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The dogs of war

Published Jan 22, 2012 8:08 PM

Already this year the U.S. Armed Forces showed once more why they should never have gone into Afghanistan and why they should get out now.

Someone videoed four U.S. Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. It’s unknown if these were dead fighters or civilians. Someone posted the video. It went viral.

Washington and the Pentagon had a problem.

In the U.S. military’s 10 years plus in Afghanistan its troops have committed much worse war crimes. They’ve invaded houses and murdered, pillaged and raped. Its planes and now its drones regularly wipe out wedding parties. Usually the top dogs cover up the crimes.

But such a viral video has repercussions. It shouts out to every Afghan — and implies to a billion Muslims and 3 billion Asians — that the U.S. military holds them in contempt. The Taliban fighters, every one of the 27 million Afghans, even those in the puppet government in Kabul, know that their U.S. “ally” considers them subhumans. That’s a big problem.

So Washington answered with a spasm of hypocrisy. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed her "total dismay," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called it "utterly deplorable," and the chair of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said it was “contrary to the values of a professional military.”

Bull. The truth is that the actions of the four Marines were the logical result of the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan.

U.S. imperialist power imparts an arrogance from the top of the government that works its way down to the troops at the bottom. Pentagon brainwashing reinforces this attitude by purposely dehumanizing the enemy, who are poor, foreign and speak a different language. The Army and Marine officers use racist terms to refer to the “enemy” and therefore to all the occupied people.

There are investigations underway of two possible murders by U.S. troops of Asian-American GIs who were singled out for racist persecution. That’s how deep racist indoctrination goes.

No, Gen. Dempsey, contempt for the enemy is consistent with the values of professional killers in a military that serves the super-rich of the world while trying to repress everyone else. Its every action is a war crime.