Madeline Albright, on Fox News May 7, stated that she was shocked and sickened by the U.S.-sponsored S&M show at Abu Ghraib prison. This is the same Madeline Albright who said that she thought it was "worth the price" to starve (at the time) an estimated half a million Iraqi children with U.N. sanctions.
The Abu Ghraib scandal, more than any U.S. military scandal in recent memory, has exposed the utter depravity of allowing women to enter the armed services. As pictures of the tomboyish U.S. Pfc. Lynndie England made their way around the world last week, it turns out contrary to some reports that labeled her a guard at the prison, England was actually an inmate-processing clerk. In other words, the multiple photos of her dragging a man across the floor on a leash, giving the thumbs up over a pile of nude Iraqi men, and standing in front of hooded men pretending to fire rifle shots at their penises, these photos were all taken while she was visiting her boyfriend, Cpl. Charles Graner, while he was in charge of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
England is now detained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, four months pregnant with Graner’s child. Hence even if she hadn’t participated in the Abu Ghraib S&M Show, she wouldn’t have remained in service and been much use to the military. Playing probably an ever bigger role in the scandal than England was another woman, Sabrina Harman. Harman took the photos (note feminist Laura Berman’s attempt to blame the male Graner for this), participated in torturing the hooded Iraqi seen in one photo standing on a box with wires coming from his hands, wrote "rapeist" on another prisoner’s leg, and best yet, posed for a photo with a corpse, a man who had been beaten to death at the prison. While Harman’s parents are claiming she took the photos to document the abuse, other evidence indicates she was an enthusiastic participant, often running and jumping on piles of stacked, nude Iraqi men to crush and hurt them.
The prominence of women in the scandal has produced several columns from feminists and fellow travelers attempting to deflect blame. These defenses, though, highlight how weak their arguments really are.
First up is Salon’s Cathy Hong, dumbfounded that women could ever display acts of cruelty. Hong ironically mentions the heated debates of the 1980s when feminists argued that women would be a civilizing influence on the military, indeed a force that would serve to vitiate the innate barbarity of men. So what happened at Abu Ghraib? Clark University feminist Cynthia Enloe has the answer: the women were "under a lot of pressure to fit into a highly sexualized, masculine culture." According to Hong, this male chain-of-command explanation is the one gaining ground in Washington D.C.
That’s astoundingly stupid, even for D.C. First, it’s a concession (unwitting to be sure) that despite huge inroads in not only the military, but its academies (West Point, Annapolis, CO Springs) and military-style colleges (VMI, The Citadel, etc.), women have failed to civilize the culture of the military. (As if the oxymoron of "civilized military" ever made sense in the first place.) The second problem is that high up in this evil "male" chain of command (above Graner, whom the feminists are focusing on) was no other than a woman: Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who oversaw Abu Ghraib and two other prisons. Karpinsky, thankfully, has been relieved of her duties.
Next up were several strange commentaries (e.g., here and here) that drew a polar contrast between England and last year’s female "hero," Jessica Lynch. But where is it? True, Jessica Lynch didn’t torture anybody but (contrary to early reports) was never tortured herself. Indeed, the prisoners of Abu Ghraib were never treated as well as Lynch was in the hands of the Iraqis who saved her life. Lynch herself admitted that the whole Pentagon account of her bravely fighting off hordes of hostile Iraqis to the last bullet was a lie. The story was true, but the courageous fighting was actually done by Sgt. Donald Walters, who died in battle.
Last up is the usual neocon psychopath. At this point most people think of V. D. Hanson, but no, this time it’s Charles "Strangelove" Krauthammer. Krauty has discerned that not only do radical Islamic militants hate us for our "freedom and democracy," they hate our "liberation of women" too. The war, see, is "deeply about"…sex.
Krauty informs us that Islamic militants are unique totalitarians because of "their particular hatred of freedom for women…For the men, that is a pretty good deal – one threatened by the West with its twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation."
That, my friends, just may be the most intellectually dishonest piece of writing in this whole war campaign of lies and deceit. It’s definitely news to those of us who don’t worship Rousseau and Naomi Wolf that the twin doctrines of Western Civilization are "equality and sexual liberation." The upshot of the neocons’ handiwork in Iraq is that the country (if it stays unified) is moving steadily toward becoming a Shi’ite Muslim state. When that happens, Iraqi women (particularly the type Krauthammer and Neocon Co. especially hate – Christians) will long for the freedom they had under Saddam.
The amenability of women to military careers was always a myth. There’s now as much sex occurring on Navy ships as in the back seats of cars. Kara Hultgren was never an ace pilot, but died in 1994 trying to land an F-14 on a Navy carrier. The Navy tried to cover up her incompetence by first blaming the crash on a mechanical failure. The real investigation found that she’d been cleared to fly despite twice committing the same landing error that eventually killed her. My all time favorite case of alleged female heroism is that of Linda Bray. Bray was the female hero of Panama who allegedly, la Audie Murphy, braved wall upon wall of enemy fire to accomplish her objective. After the dust surrounding the tall tale of her "valor" began to settle, it turned out that her real mission had only been to secure a dog kennel.
All these lies plus the problems at Abu Ghraib are piled on top of (no pun intended!!) the usual enraging stories about physical double standards between men and women and the added costs to the military of intersex fraternization. The solution to all these problems is for the military to do for women what it did for General Janis Karpinski: remove all of them from duty in the armed services permanently.
May 11, 2004
