This week has seen two milestones in Iraq, the 5th anniversary of the invasion and the 4,000th us death. The President made a speech, the news media ran a few retrospective reports and the Vice President took Senator McCain and a few other loyal supporters on a victory tour in an attempt to polish up the legacy of the last 7 years.
The rational for the war having evaporated the guy’s in the administration have fallen back to the false choice of leaving Saddam in power and the disastrous course we ended up on. The weapons of mass destruction that the VP new the location of on Meet the Pressturned out not to be there. The mobile chemical weapons labs turned out to be a fabrication, perhaps General Powellcould have done a better job vetting that speech to the United Nations. The, "yellow cake" from the State of the Union Speech turned out to be untrue. The constant attempts to tie Saddam to the attacks of 9/11 have been investigated from all angles and been discredited.
Gone too are the Rosie Scenarios floated by the administration such as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld suggesting 6 weeks maybe six months at the most for the length of our commitment. The idea that we would be greeted as liberators did not quite happen. That it could not possibly take more soldiers to keep order post Saddam than it would take to overthrow him. The oil revenues from Iraq would pay the cost of the rebuilding.
With nothing else left the President has settled on the, "We closed the rape rooms" as the last remaining justification for his actions. He first began this line before the invasion, I did not understand this argument at the time because all of the things that Saddam was accused of doing he had been doing when the first President Bush and the then Defense Secretary thought it was fine to leave this evil man in power.
Leaving that aside the media has lost interest in the state of women in the war zone in particular and they have never been interested in discussing rape during wars. Rape is only news it seems when it involves blond college girls or players of some game or another. While the nation prepares to decide between the, "100 Years War" of John McCain or the, "Precipitous Withdrawal" of the Democratic nominee. I wanted to look at the state of rape in a post Saddam world.
You may have missed these stories, most of the mainstream media did. Let’s start with something I first heard about on Democracy Now. Seems that a lot of women soldiers have died of dehydration in the Iraq war zone. This in spite of the fact that the army is constantly handing out water and warning about the heat and the need to drink plenty of it. There was a reason but Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez gave orders to keep the facts secret. The female latrine, (bathroom) for you nonmilitary types was located away from their housing; there was no lighting around the latrines making the women easy prey. In order to avoid being raped by male soldiers the women stopped drinking in the afternoon. By avoid urinating at night they didn’t get raped but some died.
Our contractors have not been exempt from the charges of rape although they too have done their best to keep it under wraps. KBR a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company that made Dick Cheney richer decided that rather than investigate the rape of one of its employees they would simply lock the employee away until she was intimidated out of reporting it. This case is now in the courts but in the form of a federal lawsuit not the criminal case it should be.
The local population of course has suffered tremendously. In the devastation that is the Iraq economy the custom of the "Pleasure Marriage" outlawed under Saddam has become common and now some Iraqi clerics and women's rights activists are complaining that the contracts have become less a mechanism for taking care of widows than an outlet for male sexual desires.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq the more fundamentalist sects are trying to impose their particular view of a woman’s place on the population. The city of Basra serves as an example. Over 40 women have been found dead with notes saying they were killed for un-Islamic behavior. This could be anything but wearing make-up and not wearing a head scarf seem to be the most common transgressions.
Of course many women are still at the mercy of the authorities. U.S. military and the Iraq police if you happen to be of the wrong sect.
Sexual Humiliation isn’t limited to women in Iraq. We all remember the infamous pictures from U.S. militaryAbu Ghraib prison. This problem seems to be wide spread in the U.S. run detention centers . It should hardly be surprising as we a huge sexual assault problem in the American American prison system as well.
Rape in war is a worldwide phenomenon. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is probably the most horrific example but history offers many. If the Vice President is going to claim victory based on, "we closed the rape rooms" and John McCain is going to claim, "The surge is working." Shouldn’t we look at the facts?