THE RAPES OF THE JOCK

This rapes-in-the-military thing keeps popping up. I’m not obsessing here; some of these articles are valuable for what they reveal about the methods and objectives of their authors and of the movement, and beyond that also reveal to Us templates by which We can look around in our Advocacy-addled society for similar patterns in other areas. It pays to be able to read the wind and the waves and the sky when you are at sea. And that We are indeed.

Truthout runs something written (I’m not sure ‘article’ is correct, for reasons seen below) by one Helen Benedict, a journalism professor (and this is disturbingly relevant, for reasons seen below) at Columbia and “the author of several books concerning social justice and women”. See "Why Soldiers Rape", http://www.truthout.org/article/why-soldiers-rape.

I’m all for society and justice, and all citizens deserve a fair shake; but as the Catholic Church found out after its Second Vatican Council, some very curious alchemy results from blending – especially under field conditions – ‘society’ and ‘justice’ into the compound ‘social justice’. Although the feminists (certainly of the Second Wave) had no use for the Beyond or for the Church (except – oddly – to get themselves ordained in it), their deploying of the phrase ‘social justice’ ignited that same alchemy. And thus We are well advised to understand that the sum of that phrase is a hell of a lot more than its parts, and not necessarily in a benign sense; and that therefore when We see the phrase We cannot simply assume that If ‘society’ is good and ‘justice’ is good, then anything calling itself ‘social justice’ must be double-good. That only really works for certain types of chewing-gum; We concern Ourselves with much larger matters here.

Once again, the reader encounters those two old stand-bys of the shell-game: definitions and statistics.

She asks: Why do soldiers rape? Fair enough as a conceptual project. And rape – the unwanted and forcible penetration of one human being by another (which is how I understand it) – is never a ‘good’ and should be and is (and always has been) a crime.

But immediately these days, questions have to be asked and the article and author have to be ‘interrogated’ by the reader even before getting into the author’s chosen story. Just how is ‘rape’ defined now? How is it defined legally? How is it defined by the Advocacy speakers and writers? By this writer? And are We told? In this case, Benedict doesn’t tell Us how she defines the word. It’s neat: if the reader assumes my ‘classical’ definition, but Benedict is using a far more elastic and broad definition, then the honest and trusting reader is going to get the impression that there are a heck of a lot of actual rapes going on, while Benedict gets her stampede without leaving herself open to the charge that she purposely misled her readers. Neat. Kewt. Is that operative here?

And what is the definition of ‘sexual assault’? Again, the ‘classical’ definition is grounded in that vivid term ‘assault’: physical force and violence used against somebody for the purposes of deriving sexual gratification, but short of actual rape or the attempt at rape. But is that what Benedict refers to? Or is it something that can include much lesser (if not necessarily more mature or honorable) actions? In a crisis, you want to have the most accurate information and the least amount of cloudy miscommunication; if Benedict’s subject is a crisis as she claims, then she (and the entire Advocacy machine) should want Us to have the most accurate information they can give Us. But of course, if their objective is not to inform Us but only to stampede Us, then ‘facts don’t matter’ and all they want from Us is Our approval or – if necessary – just Our passivity, so that they can go on and on.

She quotes some ‘studies’ and that leads to statistics. Whenever you run into ‘studies’ you have to ask yourself a whole passel of questions: Who conducted the study? What was the methodology used? The definitions? What were the actual questions presented? Were the interviewers and interpreters of the answers objective? To what extent are the ‘answers’ anecdotal (the interviewee simply telling a ‘story’) and to what extent was corroboration (by confirmed facts not under the interviewees’ control) obtained?

In this case, the studies are all by women. Well, OK. You certainly can’t presume that all studies conducted by women are tainted by the revolutionary assumptions (‘facts don’t matter’ and ‘there is no objective truth’) of the feministical agenda. And you don’t need to be a female to be a feminist (although being an OTF – other-than-female – might still prevent your attending all the klatsches and aromatherapy sessions simply because your ‘energies’ are incompatible).

A 2004 study of vets from Vietnam to the present conducted by a psychotherapist (a professional term sufficiently elastic as to include Ph.D.s and somebody who talks a bit after reading the tea leaves) “found that 71% of the women said that they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving”. Those two elastic definitions, and if you’ve ‘studied’ two categories, why not then give Us the percentage for each category, rather than just the composite total?

