Things like this happen in war, on all sides, nothing should surprise us when you train male teenagers to kill, and humiliating and dehumanizing your enemy is as old as warfare itself. But the real insight will come from how it is spun back home.

You’ve seen the pictures, or heard about them, no doubt. A Marine sniper team took videos of themselves urinating on dead enemy fighters. They are in trouble with the military authorities, I hope they throw the book at these witless barbarians.

And no, I’m not making excuses for when the bad guys do the same thing, or attacking our brave warriors just to discredit them, or tarring with the same brush, or any of the other crap the pro-war faction will spin up to justify this barbaric and stupid act.

Killing people is the ultimate barbarity; personally, I don’t give a damn who pisses on my corpse. But from a purely practical, purely military point of view, this sort of contempt for the enemy dead will eventually be taken advantage of by our enemies and used against us, both as propaganda, and as an excuse to do the same to our dead and prisoners. Americans will suffer and die because these animals can’t see any further than they can piss. To use the obvious cliche, we have become what we are fighting, and we think its funny.

Refraining from pointless cruelty and symbolic desecration doesn’t mean you’re soft on Islamic Fundamentalists or think Terrorism is OK, or that you’re a leftist peacenik piece of crap. Not doing this makes sense from a strategic point of view, from a military point of view, from the point of view of the man who has to go there and fight. What these men did is not just morally barbaric, it’s intellectually stupid, and militarily counterproductive..

And those here who might be tempted to make excuses for these thugs is just as barbaric and stupid as they are. These men deserve to be punished, and this story should be publicized, not hidden, to punish those who would prefer to keep it hidden, and to declare to the world that real Americans aren’t afraid to accept their own justice.