The Plight of Women Soldiers

The Plight of Women Soldiers
Spc. Monica Brown received the Silver Star Medal at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan in March 2008. Brown is the second female since World War II to earn the Silver Star award for her gallant actions while in combat. Pentagon policy prohibits women from serving in front-line combat roles, in the infantry, armor or artillery, for example. But the nature of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no real front lines, has seen women soldiers take part in close-quarters combat more than previous conflicts.



NPR.org, May 6, 2009 · Army specialist Mickiela Montoya was standing silently in the back of a Manhattan classroom while a group of male Iraq war veterans spoke to a small audience about their experiences as soldiers. It was November 2006, and she had been back from Iraq for a year, but was still too insecure to speak out in public. Anyway, the room was full of men, and Montoya had learned that a lot of men aren't much interested in listening to military women.

"Nobody believes me when I say I'm a veteran," she said that day, tucking her long red hair behind her ears. "I was in Iraq getting bombed and shot at, but people won't even listen when I say I was at war. You know why? Because I'm a female."

Montoya, who grew up in a Mexican family in East Los Angeles, served in Iraq for eleven months, from 2005-2006, with the 642nd Division Aviation Support Battalion. She was only 19 back then, but by the time she turned 21 she was as bitter as any old veteran, not only because of the lack of recognition she was receiving as a combat vet but because of the way she had been treated as a soldier—by her comrades, the army and by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Many female veterans share Montoya's anger. They join the military for the same reasons men do—to escape dead-end towns or dysfunctional families, to pay for college or seek adventure, to follow their ideals or find a career—only to find themselves denigrated and sexually hounded by many of the "brothers" on whom they are supposed to rely. And when they go to war, this harassment does not necessarily stop. The double traumas of combat and sexual persecution may be why a 2008 RAND study found that female veterans are suffering double the rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder for their male counterparts.

Not many people realize the extent to which the Iraq War represents a historic change for American women soldiers. More women have fought and died in Iraq than in all the wars since World War II put together. Over 206,000 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq; and over 600 have been wounded and 104 have died in Iraq alone, according to the Department of Defense. In Iraq, one in ten troops is a woman.

Yet the military—from Pentagon to the troops on the ground—has been slow to recognize the service these women perform, or even to see them as real soldiers. Rather, it is permeated with age-old stereotypes of women as passive sex objects who have no business fighting and cannot be relied upon in battle. As Montoya said about her time as a soldier, "The only thing the guys let you be if you're a girl in the military is a bitch, a ho, or a dyke. You're a bitch if you won't sleep with them, a ho if you even have one boyfriend, and a dyke if they don't like you. So you can't win."

The pinnacle of this derogatory attitude toward women is the Pentagon's ban on women in ground combat, which it reaffirmed in 2006 despite being perfectly aware that in Iraq women are in combat all the time. (Speculation is that President Obama may finally reverse this ban, but it stands as of now.) Because the US military is so short of troops and Iraq's battlefields are towns and roads, women are frequently thrown into jobs indistinguishable from those of the all-male infantry, cavalry and armor divisions, often under the guise of "combat support." They "man" machine guns atop tanks and trucks, guard convoys, raid houses, search and arrest Iraqis, drive military vehicles along bomb-ridden roads, and are killing and being killed. In Afghanistan, too, women find themselves in these positions.

Yet even though more than 2,000 women who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan have been awarded Bronze Stars, several for bravery and valor in combat; more than 1,300 have earned the Combat Action Badge; and two have been awarded Silver Stars, the military's top honor for bravery in combat, the official ban continues. This makes it difficult for women to be taken seriously as soldiers or advance in their careers, let alone win respect.

The Pentagon justifies the ban by blaming civilian attitudes. American society, its policy statement says, believes that femininity is incompatible with combat, and will not tolerate the killing and mutilation of its mothers and daughters. Likewise, it argues, soldiers are more troubled by the sight of women being wounded and killed than of men, so will put themselves at extra risk trying to protect women in battle. And finally, women in combat would endanger men because of their lesser strength.