The next study quoted is from 2003 by a psychologist “and her colleagues”, and is actually a “survey”. What does that mean? Did the psychologist simply solicit ‘stories’ and ‘anecdotal evidence’ (a more scientific-sounding term for ‘story by the individual involved’)? Ach. Anyhoo, this survey “found that 30% said they were raped in the military”. Well, if a respondent knew that no corroboration would be required, how reliable are the survey responses? But presuming that all the responses are true (and that is indeed a stretch for any ‘survey’ in any field) then might We infer that 41% of the 2004 study’s 71% are not rapes but only sexual-assaults (however defined)? It’s verrrry hard to say and the prudent reader in search of objective information is advised to tread carefully.

The next study is from 1995, which targeted “female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars” conducted by that same “psychotherapist” who conducted (in some way) the 2004 study. This 1995 study “reported” (a very strong verb to use without verification) that “90% had been sexually harassed”. Another term: ‘sexually harassed’; although Benedict does immediately go on to note that this term “means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at”. OK. But if We are being asked to invest great time and energy and military resource to deal with the level of school-yard dopery, then the question has to be asked: Is this trip necessary? If military women find this (admittedly immature) behavior unbearable then why not simply separate the genders into gender-specific units? And if they find this foolishness unbearable, are they going to have a better time handling the experiences of killing, being under fire, the experience of sudden and violent death all around you, and the incessant demand to possess oneself and keep one’s rational control under the most awefull demands of a 4GW frakfest?

Of course, one might then proceed to ask that if Nature endows life forms with certain gifts suitable to their tasks (as Evolution saith), and women appear as best We can tell to be assigned by Nature to bear and nurture children (as at least some of the feminists admitteth), then will the gifts and strengths of nurturance serve a woman well in the setting where violence must be deployed precisely not to nurture others but to kill them? Or is this thinking too much?

Or is it possible that the very tendency to violence and aggressiveness that provides the pretext for the constitutionally monstrous domestic-violence and sex-offense manias is somehow a reverse-side of the male ‘gift’ of being relatively more attuned to the deployment of violence? Or is that thinking too much? Because it would then lead to the question as to why women would ever want to get into this sort of ‘war’ situation in the first place, and whether it is at all wise or responsible to subject one’s nurturing-attuned gifts to such anti-nurturing as combat (let alone 4GW combat), and whether it is at all a sound government policy even to permit persons to take such risks. (I mean, if you can’t ride a motorcycle without a helmet on, or drive a car without a seatbelt on, is the government saying it can’t really place any limits on who can expose themselves to frakfesty combat?)

And if the female of the species is relatively less attuned to physical violence, then why on earth load the military organization with them? It adds an entire layer of ‘training’ whereby the females have to super-exert (and even contra-exert) themselves to reliably equal the level of violence-toleration that the males are naturally endowed with. Or alternatively, the females (those steroidy sensible-shoes to some extent possibly excepted) are kept away from combat either out of an awareness of the nature of their gender-gifts or in order not to burden male troops and unit commanders with yet another random and unpredictable variable in the field and in the face of the enemy: i.e., that the less-violent females will not be up to the effective deployment of the required violence and the emotional suppression (or – worse – repression) that combat requires. Not that the military requires that emotional suppression the way it requires a green rather than an ochre uniform, but rather that the military requires that emotional suppression of combat forces precisely because such violence and emotional self-manipulation is what the Combat itself imposes upon any who venture to participate in it, or who find themselves in it.

And a final “survey”, done by the VA in 2007, that found “homelessness” among female veterans “rapidly increasing”. And immediately, so as to keep that urgent and hardly surprising development ‘on her side’, Benedict then writes that “Forty percent of these homeless female veterans say they were sexually abused while in the service.” And We are back to “say” and “sexual abuse” again. Around and around We go. Around and around the Advocates lead Us.

The gist of this and other pieces I’m coming across is that the military is ‘dragging its feet’ in meeting the agenda demanded by the feminist Advocacy. Of course, the Advocacy presumes that We will simply accept its ‘facts’, its ‘story’, its ‘narrative’ at face value and thus be ‘led’ to accept its preferred ‘solution’.

