Burning the Quran; Urinating On Dead Bodies

From CounterPunch:

The burning of the Quran at Bagram Air Base, once a Soviet airfield when the Communist superpower occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, was described by a BBC correspondent as NATO’s tipping point in the country. The situation had been in the making almost from the beginning since the October 2001 invasion. The American military never understood that, in a country as impoverished but as rich in history and culture as Afghanistan, individual and national honor is the greatest asset. The failure to recognize this is particularly unfortunate for the United States, where so many politicians and those associated with the military-industrial complex would not stop talking about their honor and religious beliefs.

Is this failure down to the blindness of hubris? Or a disturbing level of prejudice against Muslims and Islam permeating certain sections of society and military? Is this the reckless instinct of a boyish mentality? Or a desperate method of finding a moment of laughter and entertainment in a highly stressful environment. Is it because of lack of training? Or no training is enough when irrationality rules human minds.

Acts such as the recent desecration of dead Afghan bodies by American marines urinating on them, and filming the episode, raise these awful but unavoidable questions.

More here.

When Alexander the Great conquered a nation, he took great pains to validate the local culture of the people he had just absorbed into his empire. He would make sure that his new subjects saw him dressed in their style of clothing. He would worship the local gods in their temples, eat local foods, participate in local cultural customs. The whole point was to win the hearts and minds of his new empire, and it worked pretty well--his empire didn't fall apart until after his death, when his sons divided it up as inheritance.

Apparently, Americans don't do that. Indeed, despite various officers and generals here and there who know how fucking stupid it is literally to piss on the culture of a conquered nation, and have done their damnedest to keep it all from happening, there just doesn't seem to be enough institutional will in our armed forces to do what needs to be done to win the hearts and minds of our new subjects. I mean, it doesn't have to be like this. We could easily educate our troops about local customs and establish standing orders that such customs must be respected; we could attach culture officers to every regiment to oversee it all. And maybe we've been doing that the whole time. I don't know. But it doesn't appear to be paying off in terms of American troops respecting the cultures of the nations we occupy.

In short, America is, at this point in history, ill suited to be an empire. I mean, of course we're ill suited because we're a republic, and empire tends to destroy republican rule. But I don't think Americans, as a people, have the cultural intelligence to really pull it all off. That is, we're a bunch of big fucking rednecks.

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