These arguments have been made for decades by conservatives too, but ironically a 2005 Gallup Poll, reported by the military itself, belies them: 72 percent of the public favored women serving anywhere in Iraq, and 44 percent (and here I quote the military's own report) "favored having women serve as the ground troops who are doing most of the fighting."

Not one of these arguments against women in combat has been borne out in Iraq. Any sign of public or media outrage over how many women soldiers are being killed and wounded in Iraq has been conspicuously absent; rather, the press has focused the bulk of its war stories on men, as if female soldiers barely exist, and the same applies to feature films and documentaries. Far from protecting women, many men are attacking them, as discussed below. Studies have long shown that some women's strength matches that of some men, and that women use ingenuity instead of strength where necessary. And there is no evidence that women soldiers add to the danger of men in any way. On the contrary, it is women who are in more danger than before, both from being in battle and from those very men who are supposed to feel so protective of them.

Did Blackwater (Xe) Contractors Attempt to Hide Evidence of a Massacre in Iraq

Did Blackwater Contractors Attempt to Hide Evidence of a Massacre in Iraq?
By Scott Horton

Private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater USA) has fallen on hard times. Iraq has yanked its license, forcing Blackwater out of one of its former operations centers. Last December, five Blackwater employees were indicted on fourteen manslaughter charges and allegations they used automatic weapons in the commission of a crime. A sixth Blackwater agent pleaded guilty to two charges as part of an agreement to testify against his colleagues. Now the company faces more bad news. Bill Sizemore of the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot reports that charges are being brought based on obstruction of justice:

Shortly after a 2007 shooting incident in a Baghdad traffic square that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, Blackwater contractors allegedly transferred a number of machine guns to another contractor who is now charged with trying to smuggle them out of Iraq. The Blackwater contractors wanted to dispose of the weapons before an investigation of the bloody incident began, according to two confidential government informants. John Houston, the contractor charged in the case, allegedly told one of the informants that after Blackwater “got into trouble,” the guards had to get rid of the firearms so they wouldn’t be caught with them…

The GOP War on Doctors, Patients and Health Care Reform

The GOP War on Doctors, Patients and Health Care Reform
Back in 1993, Bill Kristol mobilized Republicans to block the Clinton health care plan with an infamous two- word talking point, "no crisis." Now 16 years later, GOP pollster and master of double-speak Frank Luntz is offering conservatives a new lexicon for scuttling President Obama's health care initiatives. While feigning support for "reform," Luntz insists, Republicans should oppose Obama by warning of threats to the "doctor-patient relationship."

Of course, the President is threatening no such thing. And as it turns out, George W. Bush not only used the same language Luntz now advocates. As its draconian positions over abortion policy and the Terri Schiavo case showed, it is the Republican Party which is intent on abridging the doctor-patient relationship.

...........complete post at link

Another Wacky Anti-science Republican Speaks Out

Pence: I’m Not ‘Anti-Science’…But I Don’t Believe In Global Warming, Stem Cell Research, Or Evolution
Last month, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) announced the creation of the House GOP American Energy Solutions Group, which will “work on crafting Republican solutions to lower energy prices for American families and small businesses.” Undermining the seriousness of the task force, the GOP announced that it was appointing climate change denier Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to the group.

Another member of the organization is Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). In a contentious debate with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews today, the third-ranking House Republican claimed that the science behind climate change is “mixed.” Pence did, however, admit that it is “fair” to question whether that makes him a discredited messenger on energy issues

HealthCare for Every American is Not a Trojan Horse

Why The Public Health Plan Is Not A Trojan Horse
Former Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt argues that a new Medicare-like public health care plan is a “trojan horse” for “government-run” health care. He fully explains the metaphor:

The story of the Trojan horse is familiar. After years of fruitlessly trying to enter the city of Troy, the Greeks boarded their ships and pretended to sail away. They left behind a huge wooden horse, which the Trojans claimed as a symbol of their victory and dragged into their mighty fortress. But the horse was full of Greek soldiers, who waited until midnight and then opened the gates for their invading army. Advocates for government-run health care are similarly pretending to sail away from “Medicare for all” or “universal coverage,” leaving before us the notion of a “public option.”