I hold no brief for the Pentagoons nor any of their pomps nor any of their works. But I'm wondering if what the Advocacy is ‘reporting’ as foot-dragging is to some extent the military realizing either that A) there are other explanations for the experiences of military females or B) there are inescapable demands of combat that are not susceptible to the demands of the Advocacy and that the demands, if implemented, would actually degrade military capability (even more than Bush and the hairless neocons have already done) or C) there are a lot simpler and less costly and more probably effective solutions to this set of complaints.

I’m not saying I know just what the Pentagoons are thinking here; but I am saying that there are plenty of other reasonable possibilities to explain the military foot-dragging besides the single explanation insisted upon by the Advocacy: that female troops are being raped or otherwise made to feel uncomfortable by male troops in huge numbers and that the solution can only be to beat down the male troops into more acceptable behavior because the military is simply enabling the male troops – training them even – to be brutes.

The article then goes on to finger (so to speak) a “culture of misogyny” and a “rape culture”, incorporated into the very basics of military training, as one of the causes of this whole thing. Military training will certainly spark the Viking exertions and the attitudinal ethos of young males in large groups; if you’re going to train large numbers of young males to reliably function as a team, to identify as a member of a team, then that’s how it works with young males. These are the actual complexities un-noted by the screenwriters for Captain Picard’s starship “Enterprise”, whose oeuvre seems to have been the only professional resource for several decades of Beltway advisers and commentators on things military. The military is not training troops by whim; its training is structured to the realities it knows they will face in the field and the frakfest.

And therefore too, forcing the military to impose a kindler, gentler training regimen is not going to yield ‘kindler, gentler’ combat. Because, contrary to civilian assumptions, the military does not ‘own’ or ‘make’ the field of battle and war; that awefull Ground belongs to Ares Ferox et Atrox, and mortals, even in their millions, must obey his blood-iron laws.

And this brute fact – as objective as a round right between the eyes - runs precisely counter to the Advocacy-friendly philosophy that i) ‘there is no objective reality’, and ii) it’s all a matter of the ‘story’ you tell yourself and others, and iii) sufficient political pressure and agitprop will change anything that a determined cadre wants to change. In this present matter, it’s not the military that’s thumbing its nose at the monstrous realities of human struggle, it’s the Advocacies. They might as well demand that ships be constructed without compartmented hulls so that ‘women’ won’t be forced into any dark corners. It is utterly impossible for a modern warship to survive without compartmentation and it is a sentence of death on any crew required to take such a vessel into harm’s way.

Militarily reliable violence does not come with natural ease to humans, males especially. Chimpish bar brawls, abhorrent rape – yes. (And thus males need to grow up with mature male guidance … but that’s another matter.) But militarily reliable organized and coherent violence, and the ability thus to restrain oneself when violence is not tactically advisable and to exercise stunning violence when it is tactically demanded … this kind of violence does not come easily.

To tap into the largest common denominator of energy (and potential violence), so as to both stimulate it and harness it, is what the military has to do; this is imposed on the military by the nature of war and combat itself (the screenwriters of Picard’s ‘military’ avoided mass-training altogether; hence the Beltway and Advocacy ignorance of this point). Sex is a primal conduit of vital human and male energy, and to keep the psychic ‘juice’ (no pun intended) flowing both to endure long exertions and to form an identity with other males … in that way, and aiming for efficiency’s sake at that least common denominator, you wind up with those unlovely ditties the instructors bawl out while on a five or ten mile run or the fifteen or twenty-five mile hike with a pack and rifle (if such distances are still allowed in the kindler gentler military of today).

This bodes a lot of dangers for the young military males themselves, even before one gets around to the Advocacy’s focus on the female troops with whom the males will soon be mixed. To reinforce the Inner Chimp in a teen is going to necessitate repairs after the buckaroo leaves the military. If his service should include actual combat, then to require the soldier to activate and deactivate on-demand his Inner Baboon in the face of serious episodes of combat is going to lead to even more serious damage and require even more serious repairs (and isn’t it strange: if the Second Wave was right, all the males should frakking deliriously thrive on sustained violence, and yet they don’t). And in the utterly rule-less and boundary-less setting of 4GW, unremitting and continuous, some and not a few males are going to either retreat to or be forced back to the Inner Baboon and be fused to it, with only modest chances of ever resuming an upward maturational trajectory again. And these are the most unacknowledged casualties of all. Upon them be peace, but We cannot leave it at that.

