Bagging trophies on Iraqi safari

By Nick Turse
Asia Times

"......Dehumanizing them has been the other. At a recent conference on urban warfare in Washington, DC, James Lasswell, a retired US Marine Corps colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, opened an interesting window into this side of things.

He noted that, as part of an instruction course named "Combat Hunter", the marines have brought in "big-game hunters" to school their snipers in the better use of "optics". According to a September article by Grace Jean in National Defense Magazine, "[T]he lab conducted a war game with marines, African game hunters and inner city police officers to search for ways to improve training." The program included a 15-minute CD titled "Every Marine a Hunter."

This year, according to an article by Kimberly Johnson of the Marine Corps Times, Colonel Clarke Lethin, chief of staff of the I Marine Expeditionary Force - I MEF, a unit based in Camp Pendleton, California that took part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and will be returning there soon - indicated that its commanders "believe that if we create a mentality in our marines that they are hunters and they take on some of those skills, then we'll be able to increase our combat effectiveness".

The article included this curious add-on: "The corps hopes to tap into skills certain marines may already have learned growing up in rural hunting areas and in urban areas, such as inner cities, said Colonel Clarke Lethin, I MEF's chief of staff.".....

..... the utilization of "big-game hunters" as troop trainers for the "urban jungles" of Iraq has been essentially ignored. Programs stressing cultural sensitivity may be covered, but treating Iraqis scavenging in a weapon-strewn war zone as the equivalent of elephants, water buffalo, or other prized trophies of great white hunters has gone largely unexamined in any meaningful way.

From the commander-in-chief to low-ranking snipers, a language of dehumanization that includes the idea of hunting humans as if they were animals has crept into our world - unnoticed and unnoted in the mainstream media. Perhaps a few linguistics professors or other social scientists might like to step into the breach and offer their views on the subject - unless, of course, they've already been mustered into those Human Terrain Teams. "