Tomgram: Victoria Britain, Fighting a Global War on Terror!

The Global War on Terror has had many victims, since it was launched by President George W. Bush, soon after September 11, 2001. In his "crusade," a word used publicly, before he thought better of it. "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism", the history of kidnappings and renditions, torture and abuse, imprisonment without charges or trial, drone assassinations and the killing of civilians is by now well known, for those of us who care to know. But there are other less noted kinds of "collateral damage" from more than a decade of such conflict, including damage to women on both sides, or perhaps ends of the war. The New York Times recently ran a two part report on the toll that the war on terror has taken on women in the US military, and it makes for startling reading. Back in January 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated that there could be as many as 19,000 sexual assaults in the US military, not in the whole war or terror era, but in a year of it, only about 3,000 of which actually get reported. Sexual assault and the threat of it, as the times recounted, only adds to the pressures that, in these years, have been placed on American soldiers. They have experienced striking rates of brain injuries, usually from roadside bombs, rising cases of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), soaring suicide rates among both on duty service personnel and veterans, increased use of drugs, legal and illegal, and a striking rise among women veterans in homelessness, a phenomenon that itself, reports the Times, is often connected to being raped, to the Military Sexual Trauma (MST) that follows, and to the PTSD that can follow as well. This, in other words, is one kind of collateral damage, seldom thought of as such, when the war on terror is brought up. On the other end of that war, in a world where terror suspects have next to no recourse, and Washington's record of doing terrible things to innocent men is daunting, are women and children connected to those suspects. As it happens, Victoria Brittain, a journalist and former editor at the British Guardian, has spent these last years with a group of such women. She saw first hand how, in her country as in the US effort more generally, a global war on terror became a global war on terror, a war that, at least in part, turned out to be against women and children. Her book on the subject, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror, has just been published. Though both of these worlds, the world of the woman warrior and of the woman connected to a suspect in the war, we get, as Noam Chomsky wrote in a comment on her book, "a revealing picture of what we have allowed ourselves to become." Indeed!