The Wars Come Home: Violent Sex Crimes Committed By Soldiers Have Almost Doubled

If you still need proof of just what a long term disaster America's war policies of the last decade have been for the country, consider this recent article from Reuters:

Violent sex crimes committed by active U.S. Army soldiers have almost doubled over the past five years, due in part to the trauma of war, according to an Army report released on Thursday.

Reported violent sex crimes increased by 90 percent over the five-year period from 2006 to 2011. There were 2,811 violent felonies in 2011, nearly half of which were violent felony sex crimes. Most were committed in the United States.

One violent sex crime was committed by a soldier every six hours and 40 minutes in 2011, the Army said, serving as the main driver for an overall increase in violent felony crimes.

Higher rates of violent sex crimes are "likely outcomes" of intentional misconduct, lax discipline, post-combat adrenaline, high levels of stress and behavioral health issues, the report said.

And here is proof that our top military brass can challenge any CEO in their ability to talk engage in FlackSpeak:

"While we have made tremendous strides over the past decade, there is still much work to be done," Army Vice Chief of Staff General Peter Chiarelli said in a statement.

"Many of our biggest challenges lie ahead after our soldiers return home and begin the process of reintegrating back into their units, families and communities," Chiarelli said.

Not to be insubordinate there, General, but it doesn't sound like you've made any fucking strides at all. In fact, it sounds very much like you are backsliding. Might this be because you and your general officer buddies care more about your own perks and cushy retirement gigs with defense war contractors than you do about the health and well being of the troops who follow your insane orders to go invade other countries who pose exactly zero military threat to America? Perish the thought.

So just how bad is this problem?

Violent sex crimes committed by U.S. Army troops increased at a rate that consistently outpaced the national trend, a gap that is expected to continue to grow, the Army said.

The top five violent felony offenses committed by soldiers in 2011 were aggravated assault, rape, aggravated sexual assault, forcible sodomy and child pornography.

Soldiers suffering from issues such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury, and depression have been shown to have higher incidences of partner abuse, according to the report.

Soldiers with PTSD are up to three times more likely to be aggressive with their female partners than those without such trauma, the report said.

Let's also knock off with the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder bullshit. As the late George Carlin once pointed out, it's called "shell shock." That's how you describe the condition in such a way that gets the point across. The initials PTSD actually sound like they are describing a form of venereal disease that needs not be taken seriously. Which is probably part of the reason why the military is able to get away with not taking it seriously. Thus the damaged soldiers are often left untreated and end up passing on the damage to the ones they love.


Bonus: "American have a lot of trouble dealing with reality"

Pat Buchanan: Shooting the Message Along With the Messenger

image: Pat Buchanan's running mate from the 2000 presidential election might not be from the demographic you would have expected

A lot of liberals and progressives were gloating this past week that longtime political commentator and 2000 Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has apparently been suspended indefinitely from his pundit gig at MSNBC after writing some racially insensitive (at best) passages in his latest book. The ousting of Buchanan is actually quite reminiscent of the severe criticism current Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is taking for similar writings that appeared in his weekly newsletter 20 years ago. Both Buchanan and Paul are old white guys who have been very successful in life and have never known what it’s like to have to overcome prejudice or people automatically dismissing you because of your race. Therefore, by treading into the rhetorical territory of speculating whether Americans of European ancestry, who have absolutely controlled and dominated the country’s culture and politics since the founding, are getting a raw deal because those of other races have made huge progress in closing those gaps, they have demonstrated their utter cluelessness on racial issues.

Before liberals and progressives get too cocky in denouncing Buchanan, however, they should pause for a moment and make sure they aren't just mindlessly dog piling on someone who actually does have some ideas they ought to be in agreement with. The biggest issue I have with the criticism leveled against Buchanan and Paul from the left is that they are often lumped together with the true know-nothings and troglodytes like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum. For a group of people who often loudly denounce the opposition for its supposedly simplistic, black and white worldview, this shows a remarkable predilection to do exactly the same thing.

Ron Paul’s biggest attraction as a candidate, and what generates passionate support among many of his supporters, is his strong and consistent antiwar stance. Indeed, the aforementioned Rick Santorum even criticized Paul recently for having the same foreign policy positions as Dennis Kucinich, as if that’s supposed to be an insult. I first became aware of Paul back when he was regularly writing editorials for Antiwar.com against unfettered American militarism as George Bush the Lesser was still riding high in the polls and the Iraq debacle had yet to lose public support. But guess who was right there along with him, and in fact probably wrote more articles for Antiwar.com during that time period than Paul? That’s right, Pat Buchanan. Say what you will about Buchanan’s latent racism, at least he is not prepared to exercise it with a drone missile.

