“U.S. military personnel have been raping Okinawans for the last 60-plus years.”
So says James Gibney of The Atlantic.
Of course, Mr. Gibney is also kind enough to concede that “the overwhelming majority of U.S. military personnel aren’t sociopaths.” That was big of him.
Michael Goldfarb responds:
One might add that journalists have been smearing the military for 60-plus years, but the overwhelming majority of them support the troops. Or so I’m told.
Not to diminish the crimes unfortunately committed by our deployed troops, but this most recent case marks only the second of it’s kind in the last 13 years. There are over 33,000 American troops deployed to Japan and (I’m told by people who have deployed there) no small number of local women interested in them. Given that, and the somewhat tense political situation surrounding the US presence in Okinawa and other parts of Japan, these two instances of rape don’t exactly seem to indicate any sort of trend. My hometown, which is considered low-crime and has a population (35,000) roughly the size of the American deployment in Japan, saw 29 rape cases in 2005 alone.
Just to put things in perspective.
Of course, one rape is too many, but there are bad apples in every lot. The US military has its share of them. But it’s just not fair to paint all of our troops with the actions of a scant minority.
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Brian
