In yet another sock to the perception of American troops, footage shown on Australian news station SBS TV depicts American soldiers burning the bodies of two Taliban members in Afghanistan. Could this be an act of revenge? Of frustration? Gee, of hygiene?
It does not matter, because somehow this is being tied in with the treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba.
These bodies are being burned for hygiene reasons, according to the soldiers. Against religious doctrine or not, it has very little to do with the treatment of prisoners. It is the media who are conveniently making this connection for us, and their reasons are many.
As so much coverage on this issue has evinced, everything about the war is a partisan issue. The Associated Press, among others, noted how these events "couldn't have come at a worse time for the Bush administration." To say nothing of how the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan might feel about the worldwide broadcast of how insensitive American forces are to Islamic burial rites.
And the whole "brutality of war" idea is always good for headlines, especially if it can be (even loosely) connected with other brutalities.
But I have the real answer as to why there are so many brutal acts on both sides of the war on terror. (Something tells me it's in violation of Christian tradition to get your head chopped of by a meat cleaver, but that could just be my interpretation.)
It is all due to this wacky invention called a camera. Don't be confused; the camera does not actually cause the brutality. Evidentially, cameras are really good at creating melodrama.
What causes the brutality is war itself; we are no sooner pioneers of brutality than we are the founders of war. It's been going on for some time now, roughly 3 million years since humankind first wanted what someone else had.
Part and parcel with war comes the accumulation of prisoners, for those who take prisoners, at least. And with this comes the potential for maltreatment. But, again, the burning of two dead bodies for hygiene purposes falling into the category of maltreatment depends on who is watching.
The supposed answer to all of this is also inherently partisan, as well. Some want the troops brought to bear as well as their leaders, others, not so much. But left and right seem to agree that there must be a standard for how American soldiers treat detainees.
Alas, making "standardized techniques" for the detainee treatment is an exercise in redundancy. There have been standards for the treatment of prisoners for years. It's not as if troops are simply handed a set of operating instructions that read: "If you find bad guys, indulge your cruelest fantasies."
Cruelty is a natural trait; if you've forgotten this, go back to high school and there she be.
The real rub thus far has been detainee treatment in regards to religious doctrine. I'm not saying I would want my body run up a flagpole if I died in combat. But what is done to the body after death means something invariably different to me than to a Muslim.
What needs to happen is that if Congress is truly concerned about our image, educating troops on Muslim rites is a good place to start, not just writing down that having detainees on leashes is wrong. But what everyone else should realize is that not only is brutality on both sides of this war, nothing will stop it completely.
Just because a camera is catching it now, does not mean it never existed before now.
Darren Todd is an English literature graduate student. Be brutal to him at lawrence.todd@asu.edu.