Buchanan has also been one of the lonely voices out there in the wilderness, especially on the right, decrying the so-called “free” trade agreements that have utterly gutted the American working class and are now wreaking havoc on the middle class as well. Not only was free trade and opposition to NAFTA an issue Buchanan wielded against Bob Dole when he challenged the hatchet man from Kansas for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, it was also what allowed him to secure the Reform Party nomination four years later after Ross Perot had faded from the scene.

So here you have a prominent antiwar voice, who also opposes at least one of the major economic policies that is impoverishing the 99% on behalf of the 1%, and yet he is still being treated on the left as if he is no better than Dick Cheney himself. It almost makes you wonder if the outrage against Buchanan is genuine, or whether it is at least partly generated by the guilty knowledge that on these critical issues Buchanan is far preferable to many of their own so-called “leaders,” most particularly President Hopey-Changey and his warmongering Secretary of State. One is black, of course, and the other is female, but that doesn’t in any way make their slavish devotion to big business, war and empire any less odious. In fact, what it proves is that given a chance, minorities and women are just as capable of perpetrating monstrous policies on behalf of the elites as any old white guy.

It is so typical in the public discourse these days to use one particular comment or policy position of a prominent individual in order to utterly discredit them across the board as if, unlike any other person you could name, they cannot be right about some things and wrong about others. Think about someone in your own life with whom you share a similar mindset. Do you agree with them completely on every single issue? Because if you do that is, in my experience, an extremely rare circumstance. It’s unfortunate that it is so hard to find liberal and progressive commentators and politicians whose stance against globalization, militarism and imperialism is as strong and unwavering as Pat Buchanan’s, but the fault there lies with the fact that so many people on the left choose to support complete sellouts rather than people with actual principles.

The fact is you can split the politicians and the punditocracy into two different categories, those who have been completely co-opted by the corporatocracy and those who have not been. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul are actually two of the rare examples of those who bravely stand in the latter category. Do they deserve to be criticized for their more odious pronouncements and positions, particularly about racial issues? Sure they do. But before accepting any such criticisms at face value, one must always consider who it is who is leveling the criticism and whether they themselves are on the other side of that cavernous divide between those who speak for the 99% and those who do so for the 1%.


Bonus: My man Louis CK has a much more palatable way than Pat Buchanan of saying how great it is to be white

Jonathan Alter: Warmongering Douchebag

I've stated before on this blog that I was opposed to the Iraq War from the very beginning. As such, I remember having passionate arguments with some of my conservatives friends and colleagues in early 2003 during the run-up to the invasion. The war didn't turn out exactly as I and others who were opposed to it predicted, but here were a few things I was certain of even back then:

1). That there was no connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.

2). That Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (and that even if they did, they wouldn't be so foolish as to actually use them).

3). That the war would be a humanitarian disaster that was going to get many innocent people killed.

4). That it was all going to cost a shit-pot load of money.

Right there were four great reasons not to attack Iraq that anyone whose brain hadn't been short-circuited by an overdose of testosterone should have realized before the first shots were even fired. It was bad enough that the conservative/Republican drumbeat for war was deafening. But the really sick part was that so many Democrats/liberals--like Tom Friedman, Richard Cohen and Hillary Clinton--were right there with them. And now, as the American military ingloriously heads for the exits having failed to plant the seed of democracy in the middle of the Arab world, there hasn't been so much as an apology from any of these assholes for the utterly senseless death and destruction they themselves advocated.

All of which brings me to a recent article by Jonathan Alter of Newsweek in which he calls out the Republican presidential candidates for exhibiting collective amnesia on Iraq. Alter starts out with a reasonable assessment of the war's disastrous cost:

All U.S. ground troops will be out of Iraq by Dec. 31, and soon this sorry conflict will fade quietly into the past, the second-dumbest war in American history. Yet the Iraq War has been missing in action during the Republican presidential campaign.

Like “body counts,” “Khe Sanh” and “My Lai” from Vietnam, “IEDs,” “Fallujah” and “Abu Ghraib” are already meaningless to many younger Americans. Today’s young voters were preteens when the war began in 2003.

The forgetting will be faster than with Vietnam because Iraq never penetrated our consciousness in the same way — unless you were among the 30,000 who came back physically wounded or the more than 100,000 with psychological problems. If you add these 130,000 to the 4,500 dead and include the toll on their families, more than half a million Americans were directly affected by this war.

Our soldiers served with great courage, and they deserve respect (and jobs) when they return. But only now are we learning some of the chilling consequences of what took place. The New York Times revealed this week an internal report that details massacres of civilians in Haditha by U.S. forces. One U.S. officer, Major General Steve Johnson, described the killings as “a cost of doing business.”

