Word: commited
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although Pentagon officials say publicly the U.S. is willing to participate in a multilateral peacekeeping force, in private the tone is distinctly different. General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his colleagues at the Pentagon have been extremely reluctant to commit ground troops to Bosnia for any purpose. Military planners say they are examining contingencies for using American air power to enforce a no-fly order over Bosnia if the Security Council ever orders it and to "reinvigorate" relief efforts by flying air cover for truck convoys. "But that's it, max!" says a defense official...
Armies in all civilized countries receive intensive indoctrination on decent behavior and on what offenses, including rape, will result in court-martial. It is the job of officers to control their men. Elite units are the least likely to commit rape and other atrocities, although SS men in World War II proved the exception. Says the military historian John Keegan: "Elite units have a rather high opinion of themselves and consider atrocity to be beneath them." A soldier who murders or rapes disgraces his comrades and damages esprit de corps...
...sometimes, young men in war may commit rape in order to please their elders, their officers, and win a sort of father-to-son approval. The rape is proof of commitment to the unit's fierceness. A young man willing to do hideous things has subordinated his individual conscience in order to fuse with the uncompromising purposes of the group. A man seals his allegiance in atrocity...
...should be possible to draw a graph predicting the level of rape that would occur in a battle context according to the officers' degrees of tolerance or disapproval. The greatest number of rapes would happen if 1) the soldiers were under direct orders to commit rape. Slightly fewer would take place if 2) there were fully articulated official approval of rape, as with the Soviets entering Germany in 1945. The levels would descend with 3) tacit $ official approval of rape, 4) official neutrality on the subject, 5) tacit official disapproval, 6) spoken official disapproval, 7) direct orders not to rape...
Even armies operating under conditions 7 and 8 may commit numerous rapes. Rapes increase geometrically if the soldiers feel that civilian women are implicated in the war against them. American soldiers in Viet Nam committed an unknowable number of rapes, including those attending the massacre at My Lai, in part when the units were incompetently or viciously led, but also in part because it was hard for the Americans to distinguish officially friendly Vietnamese civilians from the Viet Cong...