GEORGIE ANNE GEYER England becomes military's scapegoat

WASHINGTON -- For the last couple of weeks, I have not been able to take my eyes off the emotionless face of the woman who has dominated many of our front pages. She seemed to be looking out at us from some faraway experience that she might, or might not, choose to remember.
Never a smile, only a dull stare. Only the round face of a reportedly speech-impaired girl from the American backwoods who somehow became the bearer of our military leaders' sins.
What the American military is doing to Army Pfc. Lynndie England is not a pretty sight. They are dancing off the hook for their deliberate disregard of the Geneva Accords, for their clever doubletalk on torture, and for their refusal and incapacity to train and control the troops under their administration.
Their multiple depredations through the cruel wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq have been conveniently dumped on this poor West Virginia girl with the learning disabilities and the tendency to unquestioningly follow authority, as she apparently did in Abu Ghraib. Although the case is up for grabs at this writing, it is possible that Lynndie could go to jail for 10 years, while Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Myers instead go to Rome, Brussels and Berlin to tell the world what a great and moral military we have. It is, quite simply, shameful.
S & amp;M queen
This is not to say that Lynndie England did not do her part in the tragedy of Abu Ghraib. Somehow she ended up in the unlikely position of a West Virginia S & amp;M queen: There she was, holding an Iraqi soldier on a leash; there she was again, pointing to the genitals of a whole bunch of naked Iraqis tangled up in one another in what looks like part of a Walpurgis Night spectacle out in the sands of Central Asia.
She says, when she says anything at all in court these days, that she "had a choice but chose to do what my friends wanted me to do." She was having sexual relations with another soldier, Charles Graner Jr., with whom she now has a son -- while Graner, already in prison for his part in the incidents, has married someone else. Nice picture!
These cases, because they are virtually the only ones being prosecuted for mistreatment of prisoners and torture by the military, stand for far more than the totality of their individual characteristics.
The trial of poor Lynndie England reminds us daily of how our military leaders set a stage for "anything goes" and then, without the Geneva Accords and without any real moral instruction from the top, were amazed when anything did go.
Lynndie's trial also plays directly into the frequent stories in the press in which our military leaders complain about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are stressing the American military to a point of high risk in fighting other wars. Enlistments are way down.
April marked the third straight month in which the Army missed its recruiting goal -- recruiters nationwide obtained less than 60 percent of the month's goal of 6,600 new recruits. At the same time, the government announced the virtual disappearance of $7.2 million of U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq. Another $89.4 million in aid was improperly accounted for, according to a special inspector for Iraq's reconstruction. What a tight ship!
Patriotism
But American young people do not enlist in the military merely to "see the world" or get an education. Many, perhaps most, of them enlist out of patriotism and in a search for inspiration. By treating them instead like consumers, the military has further alienated potential soldiers.
Last week, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that we do not have enough soldiers for all our wars. But he assured us that, not to worry, we would prevail.
These statements seem to me to be curious in the extreme. All of the wars we've fought in the last 10 years have been wars of choice -- we didn't have to fight; we wanted to.
So would it seem prudent, if we are so overextending ourselves, to cut back these men's beloved wars? To deal with the world with a more sophisticated mix of diplomacy, persuasion and carefully applied force?
That idea doesn't seem to have caught the imagination of these men, who seem only more determined to bring up the numbers of young Americans to go out and fight wars of choice to equal their own ambitions, rather than scale down everything to reality.
Universal Press Syndicate