Another reason to bring the troops home

The U.S. government pretends to promote women’s rights, especially in the Middle East, but the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq forced many women into prostitution within weeks of the U.S. invasion. Ever since, prostitution has spread like a ripple effect throughout the Middle East.

“The rebirth of prostitution has generated fear that permeates all of Iraqi society,” writes Debra McNutt in the essay “Privatizing Women: Military Prostitution and the Iraq Occupation,” in Counterpunch. (July 11)

“Families keep their girls inside, not only to keep them from being assaulted or killed, but to prevent them from being kidnapped by organized prostitution rings. Gangs are also forcing some families to sell their children into sex slavery.

“The war has created an enormous number of homeless girls and boys who are most vulnerable to the sex trade. It has also created thousands of refugee women who try to escape danger but end up (out of economic desperation) being prostituted in Jordan, Syria, Yemen or the UAE.

“Brothels in Baghdad’s Green Zone, disguised as a woman’s shelter, hairdresser and Chinese restaurant, had to be closed after they were exposed by the media.”

But, McNutt points out, “The prostitution rings keep their tracks very well hidden, and it is not in the interest of the military or its private contractors to reveal any information that may damage the war effort.”

Independent journalist David Phinney has documented how a Kuwaiti contract company that imported workers to build the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad’s Green Zone—where they were terribly exploited—also smuggled women into the construction site.

McNutt suspects that 180,000 private contractors, who now outnumber U.S. troops by 20,000 and who are not subject to military law, are promoting prostitution of local women or importing women under the guise of cooks, maids or office workers.

The best-known case of private contractors engaging in military prostitution was when DynCorp employees were caught trafficking women in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Postings by private contractors on sex websites indicate that prostitution exists around U.S. military bases in Iraq, though it’s increasingly dangerous for Westerners to leave military bases on their own.

“Contractors are now advising each other to do their ‘R & R’ in the safer northern Kurdish region, or the bars and hotels of Dubai, the UAE emirate that has become the most open center of prostitution in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile prostitution rings in Iraq have to go deeper underground to hide from Iraqi militias,” reports McNutt.

Another casualty of the U.S. occupation not much in the news is that women GIs—one out of 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq—are reporting rapes and sexual harassment in unprecedented numbers.

Sara Corbett wrote in a March 18 New York Times Magazine article headlined “The Women’s War” that a report financed by the Defense Department showed “nearly a third of a nationwide sample of female veterans seeking health care through the VA said they experienced rape or attempted rape during the service.”

Of those, 37 percent said they were raped multiple times, while 14 percent said they were gang raped.

Military prostitution has a long history. Perhaps the most infamous case occurred during World War II when the Japanese military forced 100,000 to 200,000 Korean women to “service” their soldiers.

These “comfort women,” now in their eighties, are still demanding reparations for sexual enslavement.

Those who oppose U.S. military bases in the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand have long drawn attention to brothels clustered around bases in those countries. The nonprofit group Prostitution Research and Education estimates 400,000 prostitutes worked in Thailand in 1974 when GIs went there from Vietnam on furlough.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated in 2006 that more than 2 million people are trafficked in the global sex trade, though it noted the number could be as high as 10 million.

The U.S. military has never admitted its role in promoting prostitution in this or any other war. But sooner or later, the Pentagon must be held accountable for this severe violation of women’s rights.

McNutt concludes that it is the responsibility of those in the United States “to stop our military’s abuses of women by ending the occupation.”