SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010 “
t’s been 17 years since Congress enacted the law known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT), and the Senate will finally vote on its repeal this week. Public figures from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Lady Gaga have said it’s time for the policy to go. A federal judge in California weighed in this month as well, finding that the law undermines unit cohesion, wastes money and leads to a loss of critical military talent. It is also patently unfair and, according to the court, unconstitutional. On the long path to regulations that treat all troops equally, a number of myths have cropped up surrounding the law.
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DADT was created to promote unit cohesion and military readiness.
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DADT has never had anything to do with those goals. In 1993, President Bill Clinton tried to
compel the Pentagon to eliminate the ban on gays in the military. The Pentagon formed a working group to figure out how to respond, and admirals and generals in that group, which ultimately helped create DADT, acknowledged to historian Nathaniel Frank that the policy was “based on
nothing.” But that is not the full story. According to historian Anne Loveland, the architects of DADT knew they could not argue that the law should be based on their personal morality, so they used the unit cohesion argument instead. In her work on evangelical chaplains in the military, Loveland discovered a behind-the-scenes debate as the policy took shape in 1992-93. Though the chaplains and evangelical groups wanted to present a case that gays and lesbians are abominations, polls showed that most of the public didn’t
KLMNO
I Disagree With You, But I Am Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler.” — Jon Stewart’s sign for his upcoming “Rally to Restore Sanity” in Washington
‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ Myths about 5 by Aaron Belkin clegg from B1
Was supporting the Iraq war excessive diffidence on Britain’s part? My own view was that the Iraq war was clearly driven as much by a judgment by the then-British government that the most important thing of all was to stick close to the United States. I don’t think it is healthy in any relationship — personal or geostrategic — for a relationship to be driven entirely by sentiments and diffi- dence.
So there is no real difference in your attitude toward the United States and that of the prime minister? The prime minister was criticized in the British press when he was last in the States, for saying that the United King- dom was a junior partner. I think what he was doing was capturing the realism of a relationship where clearly, in terms of economic size and reach, there is a huge difference between ourselves and the United States. But just because there is an asymmetry that doesn’t mean that the United Kingdom should unquestioningly follow policy in Washington.
During the election, you campaigned against putting the Tories in government. Sure.
Why did you decide to join a coalition with them? The British people said no single party de- served an outright majority. We were stuck. All the parties and all the politi- cians had to decide. We could have had an election again in the autumn. I felt and David Cameron did at that time, when we are facing terrible economic difficulties, we had to create a strong and — crucially —legitimate government. . . . Without le- gitimacy, no government can do any- thing. And we have to do some very big, difficult things.
Speaking of big, difficult things, what about your economic program? Can you bring your party along? I think so. I’m not going to disguise the fact that a lot of people are going to feel quite ambivalent and uneasy along the way. And that’s why as we take a lot of these very big, controversial and frankly unpopular decisions to fill this huge black hole in the public finances, we have got to constantly explain to people two things. Firstly, that it is an unavoidable thing to do if we want the economy to grow in the future. If you look at what is happening on our European doorstep — Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and so on — there is no doubt that if we hadn’t done something quite bold, we would have been in a real danger zone by now. The second point is that we are trying to do all of this as fairly as we can.
Are you worried about your own followers who didn’t vote to go into a coalition with the Conservatives? From the polls, you can see that your party’s approval has gone down. It has gone down a bit, yeah. I suspect that there were some people who believed
ANDREW WINNING/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“We are finally, in military terms, starting to get our act together” in Afghanistan, says British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, shown on Aug. 31 visiting troops there. Two years ago, he worried that the war had “no proper strategy.”
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For audio clips of Lally Weymouth’s interview with British
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, go to
www.washingtonpost.com/outlook.
the Liberal Democrats should be a sort of left-wing conscience to the Labor Party. But we are a liberal party;we’re not there to be a chorus on the margins of the Labor Party. So yes, it is disappointing that those people feel they can’t support us any- more. We are a party carrying a very proud and long tradition of more than 100 years of liberalism in British politics, which isn’t defined by whether it is left or right of the Labor Party, but is defined by our touchstone values: the fairness of civil liberties, internationalism, political re- form. Look at the political reform agenda: We are going to table legislation in January for the first time to reform the House of Lords.
