Also, people are throwing around the beheading thing when talking about the Taliban. I’m aware of a number of beheadings in Iraq by the insurgency there, but I’m not aware of the beheading of any prisoners/hostages by the Taliban.
Well the Taliban certainly do/did go in for some really nasty shit (horrible if not NSFW pics) like stoning women in stadiums full of people.
But here’s the distinction people are failing to get: look at the horrified faces of the brutalized in those RAWA pictures. They’re the people the US is meant to be appealing to. They’re the people from whom the Taliban recruit. The distinction the ‘it’s no big deal and besides they do horrible shit too’ camp is missing is that doing something disrespectful within the context of the culture of the victims of the Taliban, regardless of the actions of the people to whom it is being done, undermines and erodes further the authority of the US. Aside from issues of morality and desecration, it’s a strategically dumb thing to do and to film.
The good news is, however: Taliban totally fine with whole pissing on corpses thing 
Believe me, I know about the Taliban, I’ve spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. I’m just tired of people conflating Iraq and Afghanistan.
Because it’s bad PR.
Sorry, I wasn’t addressing you, I was addressing the ‘it’s no big deal’ camp while using your post as merely as a touchstone. I’m well aware of the good work you’ve done there and the consequent danger you must have been in because of it - something a vanishingly few of us on the SDMB could claim, and certainly not me - and I thank you for it.
Anyway CP has said it much more succinctly than I did: it’s bad PR.
Ah, the old “We are the civilized Christian White Man bringing enlightenment to the heathen darkies, and they don’t even have the grace to be grateful for it!” routine. They don’t resent us because we brutalize and kill them then desecrate their dead; they resent us because they are inferior beings who aren’t properly grateful that we deign to piss on their corpses.
And yes, we torture people, we casually kill people; including killing a handcuffed baby in Iraq. I fail to see why beheading or stoning someone is morally inferior to shooting them or clubbing them to death with a rifle or setting them on fire with white phosphorus.
And Americans claim God is on their side all the time.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Secretary of State had been equally loud about all the good things we do? Like pick up Iranian sailors in the middle of the gulf and feed them special food kept on hand for that very purpose.
Perhaps next time our guys should use a cigar on an orifice and see what she has to say about it.
I had to look up what you meant; I had this image of some sailors opening up a big can marked “Iranian Chow”. 
I agree-peeing on taliban corpses is juvenile and outrageous-but what about the muslim who put a bomb on a bus that killed 50 people?
How on earth do these two deeds equate?
Of course, silence from the religion of peace.
It is long past the time (when we should leave Afghanistan).
I wonder if this video was released on Wikileaks.
Yep, we are effete because we don’t abuse corpses and behead prisoners and otherwise act just like the Taliban.
What an astonishing post.
Ah yes, the old baby handcuffs. All soldiers keep a pair. Ordinarily I would say the reason to not piss on a dead enemy is out of respect but with the Taliban killing unarmed foreign aid workers merely passing out medicine and sending suicide bombers into crowds of children because they accept candy from soldiers and the whole marrying and raping 6 year olds and the general fighting from behind the skirts of the populace thing I guess I’ll have to say self respect because we are or at least should be better than that.
I fully understand the anger that would make a soldier do that, particularly against elusive shoot and run to the olly oxen free of Pakistan type of enemy but we should be more professional.
But of course we aren’t. We kill people for stepping out of their house as an American vehicle drives by, we support in power people who rape children in Afghanistan (they just seem to prefer boys), we kill people indiscriminately enough that I see no reason to believe it makes any difference whether they “fight from behind the skirts of the populace”.
This isn’t a fight of good guys against bad guys; it’s bad guys against bad guys. We’re just a better armed, richer bunch of bad guys.
The difference is that people like those behind Abu Gharib, or these people mentioned in the OP or the soldier who killed Afghans for fun are condemned by public opinion and tried.
Christopher Hitchens certainly did not believe God was on America’s (or anybody’s side) yet he realized it was a battle between civilization and savages.
No; people are embarrassed that it came out in public, and a few of the lower ranking people are admonished. But the brutality goes on, and most of the perpetrators are legally shielded against any punishment for their actions.
What does Christopher Hitchens have to do with anything? And we are not civilized. We are sadists, fanatics, looters and thugs. The world would be better off if America sank into the ocean.
You mean like the mass public outrage and the fact that the soldier got life in prison?
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I mean he was critical of much of America yet he realized we still represented civilization against the savages in the deserts and mountains of the Middle East.
Who would you rather have as ruler: Osama Bin Laden or George W Bush?
The people giving the orders weren’t punished, and most of the torturers are legally shielded from all prosecution. And I didn’t see much “public outrage”; I saw a lot of people trying to excuse it, and more people just embarrassed it became public.
Ah, the White Man’s Burden. :rolleyes:
I see little difference between the two. Put bin Laden in as President and he’d face the same restrictions that kept Bush from running completely wild; but in Iraq where Bush had license to do as he pleased we saw the Hell on Earth he’d create given the chance. Both of them were mass murdering monsters; tyrants, sadists and fanatics. But Bush killed more people.