Single-payer advocates huddled in a horse, waiting only to break-out and force every American to enroll in a new public option? No…. that’s not quite it. What will actually happen, Leavitt contends, is that the public plan will do such a good job of keeping costs low that more Americans will abandon their current plans — under which they saw premiums increase by 117% over the past ten years — and choose to enroll in the new public option.

And this is supposed to be a bad thing?

Yes, because with a ‘public option’ that uses “Medicare-like reimbursement rates”, employers would bolt…the Lewin Group estimates that 118 million Americans would lose their private health insurance…no private insurance system would be able to survive, and the United States would have a government-run system like Medicare,” Levitt explains.

But why are private insurers so vulnerable to competition? Under some conceptions of the public plan, the new program could use its purchasing power to bargain with providers, but reimbursement rates that are too low would drive away providers and, by extension, consumers. The public plan would fold. In an environment where private plans are forced to compete with a new efficient public program, inefficient, over-bloated insurers will go out of business, but private plans with good networks of providers or better services will continue attracting new enrollees. In other words, the public plan may have the advantage in administrative efficiency and setting rates, but the private plans will most certainly find a niche to fill.

Also, as public plan architect Jacob Hacker explains over at The Treatment, Lewin’s findings do “indicate that the savings from having a public plan compete with private plans could be huge…[but] it has virtually no bearing on the question of how large enrollment in the public plan would be” under health care reform.

That’s because The Lewin Group study that Leavitt cites, “looked at a hypothetical proposal in which employers could buy into a national public plan by paying the plan’s premium. What’s more, in the hypothetical proposal that the Lewin Group examined, new rules would be imposed on employment-based health insurance that would vastly increase the cost for some firms of providing coverage….By contrast, all the proposals that are actually on the agenda today have employers buy into an “exchange” that has both a public plan and private plans as a choice within it. Moreover, all these proposals have at least large employers enroll their workers in the exchange by paying a payroll-based contribution, not the public plan’s premium.”

According to Lewin’s analysis of something that’s actually been proposed (i.e. Hacker’s proposal), “the public plan ends up with much lower enrollment in the public plan than projected in the Lewin Group’s new analysis (90 million versus over 131 million)”; “around 38 million people in the exchange would choose private plans instead of the public plan.”

When considering health reform, policy makers have a choice to make: restructure the health insurance market so that it provides affordable and comprehensive health benefits to all Americans, or protect the monopoly of private insurers and continue redistributing as much income as possible to the private insurance industry. I think we know where Leavitt stands.

GOP Has Hit the Dead-End of Politics

GOP Has Hit the Dead-End of Politics
What sort of psychological bent would lead people to want to be part of a dead-end political party like the GOP has become?

Clearly, fear--stirring it as well as succumbing to it--is central to such a psyche, and Republicans are swinging that big spiked mace as wildly as if it were the night before a bitterly contested election. This Web ad that came out last week isn't from Michael Savage or Glenn Beck (more from them later) but from House minority leader John Boehner and intel committee ranking Republican Pete Hoekstra.

Actually, we do feel safer, most people would say. The world doesn't hate us quite as much now that a president is offering a handshake instead of the finger, and we're not alienating our allies now that we're not asking them to jump off the Geneva Convention while screaming "Yee-ha!" all the way down.

The strange thing is that Repubs are still producing this kind of National Security theater, complete with cardiac arrest-soundtrack, even though it's failed time and again over the past two years in campaign ads for Tom Tancredo, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and just about every other doomed GOP hopeful.