And “military culture demands that all soldiers keep their pain and distress to themselves”, accuses Benedict. Yes, it does. Because of the awful places and experiences where a soldier has to go and still be capable of controlling his emotions in order to accomplish the task at hand, he must be taught to ‘possess himself’, as scripture would put it. To go all kablooey and give vent to one’s emotional reactions to aspects of one’s surround that – however gruesome or distressing – are not immediately relevant to the mission … that’s not going to get the job done or protect the hearthfires or however you want to put it. What good is a fireman or a cop or a paramedic who in the midst of an emergency cannot suppress immediate emotions in order to focus on how to help? Is it really socially useful to have a bunch of them crying or screaming in a huddle around the engine as flames roar or bullets fly or – hey – ‘the children’ remain horribly trapped on the third floor? Not gonna be a ‘hero’ that way. Nobody’s gonna tell a nice ‘story’ about that. Nobody is going to get helped, either.

Of course, this requirement runs completely counter to the Advocacy modus operandi: decalre yourself a victim, get in touch with those feelings, and bawl them in front of the nearest useful recording device. And it also - according to some feministical theory, at least - runs counter to the operating dynamics of the female psyche, which is emotional and relational and expressive. But while the Advocacy might - thanks to the Dems - manage to get one up on the Pentagoons, the Adovcacy and its votaries will have absolutely no effect nor gain any leverage on Ares Ferox. In this way - and they say there isn't a God and that He has no sense of irony - the Second Wave cadres are sending young women into combat the way Miss Jean Brodie sent her unwitting students into the maw of war, though she herself was in her prime. The hell-hot ironies.

I think the military has never really faced up to its responsibilities in de-Chimping troops once they are finishing up their service. I think that We are going to have huge amounts of psychological casualties, and spiritual casualties, and moral casualties, from this Long War (even SecDef Gates is getting onto the bandwagon now). I cannot even begin to imagine how the female psyche is going to handle all of this, nor am I at all reassured by an Advocacy that insists that a) female troops are every bit as capable of combat as male troops and b) female troops are desperately in need of much, extra military organizational protection and services and c) that there is no difference between the female and the male psyche and d) that there is a world of difference between the female and the male psyche.

Nor on the basis of such representations – no matter how loudly and vividly made – can I take the military organization to task (although it does, all things considered, have a lot to answer for, as God knoweth).

But I do think this: the Advocacy stuff being churned out as ‘science’ and ‘reporting’ in this military-women brouhaha is a scam. And the manner of it is on this wise: from its vantage point the Advocacy sees, the awefull figure of Ares looming beyond the military’s perimeter, and knows that the military cannot but shape itself in response to the laws Atrocious and Ferocious thus imposed. At the same time, the Advocacy knows that the average reader and citizen cannot from his/her vantage point see that awefull figure, and would thus presume that the military is pretty much its own boss in shaping itself and that if it refuses to change its shapes in response to the Advocacy’s demands, well then it must be because of pure mule-headed, ornery, sex-driven male stubbornness.

And they are playing on that, these members of the Advocacy are.

Not all of them. More than a couple of them actually know nothing of the monstrous nature of combat.

Either way – through cynicism or ignorance – they keep the military and Us distracted by the still-thumping demands of their agenda.

I’d say that there are far more urgent emergencies just now. Separate the units by gender, and take an honest and objective look at the whole matter, thoroughly and soberly.

But I don’t think anybody wants that now. Not anybody who’s a ‘player’. The Dems want to keep the feminists happy; the military bosses want to get promoted so they have to keep the Dems happy; the neocons and Republicans have made enough enemies without needing to take on ‘the feminists’. And the beat will go on.

If you happen to be leading a life that does not include prayer to a just and benevolent deity, I think now would be the time to revisit that approach.

And not for yourself, but for the troops. Their genuine welfare, male or female, is not on any player’s agenda in that hell-mouth called the Beltway, be it Democrat or Republican, 'liberal' or 'conservative'. They are in the hands of terrible gods. And goddesses.

