Gender, Race and the Logic of Extraterritoriality

The Blackwater bodyguards who killed 17 Iraqi civilians have been granted immunity from prosecution by the U.S. State Department. This is a symbolic middle finger from Washington to Nuri Al-Maliki, who recently said that Blackwater ‘must pay’ for the killings. Evidently, the State Department is no longer even trying to pretend that the Republic of Iraq is a sovereign state. (Kind of like the U.S. vis-à-vis South Vietnam circa 1963. And, in fact, some Washington insiders have made no secret about wanting to pull a Ngo Dinh Diem on Al-Maliki, and replace him with another puppet who really knows his place.)

It’s not just private U.S. mercenaries who get this kind of treatment. Just last week, Japanese police announced that they would not arrest U.S. marines who a 19-year-old Japanese woman had accused of gang-raping her. The police cited “inconsistencies” in her story. Perhaps they were hoping to avoid a repeat of an embarrassing 2005 incident in which, after 6 U.S. soldiers gang-raped a 22-year-old Filipina, the U.S. embassy refused to surrender the soldiers to the Philippine Department of Justice. Or how about Okinawa in 1995? At least the perpetrators in that case were tried in a Japanese court, and paid reparations to the family of the victim. But the U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement continues to grant extraterritorial rights to U.S. soldiers in Japan, and there are similar agreements in place in the Philippines and dozens of other countries.

In July 2006, the Paraguayan National Congress granted U.S. soldiers immunity from prosecution until December 2006, despite claims that they are engaged in legitimate “anti-terrorism operations.” In 2004, the U.S. demanded that the U.N. Security Council pass a resulting granting war crimes immunity for U.S. peacekeepers on U.N. missions.

The consistent policy aim of placing U.S. soldiers, private mercenaries and even peacekeepers “above the law” in foreign countries perpetuates a two-tiered legal relationship between the U.S. and its satellites--a kind of Jim Crow jurisprudence. In this framework, there are rules for “Us” and rules for “Them,” and in practice the line between "Us" and "Them" is a sexualized and racialized one. These sexual and racial aspects can be seen at the macro-level of history, or the micro-level of day-to-day practices. At the broadest level, regarding sex, the connection between patriarchy and warfare (or prostitution, rape and standing armies) stretches back to the upper Paleolithic or to the Bronze Age, depending on who you ask. (For a review of the debate, see, for example, the work of Gerda Lerner and Joshua Goldstein.) Regarding race, at a similarly (though less) broad level, there is the historical continuity between the European conquest of four-fifths of the planet from 1492 to 1945 (one of whose episodes was the conquest of North America by white settlers and soldiers); and the global dominance (in economic, military and cultural affairs) of the biggest of the white settler states, the USA, from 1945 to the present. Despite the weakening of U.S. hegemony post-Vietnam, the resurgence of China, the upsurge in Latin America, and the tokenistic integration of women and people of color in the U.S. military, U.S. military power remains coded as both male and white. And the presence of 737 major U.S. military bases in 130 countries abroad is nothing if not an expression of power.

Conversely, it is not hard to find sex and race in terms like “client state,” “host country” and “native population,” much less “towelhead” and “Haaji.”

The expression of this patriarchal/white supremacist power is often blatant. As Katharine H.S. Moon notes in her study Sex Among Allies, since the Korean War “over one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the U.S. military.” And as Cynthia McEnloe (I am indebted to Moon’s study for the citation) writes in her book Bananas, Beaches and Bases:

“A military base isn't simply an institution for servicing bombers, fighters, aircraft carriers, or a launch-pad for aggressive forays into surrounding territories. A military base is also a package of presumptions about the male soldier's sexual needs, the local society's sexual needs, and about the local society's resources for satisfying those needs. Massage parlors are as integral to Subic Bay, the mammoth U.S. naval base in the Philippines, as its dry docks.”

This also applies to female soldiers on the bases. In her essay "Why the War is Sexist," Huibin Amee Chew reports the following statistics:

"Alarmingly, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, over 80 percent of recent women veterans report experiencing sexual harassment and 30 percent report rape, or attempted rape, by other military personnel [!]. Crimes of sexual violence by military personnel are shocking yet are institutionally ignored. Lawyer Dorothy Mackey of Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel reports that of the 4,300 sexual assault and abuse cases she is handling, only 3 were actually prosecuted. In Mackey’s own experience as a survivor of repeated sexual assault by military personnel, her attempt to press charges was opposed by the Department of Justice as a threat to national security."

The same hierarchies that render such statistics invisible in mainstream U.S. discourse also serve to distort perceptions of risk. Polls show that a majority of Americans erroneously believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11. Even if that were true, consider the trade-off: some 1.2 million Iraqis may have been killed since 2003 as a result of the U.S.-UK invasion, whereas 2,973 people died on 9/11. And it needs to be acknowledged that the logic tying 9/11 to Iraq is both sexualized (vengeful retaliation) and racialized ("Bin Laden and Hussein are both Arabs, so they might as well be in cahoots"). And, let's face it, only a worldview seriously distorted by white supremacy could see the loss of 1 million-odd Iraqi lives between 2003 and 2007 as a ho-hum affair, but the loss of 3,000-odd American lives on 9/11 as an occasion for profound grief.