At some point the vaunted Republican noise machine stopped being about winning elections and became instead a feckless attempt at mass justification, popping out one lame excuse after another for the party's failures. And it was a short leap from there to simply hitting rewind on the rightwing's longtime romance with a Lost Cause. Like Southerners still waving the stars'n'bars 150 years after Appomattox, or Col. Custer blithely riding up that coulee into an overwhelming force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, today's Repub diehards will go to their graves muttering about the fascist-socialist-gun-snatching tyranny of Barack Osama, convincing themselves sotto voce that, by fighting for a lower tax-rate for the extremely wealthy, they're the true descendants of the American Revolution. As the teabag-besotted begillionaire Mitt Romney told a Republican crowd this weekend, with no apparent sense of his own absurdity, "We are the party of the revolutionaries, they [Democrats] are the party of the monarchists."

That new study indicating that conservatives might not quite understand that Stephen Colbert's wingnut rants are devastating mockery rings true. Because not understanding isn't just a failure to get the joke, it's a defense mechanism: Without a certain level of cluelessness, the whole party would be knocking around in an unstatesmanlike manner, blurting, "My God, what have I done?" Isn't it simpler to insist, as Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe does, that Arlen Specter's flight from the GOP is exactly what the party needs to regain control of both the House and the Senate? "This is the first visible evidence that what happened in 1993 is happening again now," Inhofe told Fox News, sounding like Caligula claiming that treasure chests of seashells were his tribute from Neptune for defeating the sea.

Why are these marble men so determined to resurrect dead, failed ideas? It isn't simply because they don't have new ones (which they don't). There's also a psychological payoff to committing yourself to a bankrupt idea--whether it's the odd notion that cutting taxes will save us from our economic crisis of liquidity, or the disproved theory that abstinence-only education will decrease teen pregnancies.

The sad fact is, fidelity to a Lost Cause valorizes you, it imitates honor. So the Republican Party isn't about greed or power or any base selfishness; rather, it's about nobly committing to something larger than itself--ending abortion, spreading democracy by force, saving Terri Schiavo, or, as of late, saving the GOP itself from knowledge of itself. Never mind that none of those commitments is remotely achievable, even the last.

For the kingdom of Lost Cause Republicans is not of this world. This world is corrupt and fallen. But there is another world where all of our desires, be they sleeping with 72 virgins or living tax-free, will be fulfilled, and heavenly justice will prevail.

The beauty part about a Lost Cause is that you don't have to struggle to find practical political solutions--that would require compromise and make you impure. Instead, you only have to make gestures and think magically. As Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina said, "The best way to get to 60 is to have a core group of Republicans who really do what they say and stand for their principles."

To achieve purity, whether in a body politic or an individual body, you must be ever vigilant for contaminants. Corruption could come in the form of compromising on a stimulus package or saying something rude about Rush, or, this season, in the form of actual viruses. (Some GOPers conflated H1N1 with Specter by dubbing his defection as "The Swine Flew.")

That is, purity requires paranoia, and what better paranoid fantasy of (white) purity befouled (by darker races) is there than the Mexican Immigrant Swine Flu Bioterrorist plot? See, says hate radio's Michael Savage, the pandemic's source isn't pigs but Islamofacist terrorists who may have "concocted this virus and planted it in Mexico," knowing full well that Mexican immigrants are the "perfect mules for bringing this virus into America."

For Glenn Beck, the virus itself is the ruse, cleverly designed to put baby-killers in charge of the department of Health and Human Services. "She [Kathleen Sebelius] can be confirmed right out of the gate because of this swine flu. So don't look over here, look at the swine flu, look at the swine flu, look at the swine flu. And she just goes right through the gate."

Unclean! Unclean! They've all come back, those Goldwater-era obsessions--commie infiltration, brains getting washed, contaminants you can't wash out. And now, from crazy-eyed Rep. Michelle Bachmann, Obama's "re-education camps."

Wait, haven't we seen this movie before?

