President Obama has given the military one year to crack down on military assaults or face stricter rules than the ones currently being proposed by Congress. I'm wondering why this didn't happen the first day he took office in 2009. His handling of this issue has been beyond poor. In my view, this is the biggest mistake of his presidency especially considering he is viewed as a champion of women's rights.
The number of assaults have gone up 30 percent on his watch and now stand at 26,000 per year. I get that he didn't want to make waves in the military community but that community ends with him at the top. He's the commander in chief so he should have been cracking skulls and firing people from day fucking one. I'm sorry, but even with this deadline, he still has completely failed on this issue.
2 comments:
You're wrong, Mark. The president inherited a damaged military, one that could have been broken irreparably if not handled properly.
First off, there were deeper underlying problems that manifested themselves in troubled behaviors other than sexual assault: suicide rates spiked, there were vicious attacks on innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and so on.
And there was that constant argument about gays in the military, and whether women should be serving in combat, which aren't directly related, but these issues fill the mindspace of the public and the troops, pushing out other issues.
The president didn't have the kind of personal authority with the military to demand a huge crackdown on day one. If he had been a military veteran with 20 years under his belt, maybe he'd have been able to get away with the bull in the china shop approach.
But he was a civvie who didn't have any first-hand knowledge of the inhuman stresses that our troops have been put through. These increases in assaults are due in large part to the horrendously long deployments that the troops have suffered for more than 12 years now. Many troops suffered from PTSD and concussions from IED detonations, both of which can lead to violent behavior.
To top it all off, the sneaking suspicion that the sole purpose of the invasion of Iraq was George Bush's desire to get aboard that ship for his Mission Accomplished photo op to kick off his 2004 reelection campaign must weigh very heavily on the troops. For the last decade many of them must have been asking themselves what the point of all this blood and sacrifice was, considering that all we did was deliver Iraq into the hands of Iran, and Afghanistan will never be rid of the Taliban.
Some of the sexual assaults were committed by men who were really not responsible for their own actions because of the trauma they suffered in war. A lot of assaults were committed by scumbag rapists. Some assaults were committed by men who misread a woman soldier intentions and forced themselves on a comrade who stoically submitted, afraid to rock the boat and hurt his and her own careers. Determining which is which is very difficult.
There are no excuses for these assaults, but there are reasons. Without finding out what the reasons are, ham-fisted policies won't solve the problems, and would have exacerbated them.
Should it have taken almost five years to make these changes? No. It should have been a higher priority. But the problem with being president is that everything should be a higher priority, and there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many soldiers who are already spending all their time on matters of life and death.
I imagine you mean "sexual assaults" when you said "military assaults", right?
He's the commander in chief so he should have been cracking skulls and firing people from day fucking one.
LMAO - yeah, he's been a real ass-kicker when it comes to keeping the bureaucrats et al in line, huh? If there has been one thing this Administration has been consistent about it is the lack of holding people accountable (save of course anyone who leaked something that was not an official/campaign-sponsored leak).
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