What are you going to do to the House of Lords? Make it accountable to people finally. Make sure it is elected. Not an uncontro- versial idea in most democracies around the world, that the two chambers should be elected by the people.
During the campaign, you said that a
costly defeat in Afghanistan was inevitable. Will this government stay the course? What is your own attitude about the war in Afghanistan? Two years ago or so, I was very concerned that there was no proper strategy in Af- ghanistan. The U.S. and the international coalition had been there for years and years in an invisible war — people were understandably occupied with Iraq. Then suddenly, people woke up to the fact that we were in this long-term conflict in Af- ghanistan and we weren’t winning. So that’s why I raised the alarm in British politics — to say look, we can’t carry on like this. . . . I think now with the troop surge announced by President Obama, built upon by General Petraeus, who I met in Kabul, we are finally, in military terms, starting to get our act together. The great dilemma now is: How can we convert that into a political settlement?
You have denounced the occupation of Gaza as “a living nightmare for a million and a half Palestinians.” What is your attitude toward Israel? My own attitude as a friend of Israel is that you have got to ask yourself: Are the actions that have taken place in Gaza through Operation Cast Lead in Israel’s long-term interest? It seems to me to be a wholly uncontroversial thing to say that to have a million and a half people on a tiny sliver of land — one of the most wretched and overcrowded parts of the
world — and no employment, is that in your long-term strategic interest? Clearly not. Now, that does not mean that Israel hasn’t got every right to retaliate and take action to protect its own citizens. But how does Israel disentangle itself from a series of military strikes and incursions which provide short-term security but don’t pro- vide long-term stability and safety?
But Israel did withdraw from Gaza. They tore up all their army bases and sat there for eight years while rockets fell on Israel with no retaliation. But then the military action which was taken — you need to ask yourself, was it proportionate?
If rockets were falling on the suburbs of London, what would you do? Of course I would take military action. Do I think the nature of the military action and the overwhelming use of force and the huge collateral damage that was caused, do I think that is necessarily in the long-term interest of Israel?
Your answer is no? What I think is now obvious to everybody —and I suspect to the Israeli government as well — is that the long-term safety of Is- rael itself requires some kind of resolu- tion of what is happening in Gaza, not to mention the settlements in the West Bank and elsewhere. A military action on its own — certainly in such an overwhelming fashion — is not a long-term answer to Is-
share their moral concerns; they knew would have a better chance if they talked about military necessity. As recently as 2007, then-Joint Chiefs
Chairman Peter Pace was asked why the military still had a ban on gays, and he said he believed that DADT was necessary because homosexual conduct is immoral. He later clarified that he was stating his “personal moral views” and that he should have stuck to personnel issues. His comments spurred a group of retired generals and admirals to urge the repeal of the policy. But the problem really wasn’t that Pace spoke out of turn. It was that he told the truth about a rationale that was supposed to remain unspoken.
Repealing DADT will be complicated.
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Opponents of repeal are trying to depict the transition to an inclusive policy as a fragile
and complicated process. The Center for Military Readiness, a nonprofit organization whose president supports DADT, claims that lifting the ban will lead to logistical headaches over housing, benefits and nondiscrimination policies. This echoes the obstructionism of former senator Sam Nunn, who on the Senate floor in 1993 asked more than 40 “thorny questions” that gay rights advocates would have to answer before he would support allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. (One particularly memorable example: What would happen if a gay soldier brought a partner to a military ball?) But the shift to an inclusive policy is not rocket science. Research by the Rand Corporation shows that the Pentagon needs just three things to ensure a smooth transition: The military must have a standard of nondiscrimination that mandates equal treatment for everyone. There must be a single code of conduct that applies equally to gays and straights and does not mention sexual orientation. And military leaders at all levels must show their support for the policy.
