Marine urination , shocking?

[Rotku]

Especially if you are trying to win over the local population.

[t-ice]

In a single stroke they increased the risk of their fellow soldiers considerably along with undermining months, possibly, of their entire mission. If found guilty, the punishment should reflect that.

Yes, by taping this act these men in the long run probably caused more deaths of their fellow soldiers than if they had gone on a maniac shooting rampage in their base.

The question is, are these soldiers as individuals responsible for it? Expecting the soldiers to respect the foreign people with one hand, and kill them with the other, is sending them off on an impossible mission. And then you're saying it's their fault that they failed and punish them for it.

The logic of the leadership feigning ignorance and "bad apples" here is much like what Medvedev said of the Russian elections: "Even if you count together all proven cases of fraud, it's only a fraction of a percent, so the elections were not perfect but very close to fair."

wartime is when the walls of morality should be reinforced not lessened.

You might as well say we should all eat our cakes while saving them, so then we'd have an infinite supply of cake, no-one would go needy, and the whole world could join hands happily singing Kumbayah.

[rorax]

Soldiers volunteer to serve in the military.

Volunteer? Interesting choice of words. I volunteer to help run my local hockey club. I volunteer to write my archery club's newsletters. I volunteer when I stand out on the street collecting for one charity or another. I don't think anyone would say I volunteer when I go to work to do my job though. Serving in a military is no more honourable than working as a teacher, a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer, a plumber, or a checkout operator. If my job ever required me to do anything that was morally wrong, I would hope that I would walk out. No one can argue that killing is morally correct.

Serving in the military, for most people it's just a job , just like you said...i think serving in combat units is different.

I won't say that serving in combat units is "honorable" , but i found the people who served there to be usually LESS selfish that others. There is something in people who were willing to put their life at risk with no immediate and visible personal gain or profit.

I work in large and global pharmaceutical company, and i work in the IT department there. Most of the people who work with me are veterans of technology units and i can clearly see the difference between them. After 10-15 mins of conversion with someone and seeing how he reacts and speaks, i can know what he did in his service.


About what Paazin said , that during war time people should stick stronger to moral codes, i agree it's desirable situation. I don't think someone justified "wrong" behavior by being in extreme situations, what most people here said is that they are not "shocked" it happened and it's a bit unfair to get the entire picture because....they were not in their shoes.


A bit like the situation in "time to kill" , where the father kill the man who raped his daughter. Is it justified and correct behavior - most would answer that probably no. Did it shock anyone that he did it? probably not as well. Would it be fair to judge a father who did such thing until you "were in his shoes" i said it's not entire fair...

[paazin]

The question is, are these soldiers as individuals responsible for it? Expecting the soldiers to respect the foreign people with one hand, and kill them with the other, is sending them off on an impossible mission. And then you're saying it's their fault that they failed and punish them for it.

The logic of the leadership feigning ignorance and "bad apples" here is much like what Medvedev said of the Russian elections: "Even if you count together all proven cases of fraud, it's only a fraction of a percent, so the elections were not perfect but very close to fair."

They absolutely are responsible and any excuses offered would be tantamount to implicit acceptance.

And precisely because it is only a minority that would engage in something like that; there's a wide gulf of using off-colour language, insults and slurs and something as egregious as this. They knew it was wrong -- hell, before they did it they looked around to see if any superiors were around so they wouldn't get spotted/caught.

To compare the discipline in US armed services to United Russia's systematic attempts at vote-rigging both wholly incorrect and offensive.

[t-ice]

They absolutely are responsible and any excuses offered would be tantamount to implicit acceptance.

That's right. It would be the (civilian) leadership accepting the responsibility that starting a war leads to war - and all the hell that war implies. Accepting that you can't cherry pick the good - even if you can hide 99% percent of the bad and ugly. Because if the leadership either doesn't understand the realities of war, or more likely and perhaps worse they callously choose to deny the realities for convenience, what are the chances the next decision to go to war will be a well-informed one?

And precisely because it is only a minority that would engage in something like that

And how did you divine that? Comments to this "crisis" by people who have supposedly had boots on the ground in similar situations don't exactly support the notion that this is something fringe. Especially if you listen to people whose hands aren't tied by political reasons. I'd easily believe it's a "minority" in the sense of less than 50%. But for the local people, 5% is way more than enough. (And so it is with perspectives turned: 5% of the local people fighting the soldiers as insurgents is way more than enough. And thus the spiral to hell is on.)

