Flag of Islamic State graffiti, St.-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or, Rhone-Alpes, France Image by thierry ehrmann and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
•Please stop killing people and destroying things they need and treasure.
•Help us all work peaceably together to create good lives for everyone.
•That will take a lot of effort, creativity,
sacrifice, cooperation.
•We can, we must do it.
American soldiers display the Hoe battle flag during a patrol, Jan. 22. They hold the flag in reverse to symbolize the way Soldiers wear the flag on their right shoulder. Crow said the flag represents a ‘lineage of warriors.’ Image by Sgt. Aaron Rosencrans is in the public domain.
•The alternative is horrible, endlessly tragic.
•Let’s show each other and our children that we and they are not members of a monstrous species.
•Let’s prove that together we can transcend the past and create a humane and loving future for everyone.
•Let’s begin doing this now.
Nimroz provincial Gov. Mohammad Sarwar Subat, center, speaks during a friendship dinner at the Afghan Cultural Center at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province, Afghanistan, July 25, 2013. Regional Command (Southwest) hosted the dinner during Ramadan to bring coalition forces and key members of the community together to promote peace and discussion. Image by Sgt Tammy Hineline and is in the public domain.
Tom Greening was educated at Yale, the University of Vienna, and the University of Michigan. He has been a psychologist in private practice for over 50 years, and is a retired professor from Saybrook University, UCLA, and Pepperdine. He was Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology for 35 years. He is a Fellow of five divisions of the American Psychological Association and Poet Laureate of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry.
Abu Ghraib, Oct. 20, 2003. Nude detainee handcuffed to bed with pair of panties draped over his face. In the public domain.
Today’s post is an excerpt from an interview with guest author Dr. Anthony Marsella back in 2008. What the US administration has been doing and attempting to justify in its “war on terror” is terrifying; it is also torture, as the recently released report on torture from the U.S. Senate corroborates.
“The issue of torture is important for our very nation. What is at stake is our moral authority in the world. The US Administration has simply used the notion that torture is an essential tool for our national defense. In fact, [George Bush] has had the audacity to say that the use of torture may be necessary to protect America.
This kind of rabid nationalism, this fear of non-existent provocation is consistent with many political leaders throughout history who sought to control and dominate people by creating fear and anxiety, so that they would increasingly rely upon their national leader for protection. This is an old trick used by dictators.
Unfortunately the media has failed to respond and the American public has been taken in by all this propaganda, so resistance has not been as widespread as we would like it to be. It would be wonderful if throughout the US all organisations as well as people would simply say to the government: what are you doing? Stop it! It is against the law! You are destroying our national character and integrity….
On the one hand Bush said: “We refuse to be part of this. America does not torture” and on the other hand we know what happened in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo, in Kandahar and in rendition. We also know that the Pentagon has decided to eliminate some of the Geneva Convention restrictions on Torture from its army training manual and the highest members of the US administration have had meetings in which they have authorised and actually orchestrated torture activities.
This duplicity, along with the very act of permitting torture itself, has a heavy cost on America because in the eyes of the world we have lost our moral authority. We have lost whatever role and stature we had. We are no longer the voice for democracy, freedom and justice.”
Men who perpetrate military sexual assaults tend to be indiscriminate;—they will destroy the lives of men as easily as women.
Indeed, because men enter the military in much higher numbers than women, the majority of military sexual assault victims are men. In a 2013 report on sexual assault, the Pentagon estimated that 26,000 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2012; 53% of those attacks were directed at men, mostly by other men.
It has been estimated that 38 military men are sexually assaulted every day; “The culprits almost always go free, the survivors rarely speak, and no one in the military or Congress has done enough to stop it.” A few survivors did talk to GQ Magazine; you can read their stories here.
In order to explain sexual assaults, one factor that clinicians and social scientists have advanced is “toxic masculinity,” which may be exacerbated by toxic environments. Toxic is defined as “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.”
Such traits appear to flourish in certain toxic environments more than in others. Prisons comprise a toxic environment, and the military is another.
Do the ideas of toxic masculinity and toxic environments sound valid to you?
Whatever your views on the extent to which traits and environments become toxic, I hope you will steer children away from bullying and recognize that neither military service members nor imprisoned men and women deserve to be sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, or otherwise abused—in violation of international law.
[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: Today we continue the series by guest author Neta Crawford. Part 2 picks up on the question of why it so difficult to accurately assess the true costs of war.]
First, there is a tendency to focus on what has been appropriated by Congress specifically for the war, with the consequence that the larger costs of war in Iraq are either missed or downplayed.
"Artwork" with 20 Dollar Bills by selbstfotografiert, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Unported 3.0 license
Specifically, many tallies focus on Congressional appropriations to the Department of Defense for the Iraq war, most of which were authorized in special emergency or supplemental appropriation, not included in the regular Pentagon “base” budget appropriations.
Others rightly include war related appropriations to the Veterans Administration and the State Department and US Agency for International Development (AID). One of the most sophisticated of these analyses, by Amy Belasco of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) totals appropriations to Pentagon, State/USAID and the VA at $806 billion from 2003-2011.
But overall Pentagon appropriations and spending increased over the war in large part due to the Congressional desire to give the military whatever they needed and more.
Winslow Wheeler, of the Center for Defense Information, estimates that the base budget increase attributable to both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is more than $600 billion over the last 10 years (whether one counts in current or constant dollars, and that matters).
If Wheeler is right or even right by half, then the share of the increase in base appropriations to the Pentagon that can reasonably attributed to the Iraq war is between $190 billion and $380 billion.
The second reason the official estimates are low compared to what the war will actually cost is the tendency to forget how the Iraq war was financed — almost entirely by deficit spending. If one calculates the interest on debt for just the Pentagon, State, and VA appropriations, using the amount appropriated according the CRS, for the Iraq war already paid, the total is about $117 billion.
Neta C. Crawford is a Professor of Political Science at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War study www.costsofwar.org
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