Pentagon wages war on women

At least four U.S. women soldiers died in a June 24 attack by the Iraqi resistance on a U.S. military convoy in Falluja. Eleven of the 13 Marines wounded were also U.S. women. The deaths may be the most female U.S. service members killed in one incident since World War II. (New York Times, June 25)

The casualties highlight the contradictions between liberal Democrats’ call for women’s equality, the Bush administration’s boast of liberating women through imperial war, current Pentagon policies, and the on-the-ground experience of both U.S. and Iraqi women.

More than 11,000 women in the U.S. armed forces are now deployed in Iraq—about 8 percent of the 138,000 Pentagon troops in the country. Thirty-seven have died to date.

Women and Pentagon torture

The U.S. women soldiers’ deaths come in the midst of an intensifying debate about the role of women in Pentagon combat—and U.S. torture.

The initial Marine statement about the June 24 attack said that the female Marines had been used to search Iraqi women and children in order “to be respectful of Iraqi cultural sensitivities.’

How can a colonial-style military occupation be “respectful of cultural sensitivities”?

Of the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians reported killed since the U.S. invaded, more than half were likely women and children, according to estimates and analysis used by Iraqi Body Count. (www.iraqbodycount.net/ )

The torture and rape of Iraqi women—including prisoners—by U.S. troops and mercenaries has been invisible in the big business U.S. media. But photographs of such horrific incidents have circulated in the hundreds among U.S. troops. (www.aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm and www.womenagainstrape.net)

Yet President George W. Bush, in a press conference last year, tried to justify the war in Iraq as opposing a “fanatical political ideology’ that seeks to “oppress and persecute women.’ ( New York Times, April 14, 2004) In fact, before the U.S. war, Iraqi women had made great progress in jobs, education and social standing, and were considered among the most liberated in the Middle East.

Evidently, the Pentagon also used its research into “Iraqi cultural sensitivities” to train U.S. women soldiers to humiliate and terrorize male Iraqi prisoners through specifically sexualized and racialized torture.

The world saw the Abu Ghraib prison photographs of  Pfc. Lynndie England dragging an Iraqi man on a leash. A pattern of similar systematic torments of Iraqi men by women GIs has emerged in other Pentagon prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, including details contained in documents recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through the Freedom of Information Act.

Economic draft of U.S. women

U.S. imperialist war is bleeding money from domestic budgets. As social safety nets and services are  cut, women—the most impoverished—are gravely affected. Sixty percent of all poor adults in the U.S. are women—and an estimated 20 percent of African American women and Latinas in the U.S. live below the poverty line. (U.S. Census Bureau 2002)

Often women—in an attempt to survive, get health care for themselves and their children, or get access to education—see the U.S. military as their only option.

But what they find when they get there is not the “equal opportunity’ that flag-wavers put forward as the goal of military service for women. They are likely to be abused and even raped by their fellow soldiers—the same soldiers who abuse the women of these occupied countries.

The Miles Foundation, which compiles information on violence in the U.S. military, says that 8 percent of Gulf War veterans report being sexually abused during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and 30 percent of all female veterans reported rape or attempted rape during their active duty.

Yet the U.S. House of Representatives voted on May 24 to deny U.S. military women who are victims of sexual assault any access to abortion or emergency contraception at military hospitals. Even if the women are willing to pay for these services themselves, the vote was still “No!’ For the 100,000 U.S. women living on bases overseas, including Afghanistan and Iraq, this vote effectively denies them the right to an abortion, even if they become pregnant as the result of rape. (New York Times, May 29)

The mainstream debate about the role of women in the Iraq War concentrates on whether or not  women soldiers should be fighting on the front lines. Under pressure from a Pentagon suffering from record low recruitment, Congress backed off in May from trying to restrict women’s assignment in combat positions. (Feminist Wire Newsbriefs, May 26)

But despite the public rhetoric about whether or not female troops should be in combat positions, the reality of the Pentagon war is changing the rules, no matter what speeches are being made about the proper role of women. Commanders in Iraq are already deploying women as turret gunners in Humvees and in other roles that place them in a kill-or-be-killed position. (New York Times, 25 June)

However, counter-recruiters are organizing to keep the military’s hands off young people vulnerable to adventurist military hype, and especially young women who will suffer specific oppression in the U.S. armed services.

LeiLani Dowell, a spokesperson for the youth group FIST—Fight Imperialism, Stand Together—emphasizes, “Since ‘No Child Left Behind’ passed, and the recruiters were allowed on campuses, young women have reported dozens of cases of sexual harassment and rape by the recruiters. In one case, a recruiter told a young woman she had to have sex with him in order to sign up.

“Not only is there sexism inside the military, but we need to fight to keep recruiters out of our high schools and off campuses. We cannot allow our young women—or men—to be dragged into this dirty, illegal war.’