BOAT-ROCKING NOT GOOD IDEA IN STORM

Truthout has a section dedicated to culling articles on assorted women’s issues. Good enough. I don’t spend much time on them since most of it is still that Second Wave soviet-ish stuff. But sometimes it’s hard – cruel hard, it is – to pass over some of this stuff. And you can learn a little more about how things operate in this 2nd-Wave-soviet universe, because these people are not going to stop until … well, they’re still not sure on when they’ll stop – perhaps at the Last Trumpet, but if the Bugler is a ‘man’, well, not even then. (Jennifer Hogg, "Military Women Get Ready to Rock the Boat", http://www.alternet.org/asoldierspeaks/92289/military_women_get_ready_to_rock_the_boat/)

I had mentioned back in the Spring of ’07 that – April being a ‘Month’ dedicated to women’s abuse issues – there seemed by purest coincidence to be articles ‘discovering’ that female troops were being sexually abused in astronomical numbers in the military, although there’s always the question of definition in these matters nowadays. I had noted that if so, then – presuming that ‘abuse’ meant serious assault and harm – it meant that either a whole lot of the ‘heroes’ over there were rampant sex-offenders or that there were a couple-three stupendously busy ‘bad apples’.

This past Spring the emphasis changed: women in the military were in general being abused in crisis numbers, but suddenly there was no focus on the combat zones.

The alert citizen might then have presumed that there would be a lull until the next Spring ‘awareness’ cycle, but – alas – this is an election year. And everybody knows what that means.

Ms. Hogg of the Women’s Media Awareness Center ‘reports’ that – the title says it all – “Military Women Ready to Rock the Boat”, an article dated July 18th. The military is failing in its promises to “the young, the poor, the single mothers” who joined up as a last resort to obtain “adequate housing, health care, and jobs”.

Well, here we go again. Another Israeli gambit, whereby a bad idea is introduced for political reasons, the consequences predictably are not at all good, and another 'crisis' is declared to solve the bad-consequences of the initial bad plan. And if you call attention to that, then you are a 'hater' and 'shrill' and fill-in-the-blank.

In this case, with the assistance of the Democratic Party and all the markers it could call in, those stalwart resolutes of the soviet Second Wave three decades ago deconstructed 'marriage' and 'family' on the basis of their hugely dubious assumption that those things were bad for 'women'. Whether such structures were of any value to society, and whether the deconstruction of said structures would have a bad effect on society ... these were not questions for the mothers of the revolution; after all, their revolution was a world-historical event, not to be sidetracked by the nitterings and natterings of any single 'country', especially one run by 'men'. Recall that at this time in US history there was still a Soviet Union out there and people were still laughing at Lenin and his whacked-out ideas of world revolution.

Now it appears that the drive to put women in the military was not at all to 'civilize' or 'sensitize' the military by de-machoizing it. It was simply a necessary revolutionary ploy to find employment for all of the young women - most of whom would not have read the mothers or heard them speak over the click of plastic chardonnay glasses on this or that bosky campus - who would, in a '70s version of the '60s, simply say I-shall-go-for-it, leave home, have kids without husband or marriage, and then start looking for a job. And all this at a time when US economic and industrial primacy was clearly starting to decline relative to the rest of the world and the country was obviously going to be hard-put just to provide jobs for the workers it already had.

Of course, maybe the reduction of the US labor force into a short-order peasantry was part of the foreseen consequences. If there were going to be far fewer jobs, then the revolution's solution might well have been: halve the salaries and benefits in order to accommodate the doubling of the workforce necessary to provide 'our' side with jobs. Neat. Shrewd. And who could lose? Lotsa young women trying to raise kids while holding down a job as a waitress or a barrista? Lotsa industrial blue-collars? The whole American enconomy? The whole American society?

Collateral damage. Because hey - the mothers were revolutionaries, not omniscient gods (.. goddesses?) and where would the Russian people be if Lenin had gotten out of bed that last morning before Red October and said Hang on, let's think this through one more time ... ? So scads of young women, under the gimlet-eyed tutelage of those-who-wear-sensible-combat-boots, headed for sea, field, and sky. It is a subject worthy of future historians; of that there can be no doubt.

Well, the military is failing in a lot of things these days, especially – not to put too fine a point on it – in winning the two current large-scale combat operations not-quite-accurately termed ‘war’ but hardly an 'occupation'. But it should come as a surprise to nobody who read the manifestos a few decades back that ‘the war’ can only be a mere historical accident compared to the long-term, supra-national objectives of ‘the revolution’.