Speaking of cost, the full price of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is at least $1 trillion, which President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress put on the credit card.

He goes on to chide the candidates for pretending like the war never happened:

One might imagine that having been colossally wrong about Iraq, the Republican front-runners would want to hire advisers who got it right. Nope. Gingrich says that John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, would be his secretary of state. In 1998, Bolton, who makes Donald Rumsfeld look like Michael Moore, was among the 18 signers of a Project for the New American Century letter that kicked off the movement for regime change in Iraq. Romney’s top foreign-policy adviser on the Middle East is Walid Phares, a stridently anti-Islamic lobbyist for Israel who pushed hard for the Iraq War by lumping in Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat. Both foreign- policy “experts” are now leading the charge to invade Iran.

Sounds reasonable, right? Oh it's very reasonable, until you consider this passage:

Is Iraq better off? Yes, we removed Saddam Hussein, but the Arab Spring might have done that by now without us. The Iraqis viewed us as occupiers not liberators, and recently refused even a residual force of 10,000 U.S. troops to help protect them. The Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, heads the most pro- Iranian government in the Arab world, other than Syria. For all of the diplomatic niceties when he visited with President Barack Obama this week, Maliki has trampled on the rule of law and assumed quasi-dictatorial powers. Iraq is a democracy in name only.

If we knew in 2003 what we know now — about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the cost in blood and treasure, the length of hostilities, the blow to American prestige — would we do it all again? Of course not. Even those like me who supported the war at the outset must admit the whole thing was a fiasco.

First of all, let me address the question as to whether Iraq is better off by saying, are you fucking kidding me? I've got over one hundred thousand dead civilians (no one really seems to know for sure exactly how many), an utterly devastated formerly modern infrastructure and a security situation so bad that Baghdad was recently rated the worst city in the world in which to live that says Alter is full of shit. Saddam was a bad guy, and jailed, tortured and murdered many of his own citizens, but what he wrought upon the country was nothing compared to what has happened since the invasion.

Juan Cole has a few more details:

Population of Iraq: 30 million.

Number of Iraqis killed in attacks in November 2011: 187

Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17

Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50

Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.

Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.

Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.

Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.

Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million.

Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million

Internally displaced persons in Iraq: 1.3 million

Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8

Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175

It's easy for Alter to say Iraq is "better off." After all, its not like he ever got shot while approaching a traffic checkpoint, or contracted cancer from depleted uranium munitions, or was tortured at Abu Grahib prison, or saw one of his kids' limbs blown off, or had to watch helplessly as some pissed off Marines stormed his house and forced him, his wife and children to the floor, pinning them there while they ransacked all of their earthly belongings.

But the most galling part is that last sentence, where Alter condescends to admitting he was wrong about the "fiasco," but clearly sees no reason why he should say he was sorry, let alone resign from his position in disgrace. After all, it wasn't anyone he personally knows who was butchered or maimed, or had their home and/or livelihood destroyed by the arrogance and hubris of warmongers like Jonathan Alter. Heck, all those people that bad stuff happened to were not Americans, or even Europeans for that matter, so it doesn't really count, don't you know. Unlike in a real job, being a card carrying member of the punditocracy is not only great fun, but also gets you a mulligan on being completely wrong on matters of life and death.

If you want to know yet another reason why not only American liberalism, but also the mainstream media are so thoroughly discredited, look no further than the example of Jonathan Alter. I almost prefer far right commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to the likes of him. At least those guys don't pretend like they care about the horrendous damage caused when their hideous ideas become public policy.


Bonus: Chimpy Bush wasn't Cheney's only toy

Putting the "We" in "We Are at War"

We just heard at the Watson Institute: Matthew Gutmann, Brown University "Breaking Ranks: An Oral History Project on Iraq War Veteran Dissent;” Erin Solaro, author "Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military;" Greg Gardner, served with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as Chief of Staff for the Senior Advisor, Ministry of National Security and Defense, Iraq vet, military analyst for FOX News.

A major theme of this conference, “Front Line, First Person,” is the disconnect between the American public and what is really happening in Iraq. Experiencing the photos, interviews, sounds, images, profanity, love, and fear can bring us a little closer to understanding. I kept hearing soldiers urge more Americans to seriously ask more returning soldiers for reflections on their experience.

The power of this meeting is the level of discussion. Sometimes conferences fall into jargon and sound bites, empty of meaning and responsibility. Here, people are speaking with feeling and passion, and in language that is plain, unvarnished, and poetic. Note to self: This is how to do a great, meaningful meeting.