What's an honest American to do besides take that long, last ride into the purity of a blinding flash of white?

Right to the Very End in Iraq, Our Masters Denied Us the Truth

Right to the Very End in Iraq, Our Masters Denied Us the Truth
'We acknowledge," the letter says, "that violence has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqi civilians over the last five years, either through terrorism or sectarian violence. Any loss of innocent lives is tragic and the Government is committed to ensuring that civilian casualties are avoided. Insurgents and terrorists are not, I regret to say, so scrupulous."

This quotation comes from the Ministry of Defence's "Iraq Operations Team, Directorate of Operations" and is signed by someone whose initials may be "SM" or "SW" or even "SWe". Unusually (but understandably), it does not carry a typed version of the author's name. Its obvious anonymity – given the fact that not a single reference is made to the civilians slaughtered by the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq – is no surprise. I, too, would not want to be personally associated with such Blair-like mendacity. What is astonishing, however, is that this outrageous letter should have been written this year.

I should say at once that I owe this revelatory text (actually dated 20 January) to a very un-anonymous Independent reader, Tom Geddes, who thought I would find its "economy with the truth" interesting. I certainly do. We are now, are we not, supposed to be in the age of Brown-like truth, as we finally haul down the flag in Basra, of near-certainty of an official inquiry into the whole Iraq catastrophe, a time of reckoning for the men who sent us off to war under false pretences. I suspect that this – like the Obama pretensions to change – is a falsehood. Well, we shall see.

Mr Geddes, I hasten to add, is a retired librarian who worked for 21 years at the British Library as head of Germanic collections and is also a translator of Swedish – it turns out that we share the same love of the Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Sodergrund's work – and he wrote to the Ministry of Defence at the age of 64 because, like me (aged 62), he was struck that John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Defence, described those who jeered at British troops returning home as "cretins".

"Such jeering is clearly not meant to denigrate individual bravery and sacrifice," Geddes wrote to Hutton on 28 October – readers will notice it took the Ministry of Defence's "SM" (or "SW" or "SWe") three months to reply – "(but) is a political comment on the general dubious legality and morality of recent military actions."

I'm not so sure the jeering was that innocent, but Geddes's concluding remark – that "unless you or the Government can explain and justify Britain's war activities, you cannot expect to have the country on your side" – is unimpeachable.

Not so "SM's" reply. Here is another quotation from his execrable letter. "It is important to remember that our decision to take action (sic) in Iraq was driven by Saddam Hussein's refusal to co-operate with the UN-sponsored weapons inspections... The former Prime Minister has expressed his regret for any information, given in good faith, concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which has subsequently proven to be incorrect."

I am left breathless by this lie. Saddam Hussein did not "refuse to co-operate" with the UN weapons inspectors. The whole problem was that – to the horror of Blair and Bush – the ghastly Saddam did co-operate with them, and the UN weapons team under Hans Blix was about to prove that these "weapons of mass destruction" were non-existent; hence the Americans forced Blix and his men and women to leave Iraq so that they and Blair could stage their illegal invasion. I saw Blix's aircraft still on the ground at Baghdad airport just two days before the attack. Note, too, the weasel words. Blair did not give his information "in good faith", as SM claims. He knew – and the Ministry of Defence knew (and I suppose SM knew) – they were untrue. Or "incorrect" as "SM" coyly writes.

Then again: "We can assure you that the Government would not have engaged in military action if it were not satisfied that such a decision was justified and lawful. The former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, confirmed on 17 March 2003 that authority to use force against Iraq existed from the combined effect of UN Security Council Resolutions 678, 687 and 1441."

But as an outraged Tom Geddes points out in his reply to this remark, "You must be aware that the decision to wage war on Iraq was neither justified nor lawful. The Attorney General's advice has been widely described as 'flawed'. Given that his previous advice was that an attack would be unlawful, we all know what 'flawed' means. I suspect the MoD (Ministry of Defence) also knows." So do I.