Considering the circumstance of this video even being recorded, let alone manage to slip to the internet, you can't help but ask how countless many times something similar has happened before one recording gets public. For an order of magnitude estimate, take the Abu Ghraib precedent. By that analogy, before a case of something like this slips public, it would have become a regular habit that people feel relaxed about, and thus lose their focus and perspective on the need to hide it deep.

This, which I suppose is as close to the horse's mouth as we'll get in this thread, is well worth repeating:

Civilians send soldiers to war..they shouldnt cry when soldiers do what they do.

Me, I'm just counting myself lucky it isn't me.
I hold no moral superiority to throw the first stone at these men.

[oldgrayrogue]

Never been in the military, no idea what it feels like to be in a war zone. However I grew up with a whole lot of macho assholes who thought crap like "I piss on your grave" was cool. All this is is a few soldiers acting like idiots. The reason there is such outrage IMO is that we Americans like to think we are above this sort of stuff.

[paazin]

I can't pretend to give figures as it's all circumstantial; I know a great many in the armed services said it was profoundly disappointing.

Indeed the narrative is that Americans are better than this and despite what people say of its truth, it's part the American idea of exceptionalism. If you look at the last half century or so and the Pax Americana, an integral piece of the American liberal order has been a commitment to ethics, rule of law and the ideal that more is to be gained from internationalism and cooperation than isolation.

Behavior like this (Guantamo, Abu Ghraib, etc.) flies in the face of everything and undermines the American position everywhere, from Afghanistan to Latin America and only encourages states like Russia and China who don't necessarily have the same dedication to ethics.

[t-ice]

You have to ask why are these young men doing this, surely they don't mean to piss on American "exceptionalism". What I think this is, is an act of camradery saying: "We value the lives of our comrades in arms more than we value the dignity and human rights of our enemies." Because that question these young men have to answer routinely in their duty: Whether to risk the lives of your comrades for the dignity and human rights of someone who likely enough (like at least more than 0.1% likelyhood) wants to kill you all.

Valuing the life of your fellow soldier above all is the single most important thing making military units effective. There's no exceptionalism there, it's what even the US Military wants to promote and that camradery is considered a highly honorable part of service. But the interesting question is not whether you value your life more than that of your fellow. It's whether you value the dignity and human rights of hostile people more that the life of your fellow. I'd claim almost all soldiers will place their fellows first, and how can you blame them? I know I would. Unless you would be willing to sacrifice your comrades lives for the dignity of the enemy, and you would want your fellow soldiers to likewise be willing to sacrifice you, for all means and purposes that matter, this is you pissing on corpses here.

[rorax]

Behavior like this (Guantamo, Abu Ghraib, etc.) flies in the face of everything and undermines the American position everywhere, from Afghanistan to Latin America and only encourages states like Russia and China who don't necessarily have the same dedication to ethics.

Nah....while such videos play to the hands of the "enemy" who ironically lectures back about morality, what undermines the position of US are completely different things and mainly the lack of action the US government adopted as policy during the last couple of years.

Talking about pissing...N. Korea was pissing on the US when they did their nuclear tests, the hesitated tune and position the US showed is what causing the country to decline. Also, how they are dealing with the Iranian crisis and the middle east in general....(Libya, Egypt, Syria the peace process, etc...)

And few days ago....this story:

http://news.yahoo.com/iran-mocks-us-toy ... -news.html

If it's true....that's what i call pissing and exactly from the type of things that make US power to decline."

[Rotku]

[Edited] Ignore me. I'm trolling. Post removed(ish).

[Heero]

All is fair in love and war.

[Castano]

t-ice is sadly right. Killing another human is a sin period. I much prefer that we should have used a nuke on Afghanistan after 9/11 rather than sending our soldiers there to be dehumanized fighting the barabarian Taliban and engaging in "nation" building for people who have been wholly incapable of governing themselves in any kind of civilized way for centuries.

[rorax]

t-ice is sadly right. Killing another human is a sin period. I much prefer that we should have used a nuke on Afghanistan after 9/11 rather than sending our soldiers there to be dehumanized fighting the barabarian Taliban and engaging in "nation" building for people who have been wholly incapable of governing themselves in any kind of civilized way for centuries.

LOL!

*votes to castano*