In the eyes of the revolution, women – like the world’s ‘workers’ before them – are citizens of no nation, but rather constitute an international class whose loyalty must be to no merely national entity.

Nonetheless, the military having spent the past couple of decades twisting itself into a pretzel trying to make room for the demands of the 2nd-Wave, it is now being taken to task for having the effrontery to distract itself from their ‘concerns’ by losing a war on two fronts (and if the balloon goes up over Iran .. then three fronts).

This cannot stand, says the author. She shrewdly acknowledges that “for the military” a lot is riding on the election, “with two occupations taking place simultaneously … and a third waiting in the wings.” Clearly – and this is giving her the benefit of the doubt – she purposely understates the critical situation the military is currently in by referring to Iraq and Afghanistan as “occupations”; they are hot-war, surround-fire, 4th generation warfare frakfests. And for her to toss off that Iran might be a third such “occupation” undermines either her reportorial integrity or her competence in military affairs, or both: if the balloon goes up over Iran the US military on the ground in Iraq, virtually the entire field force of the Army and sizable chunks of the National Guard and the Marine Corps – will be in a position only marginally better than Custer’s on that last afternoon.

But women “risk being forced into silence lest the boat capsize”. Surely, a measly war should not be allowed to stand in the path of the revolution, comrade sisters!

And then she tries to trump any possible argument about the validity of her position with one of the old 2nd-Wave ploys: “But if [the boat] is that close to going under, isn’t it time for a better boat?” Tee-hee, zang, gotcha, trump – that sort of thing, delivered with a bright, perky, winsome, in-ya-face toss of the head. This is what passes for ‘logic’ among the cadres of the revolution. But it’s not rocket science to know that the time for pulling apart the hull and building a better boat is exactly not when you are in danger of capsizing; it’s when you get back to port, God grant that you do. For the moment, one is advised precisely not to start ripping out watertight bulkheads and other ‘obstructions’.

A horror story about a female soldier shot by a male soldier “who had a record of three previous assaults against her”. A random homicidal maniac? A ‘relationship’ gone bad? The author – shrewdly, again, I think – doesn’t say. Because that would open up the whole question of whether it was ever wise to place young males and females in the same units, and then putting those units in the front line (or in Iraq, where everywhere is the front line). And the mothers of the revolution don’t want that to get discussed. They went to great lengths precisely to manage things so that it wasn’t discussed.

Why do we have mixed-gender units? Without raising the whole women-in-the-military thing at the moment, why not simply have same gender units and deftly sidestep all of the problems associated with young people of both sexes together under the incredibly stressful and intimate conditions of hot war?

And it would be a hell of a lot easier on commanders who must not only lead but provide for the units. Is it true that once a year all women in the military have to be gotten to a medical facility advanced enough to perform mammograms? On top of ferrying pols and ‘contractors’ around, are what available transport resources the military has being tasked with moving all deployed females back and forth to mammography exams? And a single-gender unit would be easier to supply, with such special items as might be needed.

Because on top of everything else, We are now facing the prospect of the ‘Israeli Outcome’: embarked on a gambit that from the get-go was almost guaranteed to remain insoluble. But I’ll go further and say that the mothers of the revolution purposely deployed the ‘Israeli Gambit’: knowing that what you’ve started will not only be insoluble but will continue to generate increasingly bad outcomes as it goes on, you plan to capitalize on those bad outcomes to keep you in business for the rest of … Time, perhaps.

The only losers? Lotsa young women who - driven or even addled by anxiety or 'dreams' have signed up for the military jobs-and-education program, not really imagining they would wind up in a shooting war. Lotsa young guys who find themselves distracted by sexual tension when they need every ounce of attention they can muster to handle the losing end of 4th Generation Warfare. A military distracted by utterly preventable problems when it's fighting (and not-winning) wars on two and perhaps soon three fronts. But - to opine as the mothers of the revolution - a few eggs must be broken to make the revolution's omelette. Da! Ja! Yah.

This type of tactics has not worked well for those who have deployed them. The consequences of these tactics will burden a military already burdened with the modern problems of bureaucracy and the corrosive effects of the military-industrial complex, to say nothing of a national economy that is starting to give way. And the two un-won wars. And maybe the third on the way.

