FACTS ON THE GROUND

There’s an article on Truthout by Sarah Rich called “Good Order and Discipline” (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020607L.shtml). Ms. Rich is a social worker; her daughter is Suzanne Swift, a female soldier (an MP) who is presently pursuing some type of sexual harassment charges against the Army while also receiving some form of in-patient mental health care while also awaiting court martial. The alleged harassment (Ms. Rich slides into “molestation” here and there) has led to Ms. Swift’s desire for a discharge, while the commanding officer (a female colonel) of this MP unit seems to be going – as aforenoted - for a court-martial. Ms. Rich is not at all pleased.

Contemplating this scenario one is reminded of the tactical and strategic gambit called “creating facts on the ground”. To the best of my knowledge, the actual phrase was created – and the gambit deployed – by the Zionists in the post-World War 2 era.

The gist of its modus operandi was that this matter (giving “the land of Israel” as a self-governing haven in atonement and compensation for the Holocaust) was far too important to be left up to discussion, hemming and hawing and chin-stroking. Rather, the Zionist strategy should be to move Jews (again, I don’t like this fore-shortened term) onto the land immediately, regardless of the state of discussions; thereby, one creates “facts on the ground” that have to be taken into account no matter what one’s more abstract thoughts and ideas might be (or, more precisely, ‘have been’ before the aforesaid “facts” were suddenly created and injected into the equation).

The matter was actually not one of pure and utter urgency: there was little chance of the Third Reich coming back in 1946 or subsequently. But it was certainly a matter that would allow, indeed would demand, serious reflection and deliberation. After all, to set up such a state in the midst of unfriendly peoples who had been occupying the property and did not recognize the Judeo-Christian scriptures as a basis for this-worldly land-taking … this was a step fraught with long-term consequences.

With shrewdness and chutzpah the Zionists decided to go for an end-run around deliberation, not illogically assuming that a matter this complicated would not be decided for a long time, and quite possibly not in their favor. Better to force the issue by creating those “facts on the ground”, after which point they would sit at the discussion table armed with more than abstractions such as ideas and ideals.

It was a foxy maneuver, but in an eminently good cause, and in this world how much closer to perfection could you reasonably expect to get? In regard to its merits in the long-term nothing here is ventured.

But it cannot escape notice that in the same time-frame when the feminist Revolution (one of those Revolutions of the Identities discussed on this site) was being effected, this strategy of our newly-minted Israeli friends (we had tilted toward them after LBJ pretty much reversed JFK’s policy) was apparently adopted by the shapers of the Revolution.

The shapers themselves were urging numerous immediate and far-reaching changes whose claims to legitimacy were in many ways modest at best and might thus be debated and deliberated endlessly. So it apparently became the strategy – wherever possible – to create their own version of “facts on the ground”, the very existence of which would then give their wielders more leverage in the on-going revolutionary horse-trading to come.

It seems to me that one area where such ‘facts’ were created before the whole thing was carefully thought through was in this matter of placing women in the military. Not that there is no case to be made for it, certainly. Rather, that it was insisted from the very beginning that women were not simply to be given a place in the military, but had to serve in mixed-gender units with males. Which was a whole ‘nother issue altogether, but which was somehow bundled with the general ‘women in the military’ matter; somewhat like the old WW2 war-film gambit of a submarine getting into the enemy’s protected anchorage by hiding under a freighter authorized to pass through the opening in the anti-sub net.

It has been discussed elsewhere on this site (“Sex Offends Military Justice”), but Ms. Rich offers a couple of fresh opportunities for reflection.

The espousal of the facts-on-the-ground strategy is understandable. As said above, the proposed changes were large and deep and their claim to the status of justice and ‘reality’ was hardly adamantine or irrefutable; the discussions and deliberations involved in formal adoption (or quite possibly rejection) of the proposals could have gone on ‘forever’, or reasonably close to it.

But then bundled with the demands that women serve in the military and that they serve in combat, was a third demand that women serve only in mixed gender units, or on mixed-gender ships. There was not only very modest conceptual justification for this third demand, but it was gravid with almost insoluble problems. If supplying ‘feminine products’ – however widely or narrowly defined – was going to be a challenge to the military, then having to supply them to mixed-gender units would pose far more problems than to single-gender units. More importantly, and almost ‘classical’, was the matter of sex.

In the early-‘90s, this problem posed massive enough questions. Sex being almost hard-wired into the male of the species in order to ensure propagation, there were few ‘disciplines’ ever historically imposed upon (male) troops or accepted by troops that fully neutralized the distractions that accompanied even the most tenuous sexual opportunity. Indeed, absent any actual opportunities, imagined and fantasized ‘opportunities’ were substituted, and not infrequently to the point of obsession.

Such distractions always posed a problem for field commanders. You wanted your troops to be as ‘stoked’ as they could be, yet you didn’t want them distracted from the military mission and the ‘stoked’ energies thus wasted. And once troops under pressure encountered females – especially foreign and civilian – in the course of their operations, then all sorts of unlovely situations could arise.

