The flip side of glory: Why is the military unable to control rape?

[unhappycamper]

The flip side of glory: Why is the military unable to control rape?
by Robert C. Koehler | May 29, 2008 - 9:27am

An American soldier's sexual assault of a 14-year-old Okinawan girl has caused a diplomatic crisis that could result in Japan's refusal to increase its participation in the Iraq war, creating a rare situation indeed: an instance in which rape matters to the U.S. military.

President Bush apologized. Condi Rice even told Japanese leaders that the United States would "try" to prevent such incidents from happening again. My opinion: "Try" is already an admission of helplessness.

The military has no idea what to do with its rape problem because it's part of the core contradiction out of which today's military tradition has grown. Military rape, and the denial and/or blame-the-victim vehemence with which it is generally greeted, exposes, perhaps like nothing else, the lunacy of so much of our foreign policy, which is built on assumptions of that tradition that have long been abandoned in most other spheres of life, beginning with the need for a dehumanized, soulless "other" who is the "enemy."

Turns out the dehumanization process is not easily controlled, especially when it is well-armed and stoked with testosterone. This is the flip side of glory; and there is a growing global awareness that the way nation states conduct their business, and press their "interests" in the moral vacuum that separates one from another, must be reconsidered and humanized all the way, you might say, back to Rome (about whom it was said, "They create a wasteland and call it peace").

Doing so may well be humanity's most crucial task, and evidence that military rape -- against the enemy, against neutral civilians, against itself -- is a stealth horror far more pervasive than official sources willingly admit, or popular culture sees fit to acknowledge, demonstrates with particular poignancy the cost of avoiding it.


Rest of article at: http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/14910