Nor can it be ignored that ‘women’ are well represented in the sad parade of senior military personnel who have helped things spiral downward: the Army Medical Corps general officer who oversaw the repugnant neglect of wounded vets at Walter Reed, the Army JAG – one Lt. Col. Beaver – who played the game and went along with her field commander’s urge to commence torture. And the female officer Jane Mayer refers to in "The Battle for a Country's Soul" on Truthout (July 15th) "who pushed to have Khaled el-Masri imprisoned after his mistaken rendition" and was then "promoted to a top post handling sensitive matters in the Middle East". And we'll leave Condoleeza Rice's fatuous but tenacious enabling out of it since she's not in the military, although a poster-person for the Second Wave's success.

Whatever reason there was for all the ‘change’, infusing the military with more relational integrity or sensitivity or whatever it was that women theoretically have and men don’t that would lead the military into broad sunlit uplands of mature war-fighting like they do it on Picard’s ‘Enterprise’… that hasn’t paid off at all. The tires should have been kicked before it all got started, but that was precisely what the mothers of the revolution fought successfully to prevent.

Amazingly, the author then goes on to note that “forty percent (39) of those [97 females dead in Iraq] are attributed to non-combat related injuries”, and from that spin a coy implication that those numbers do not reflect suicides caused back in the States from sexual assault by male troops, and that god-knows-how-many of those 39 deaths were “murders” perpetrated by male troops.

“One begins to understand”, she continues in the accents of grave maturity, “why some women in Iraq –marked as targets by both their uniform and their womanhood – carry weapons for protection against fellow service members.” OK. If that’s true, if in the middle of a losing war with no front and an almost unidentifiable but effective enemy … if on top of all that our forces are now also split in such a way that Our female troops are prepared to fire on Our male troops, well then, something is very wrong. And more Political Correctness, more sex-awareness classes, more unit ‘advocates’ and more 'appropriateness' lectures are not the solution.

And of course if all of this 'report' is not true, if this is just a tad of feminist hyperbole designed to spackle up the faithful, well ... a lot of those desperate faithful will take it as real and as an option, just as they did all the previous hyperbole (to use the most charitable description) of the past thirty-plus years.

And if Our legislators have been lying to Us and not reading the bills before voting on them and not really giving a crap whether the laws they're passing are good for Our common weal or not, well it appears that they got the idea from the mothers of the revolution, who - taking their cue from Lenin and Goebbels - realized that the people don't need to be told the truth; they just need to be herded in the correct direction. Yah.

Put the females into separate units where sex isn’t a danger or a distraction (well … ummm … presuming no threat to the women from the artistes-who-formerly-wore-sensible-shoes). Good lord, We are starting to run into the same problems the German Army did in the Ukraine: Party political doctrine refused to permit the clearly effective and very necessary action required to achieve operational success.

No wonder the Democrats are so edgy about being accused of being ‘soft on defense’. In the pursuit of votes, they raised up the 2nd-Wave feminists as an Identity with carte-blanche to demand its way to an agenda whose ‘success’ was clearly riddled with conceptual inconsistencies and potential consequences that any grade-school teacher could have pointed out.

The job of the military is not to be a ‘laboratory for social engineering’, one knowledgeable participant noted two decades ago. In those heady days with the USSR coming to the end of its far-too-extended run, he probably figured it would be considered purely rhetorical to add the next point: that the job of a military is to focus itself without distraction on the ability to win the wars it is ordered to fight.

Well, here We are. Troops uncertain of the reliability of their own colleagues, distracted not simply by the concern of getting slapped with a sex-charge, but actually distracted to the point of being ready to shoot or be shot by other service-members. And all of that before you start factoring in ... umm, the enemy. I don’t think that even Bin Laden, as shrewd as he might be, could ever have imagined a success like this.

The article is right though: things need to get better. Right now. And planning further initiatives to neutralize the perennial birds-and-bees elements of human relations, to cauterize the messier elements of sexual attraction, is not going to have any immediate traction. Uncle Sam looks foolish enough now without actually wading out into the surf and trying to command the tides like King Canute.

Separate the genders, and get on with the war. It is – is it not? – the primary concern. And it is not going well.