Video of Bodies of US Soldiers

CNN is reporting that a video of the bodies of the two US soldiers killed and mutilated in Iraq recently has been posted to the internet on Islamist websites. The video contains images of Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi, as well as voice-over by al Zarqawi.

The video claims that the killing of the soldiers was a reprisal for the rape and killing of the woman and her family in Mahmoudiya (which was allegedly committed by men from the same unit as the soldiers killed, but not by those men themselves). This veracity of this claim is suspect as the issue of the rape was not widely known until more recently than the deaths of the soldiers. It could be true, but we cannot know.

Posting of such images in despicable. The images themselves- with a "jihadist" holding up the decapitated head of one soldier and another placing his foot on the head of the other soldier to disgrace the body- remind me of the inhumanity I've seen in Holocaust photographs. This video shows clearly the nature of the individuals who are engaged in this so-called 'jihad' (there's nothing holy about this war) against the US and the West.

But... we must be careful.

Why be careful? The Middle East is plagued by a cycle of violence. "You kill one of mine, I kill two of yours." (Witness recent events in Gaza.) We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged to that moral low-ground- not in deeds and not even in our thinking. I'm afraid we already have done this- I can't tell you how many times I've heard the Iraq war justified by statements like, "They deserve it after what they did to us" (meaning 9/11 as if anyone of Arab decent was equally culpable). But it is not too late for us and our moral sensibilities.

Soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Americans at the homefront cannot afford to engage in this sort of thinking. It infected Americans' minds as they listened to the Bush Adminstration call for war in Iraq, and the consequences have been steep. It has rallied our enemies and increased their ranks.

Worst of all, it has damaged our collective soul as a nation. We need to aspire to more than such base thinking. We can be angry at the perpetrators- both of the killing and of the video production. We can seek justice against those involved. But we must not allow ourselves to think in terms of "collective justice" and use such an incident to harden our hearts against the suffering that we cause. We must not seek general retribution.

We must seek the moral high-ground- to live with ourselves and to set an example for the world. We must be very aggressive in training our troops to avoid more incidents like those at Hadditha or at Mahmoudiya. We must stop broadcasting to the world images of those our army kills- like Hussein's sons or al Zarqawi- if we expect the Islamist world (not Islamic) to stop broadcasting images of our dead soldiers.

Naive. No. Of course it will not cause those individuals like those involved in the killing and videotaping of those two soldiers to change their ways. But, it may reduce the appeal of videos such as these (they are for recruiting after all). It may slow the cycle of violence so that some day it may cease to spin.

Look at history. When has retaliation killing lead to peace? It hasn't. It takes more courage to break the cycle than to continue it. We must develop that courage and demonstrated it for all to see.

America's leadership could yet come from demonstration of morality and discretion, but we need to change directions and do so quickly. Otherwise, as I've said before, we will continue to reap what we sow.

GP