because the Taliban gave succor to Al Qaeda). Twice? No way. Before a drowning man can be saved, he must want to be saved.

But the analogy is flawed. Ass’stan is not a single entity; it’s not even a beehive or an ant colony. With apologies, I think it most represents a pile of horse[bleep], hosting a variety of beetles, flies, worms, bacteria, and other vermin. Not to say that some of that vermin isn’t cute, pretty, and worthy of our sympathy—but not worthy of our blood. Not another drop. Sorry, Afghani women: it was probably a mistake to teach you how to read.

PS: This story also mentions a NY Times dispatch that suggests we will assign a small unit of elite special forces to keep the Taliban in check. This was the deployment favored by Joe Biden and BTL, among others. Bush’s surge worked in Iraq. Obama’s surge never stood a chance.

First WikiLeaks, now WickedLeaks:

The video that emerged in recent days appearing to show four U.S. Marines urinating on several dead Taliban fighters has outraged many people in this country. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have condemned the act, the military has promised an inquiry, and some experts are even suggesting that the act could qualify as a war crime.

Mainly, however, people seem simply to not understand it. Why would America’s warriors — for that matter, why would anyone — urinate on a dead body?

I spent a year, off and on, with a platoon of U.S. soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan. There was a lot of fighting, a lot of casualties and an enormous amount of stress on the men I was with. I never saw anyone do anything like this, but then again, I never saw any dead Taliban fighters — the enemy always recovered their casualties before we could get there.

Nevertheless, the things the soldiers shouted during combat were very revealing of the state of mind that war produces. (For the record, I’m sure the Taliban was screaming pretty much the same things about us.) At one point a Taliban fighter had his leg shot off during a firefight and was crawling around on the hillside, dying, and the men I was with cheered at the sight. That cheer deflated me. I liked these guys tremendously, but that celebration was just so ugly. I didn’t want them to be like that.

Later, I asked one of them about it, and he explained that they had been happy because they were that much closer to all going home alive. They weren’t cheering the enemy’s death; they were cheering their own lives. That particular fighter would never again be able to kill an American soldier.

There’s the answer right there. Can we be done now?

Guess not.

There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.

When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 10 years old. As children they heard adults — and political leaders — talk about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions — achieved through torture — will not stand up in court.

For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad — not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living.

I hope someone else knows how to explain that to our soldiers, because I don’t have the faintest idea.

I will cede that Sebastian Junger has more experience in battle than I do (mine being zero). But I can think (in a way, after a fashion). So I ask (rhetorically): what the [bleep] is he talking about? I honestly don’t know.

Who talked about whom in inhuman terms? What self-important men and women? What enemy fighters have we sent to Libya and Syria? Whom did we torture into confessions that we were inadmissible? I’m not saying he’s wrong, I just don’t know what or whom he’s talking about.

This is the same moralizing codswallop I came to hate after 9/11. This pointless self-blame. Moments before whizzing on the Taliban, the Marines and their enemies were trying to kill each other. As in you’re dead or I am. I happen to value life more than death (some Moslem fighters proclaim the opposite), so my happiness that the four Marines lived to pee on their vanquished enemy is lessened imperceptibly by the manner in which they celebrated their day’s victory.

Sometimes, a leak is just a leak. If you don’t like war (and who does), don’t have one.

PS: For the record, this is my second comment on the story. The first is here.

To President Obama, GI are only the first two letters of “Git the [bleep] away from me!”

After the talk, out of earshot from the soldiers and diplomats, he starts to complain. He starts to act very un-Obamalike, according to a U.S. embassy official who helped organize the trip in Baghdad.

He’s asked to go out to take a few more pictures with soldiers and embassy staffers. He’s asked to sign copies of his book. “He didn’t want to take pictures with any more soldiers; he was complaining about it,” a State Department official tells me. “Look, I was excited to meet him. I wanted to like him.

Let’s just say the scales fell from my eyes after I did. These are people over here who’ve been fighting the war, or working every day for the war effort, and he didn’t want to take fu**ing pictures with them?”

Well, it was a long flight, and you know how little leg room there is on those flights these days. He had probably already seen the movie.

Here’s a president who knows how to handle adoration—with both hands!

“Clinton” is the latest installment in PBS’s “American Experience” series and is set to air in February. A half-hour sneak peak is being previewed Thursday evening at the National Press Club.

The film covers Clinton’s life in its entirety — from his childhood in Arkansas to his first runs for office to his election as governor of Arkansas to his presidency — but almost a full hour of the documentary focuses on Clinton’s personal struggles with fidelity, coupled with harsh, blunt language from many of his colleagues and chroniclers. In fact, the film’s introduction, a quick summary of the entire documentary, opens with the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Eight minutes in, the topic of Gennifer Flowers surfaces.

“There was this growing skepticism in the press that this guy was just a big phony,” Time’s Joe Klein said, discussing Clinton’s reaction to the allegations. “He was too slick. He was too smooth. And he would lawyer answers to questions.”

When discussing the Clintons’ years in Arkansas, narrator Campbell Scott said, “Hillary had to deal with Bill’s constant womanizing.”

“You’ve got to understand, at one time, there [were] at least 25 women per day coming through there trying to find him,” sais Paul Fray, Clinton’s campaign manager during his unsuccessful congressional run in 1974. “I’d tell them, ‘He’s on the road, get out the door.’ But, Lord, it was bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.”

…

“It’s almost as though there was a part of Bill Clinton that he had no control over,” said William Chafe, a history professor at Duke University.

Yeah, it was a little part that hangs to the left, I hear.

[Oh BTL, did you have to? Yeah, I did.]

It’s disrespectful, sure, I get that—but weren’t they just trying to kill each other?

NATO-led forces in Afghanistan denounced a video purporting to show a Marine sniper team urinating on dead bodies, saying Thursday the actions appear to be the work of “a small group of U.S. individuals” who are no longer in the country.

The statement appears to indicate that military officials believe the video is real, even though the Marine Corps says it is still working to verify its origin and authenticity.

“A video recently posted on a public website appears to show U.S. military personnel committing an inappropriate act with enemy corpses. This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces,” the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said in a statement.

“ISAF strongly condemns the actions depicted in the video, which appear to have been conducted by a small group of U.S. individuals, who apparently are no longer serving in Afghanistan.”

Naturally. After you’ve relieved yourself, why would you stay?

Now, before you get all moral on me, just don’t. I’m not in the mood. Our soldiers are there to kill the enemy, if necessary, and I don’t much care how they do it, as long as they get home in one piece. At least they had the decency to pee on them after they had killed them, not before. It certainly pales in comparison to what the Taliban do to our dead (and their living, for that matter).

If I were a general, I’d punish them. For acting like college students on spring break, and engaging in conduct unbecoming of Marines (if indeed it is).

But I’ve said all along as I’ve supported our “kinetic military actions” that soldiers do all sorts of things in war that we (and even they) wish they wouldn’t. Always have, always will. It’s a powerful argument against war. But once you’ve lost that argument, once you’re in it, you better be there to win it. Everything else is secondary. I said that when it was Bush’s war; I still say it now that it’s Obama’s.

Interesting how the political establishment seems to agree with me now. Abu Ghraib was nuclear, and it was just underwear (albeit ladies’ underwear, very dangerous stuff). This is but a pale flame, easily extinguished with a stream of p*ss.