It quickly becomes clear simply on the theoretical level that to mix genders among troops, especially in combat, was going to pose problems pretty much on the level of ‘making a jet fly in reverse’. But those were the salad days: the Soviet Union had just fallen, the U.S. had no peer-enemies and the whole world seemed happy, and the revolutionists might be forgiven for figuring that ‘now’ was as good a time as any to create “facts” which could be finessed later on, the whole thing not standing much chance of incurring its own worst possible consequences.

The brass saw that they were over a barrel. If they claimed the thing couldn’t be done, then ‘the women’ would mock their ‘can-do’ bravado and their assertions that in the U.S. military the impossible will take a few minutes and the difficult will be successfully accomplished immediately. And so, figuring uneasily that they should have some breathing space before ‘reality’ had to be faced out there in the actual world, the brass got on the bandwagon and allowed as how – shucks – this is a doable-do. Of course it is, glared ‘the women’: we would expect nothing less from our valiant generals. Congress was happy to avoid unpleasantness. Things moved along quickly.

Then came the sex-offense craze of the mid-‘90s. Date-rape, violence against women, sexual assault, sexual violence (a term Ms. Rich uses), molestation (ditto), sexual abuse (ditto). Attempting to surf these tricky and even dangerous new waves, the military – having yielded to all three of the major demands – now found itself trying to control sexual encounters in mixed gender units while simultaneously not utterly degrade the fighting spirit of the male troops, but in an environment now where any allegation had to be accepted at face value, and where such alleged encounters might even not-include actual sex.

If the matter has vexed and deformed civilian justice, it has created even more dangerous complications in the military. Not that military justice is any great shakes, but that the nation then entered a period where actual major and sustained ground combat became a reality. Suddenly, the revolutionary plan of exploiting its “facts” for maximum pervasive effect throughout the military while enjoying the leisure afforded by the post-Soviet world order was almost completely undercut.

And it can come as no surprise that there is now a rising chorus of complaint of ‘sex offenses’ in Iraq. It is anybody’s guess how much pressure troops are under in the failing and lethal maelstrom that has become Iraq and the life of the average solider in Iraq. To add that a sexual ‘incident’ can be made out of a look, a comment, or any number of non-material elements short of physical touching or violence … the consequences of this “facts on the ground” strategy, especially in its 3rd-level aspect of mixed-gender units or gender-mixed operating areas, are now home to roost.

If it seems hugely unwise to subject already-pressed troops (male or female) to the distractions of sexual possibility, it seems just about criminal to subject those troops (especially the males) to the classic tropes and slippery roads of the ‘sex offender’ script. They are in a battlezone with no ‘rear areas’, where everywhere is ‘the front’ and the enemy could be anybody out there beyond the wire. And to this we insist on adding the possibility that a look or a comment will subject them to charges? It can hardly be any wonder that combat-and-brass harassed unit commanders are setting the bar of formal action rather higher than the revolution would prefer; there is – as used to be said – a war on.

Ms. Rich exemplifies the problem clearly. In defense of her daughter’s cause she deploys just about every element of the classic civilian sex-offense script: “sexual violence” is not clearly described although variously appears to be untoward comments or a touch (but may be worse – it’s hard to tell); “rape” and “abuse” – vastly distinct on the spectrum are combined into a single phrase; “winks” and “nods” between “battle buddies” (so male) are involved; the damage to her daughter is “devastation”; the military is “an archaic institution” and has no honor and is hypocritical; the male troops are “sexual predators”; her daughter suffers “humiliation” and then in-patient acute psychiatric care; who will enforce the “civil rights” of those who voluntarily enlist; her daughter is only 19. A presentation as ‘classic’ and as familiar as any in Soviet Realism, and ably deployed.

If any of the foregoing recitation appears to tend toward the less-than-serious, I state right now that such is not my intention. I take this all very very seriously.

But I will not permit myself to slough off into the approved and conventional script patterns. It is gravely serious that this whole gambit of women and the military – in mixed gender units and at the front – was undertaken without adequate consideration as to what might happen in actual wartime conditions (as opposed to – say – ‘war’ as it was waged on the flying Marriott concierge-suite that was the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701D back in the day); it is gravely serious that feminists were willing to use young women – many of them needy in so many ways – as pawns to be made into the revolution’s “facts”; it is almost criminally serious that careerist generals and admirals allowed themselves to be stampeded into promising that they could suppress the male-urges of their often young and needy troops through the simple application of good old American military discipline; it is pathetically serious that politicians were happy just to be taken off the hook so that two seemingly irreconcilable ‘interests’ could be simultaneously mollified and pandered-unto without voters being alienated. Phooey.

And as always, who pays? It all flows downhill to the little people at the front, now male and female. They will be further empawned as ‘roles’ in this or that ‘script’ – the predatory rape-happy male, the helpless victimized female, the sleazy and insensitive and uncaring unit commander – while the hell that is a day in Iraq engulfs them all.

Like so much else in Iraq, and like so much that has happened within this country and this culture, that is now fraying under the pressure of Iraq, this sex-offense-Script-meets- War is an outmoded strategy that should have been reworked long before now.

The real travails of Ms. Rich and her daughter offer Us an opportunity how We might best arrange matters so that the lives of our staggering troops are not further burdened. To be a set of “boots on the ground” is task enough. The ploy of “facts on the ground” will have to wait.