Over at The Atlantic, Steve Clemons has an in-depth interview with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. It is well worth reading. Clemons, who has opened up avenues of U.S. foreign policy discourse that were virtually nonexistent ten or fifteen years ago, is an unabashed supporter of Chuck Hagel. Therefore, don’t expect a Mike Wallace-style interview should you read it. Nonetheless, Clemons does draw Hagel out on a “whole host of issues” – as our dapper president would say – and that may not be such a great thing for Chuck Hagel, or the country. Indeed, if our nation’s enemies learn what a terrible dot-connecter the Secretary of Defense really is, we’re in more deep doo-doo than we thought.
Nowhere is the Nebraska-born Defense Secretary more open and transparent about his dot-connection issues than in his discussion about the crisis of military sexual assault. (By the way, this should not be read as a knock against Nebraskans. On the contrary, I find the state of Nebraska to be filled with the most polite people on the planet. I’ve driven across country several times in my life and I’m always glad when I enter Nebraska and sentimental when I leave. The politeness of that state is infectious. So for the record, there is nothing about the state of Nebraska which would suggest higher rates of dot-connection issues, which leaves the Hagel situation largely inexplicable.)
When Clemons brought up the current military sexual assault crisis, Hagel’s first response was to note his steadfast committment to holding regular meetings with a Defense Department advisory board that was established in 1951, back when Bing Crosby was still topping the charts.
It is not clear from the interview transcript if the so-called “Secretary of Defense Women’s Advisory Board” is the same group of military people with whom Hagel has “weekly one-hour” meetings to discuss military sexual assaults, but whatever the case, this much is clear: Chuck Hagel doesn’t want outsiders – like the American people, for instance – taking control of the U.S. military’s sexual assault epidemic. As Hagel explained to Steve Clemons:
I told the President one of the first times we talked about this, this – this problem will get fixed in this institution. We need help. Absolutely, we need – we need some changes in the law. Absolutely. But you can’t take it [the problem and a solution] away or out of the institution because this is all about accountability. And everyone in this institution is accountable in some way. There are chains of command accountability.
That chain of command has failed over the years, obviously, for a lot of reasons. But if it’s going to get fixed, it has to get fixed here in this culture, in this institution, in each service. And that’s what we’re focusing on.
The good part – and it’s not polite to criticize someone without mentioning their good parts, which I learned from Nebraskans as I travelled about their polite state – is that Hagel is firmly recognizing that U.S. military culture is an entirely separate culture from mainstream American society.
In other words, Hagel knows he’s the boss of a lot people, albeit a teeny-tiny minority of the U.S. population, who make a living off the practice of hot war. The fact that he recognizes the wholesale separateness of U.S. military culture, the fundamental “we for-pay soldiers are from Mars, those pansy civilians are from Venus” nature of the institution, is a good thing.
Where the acute dot-connection issues come in for Hagel is that he fails to realize that the teeny- tiny minority of men in this country who are perfectly content to inflict violence on others – namely the act of war – as a way to actually make a living for themsleves, not for anything remotely related to the actual defense of the nation, which the Iraq and Afghanistan wars so clearly proved, will at worst have a higher propensity to inflict sexual violence on others, or at minimum, not be shocked by those who do.
Indeed, one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever seen on TV was a news clip of a U.S. military “sexual assault training session.” Grown, twenty-something men, in military uniform, and sitting around a table, were being “taught” that when women are being sexually assaulted in front of them they should step in and say to the other guy something like, “Hey, stop. That’s not the right way to treat a lady.”
It’s so beyond pathetic.
I hope the American people, including our beloved Nebraskans, will eventually connect the dots that Chuck Hagel cannot: A human conscience that is not instinctively morally outraged by the very notion of salaried war-making, in and of itself, is not going to be instinctively morally outraged by other forms of wanton violence, in this case sexual violence. Thus, such a conscience will have to be mentally “reprogrammed” or “retrained” at twenty-five or thirty.
The bottom line is that war-making as a lifestyle in this country – even if only a tiny fraction of Americans are partaking in it – has wreaked total havoc on our nation, both moral and strategic, and both domestically and internationally.
Related Link: http://tyrannydissolution.wordpress.com. Section 6 of the proposedconstitutional amendment, which can be found in the About section,wouldend the for-pay soldiery in theUnited States.
First big fallacy of this argument: To say U.S. military culture is not connected to the civilian culture is in itself a failure to connect the dots! Where does the author think the military personnel come from anyway? The military may be a more rarified or distilled form of the U.S. population, but it is not something different or alien to the larger culture where violence and, particularly, violence against women are epidemic. Let’s get real and see Chuck Hegel’s blindness and the military’s voracious violence against women as just an inevitable outbreak of an otherwise ignored cultural reality that in the “polite” civilian world chooses not to acknowledge.
An interesting question. Cultural attitudes towards women have been around for a long time. Prior to WW 1, Americans were mostly pacifist and not inclined to get involved in international conflicts. For 3/4 of the 20th century, America was involved in wars fought by competing imperial (colonial) or fascist nations. After our Vietnam debacle, the military reorganized while the public’s attention returned to domestic matters. While 9/11 changed the whole game, policy decisions were made that indirectly lead up to it. Meanwhile the media fanned the flames of hatred toward “other”. I think one could argue that we have, as a people, become more violent and inured to the effects of economic disparity on the lower classes. I don’t think there is one single cause for this current sad state of affairs.
Randell, What was the Spanish-American War? America was to a “pacifist nation, it was a country that had not yet emerged as a major player o the world stage, which was centered in Europe. . It was coming off the deep wounds of the Civil War. Just thinking of WW 2, was there anything wrong with the US involvement?
I knew someone would remember that war. Well, I’d say that was the beginning of American Imperialism. It was initially promoted by industrialists interested in wresting control of resource rich territories from a weakened Spanish empire and justified through racist propaganda of Hearst and Pulitzer. The American public was probably duped into supporting this war by appealing to ideals of liberty for the Cuban and Philippine people who were ultimately betrayed by the American imperialists. I don’t think the American public would have supported a war of conquest. Just my opinion but the initial non-interventionist response to the European War, which later became WW I, bears this out. As far as WW II, in the popular cultural myth, it’s “The Good War” but historical research shows that American leaders cynically let England and Russia take the brunt of war’s impact. We followed the same strategy in the Pacific with China and England again. Pearl Harbor may have been a miscalculation or possibly a deliberate invitation for Japan to attack us. I still say it was a war between competing fascist / imperialist nations.
Randell, that’s real cute. I don’t know where you read your history. There was a reluctance by the US to get involved in WW 2 after the bitter experience in crafting the Versailles agreement. The Nazi strategy was to conquer Europe and enslave it, not to draw the US in. Russia was its greatest enemy. BTW Randell, the Soviet Union was only invaded in 1941, that was after the they held off invasion with a non aggression pact in 1939.
As for taking the brunt of the war, US soil really was not within reach of German weapons, except for a few submarines. But the US sustained many losses helping win the war. It was no walk in the park.
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