All of these steps are simple, which is
why the militaries of Britain, Israel, Canada and other U.S. allies have had such an easy time getting rid of their bans. At a recent summit at the Brookings Institution, Canadian Lt. Gen. Walter Semianiw said, “There has been no impact to reflect on operational effectiveness by having men and women of any sexual orientation fighting together.”
The integration of women and African Americans into the military offers useful comparisons.
regards. Just as some people claimed that white enlisted personnel would not follow black officers, for example, others say that straight troops will not follow gay commanders. Yet it makes little sense to compare
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the current situation to the previous integration of women and racial minorities. Operationally, the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” will be a cakewalk compared with racial and gender integration, which took many years and faced huge logistical obstacles. In this case, a majority of troops already say that they know or suspect that they know gay peers and are comfortable serving with them. Symbolically, the comparison is wrong as well: It conflates homophobia, racism and sexism, which are distinct phenomena.
The troops oppose repealing DADT.
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It is true that when asked their policy preferences, more troops say they favor DADT
than allowing gays to serve openly. But there are several caveats: First, the margin is small, and a large number of troops say they have no opinion. Typically, polls find that about 40 percent of troops prefer DADT, 30 percent prefer open service, and 30 percent have no opinion. Second, the
The debates over gays, women and blacks in the military seem quite similar in many
vast majority of troops say they are comfortable working with gays and lesbians. Third, even among those who have an opinion, very few feel strongly about it. Military leaders have expressed their
support for repealing DADT as well. Mullen has said that eliminating the policy “would be the right thing to do,” and his view is reflected, in large part, in the opinions of the troops. I have made more than 25 visits to service academies and military universities over the past decade, and I have noticed a remarkable shift. Among those gays and lesbians who are out to their units, very few are encountering problems these days. The gay troops who experience the most difficulties are the ones who remain in the closet. Their peers know they are hiding something, and that perception of secrecy does undermine cohesion.
DADT is a losing issue politically.
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More than a dozen polls in the past five years have found that roughly two-thirds of the
public supports repeal. Majorities of regular churchgoers and Republicans now support allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. The political risk for the Obama administration and the Democrats is in not following through on their pledge to repeal the policy. Some people believe that Clinton tried to push the country too far to the left when it came to gays in the military. But Clinton’s key mistake was allowing himself to get pushed around. That is why he lost the respect of the military and its supporters.
Aaron Belkin is an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University and the director of the Palm Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
on
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Aaron Belkin will discuss this article Monday at 11 a.m.
at
washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
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‘We are going to have to grit our teeth and hold on’ rael’s security interest.
When you were a young man, why did you join the Liberal Party, which hadn’t been in power in years? This is going to sound trite, but I really am a Liberal. I really believe in this stuff. I believe in the core Liberal values.
How do they differ from those of Labor? Labor has a very different fundamental vision — socialism, that society is com- posed of groups, classes. . . . A Liberal starts with the integrity and the value and, dare I say it, the beauty of every sin- gle individual. That is why I believe so passionately in civil liberties, and Labor didn’t. Labor destroyed our traditional British civil liberties.
What specifically are you talking about? The creation of the world’s largest DNA database. Locking people up without charge. Pushing for trial without jury. It is just an expression of a worldview which says it doesn’t matter what individuals think, doesn’t matter what their rights are, as long as you the government justify that it is a good thing to do for the collec- tive whole. Joining the Liberal Party was a no-brainer for me. . . . And when you are a young man, you don’t get a calculator out saying, “Am I going to get to power?” You get pro- pelled forward by idealism.
Is it fair to say that your party disagrees passionately with the Conservatives over Europe? I take a very simple, almost pragmatic view, which is that in a world where we are facing huge global instability in our economy, we are facing climate change that crosses borders, we are facing inter- national criminal networks which stretch across continents, we are dealing with mass migration of peoples, we are dealing with conflicts to do with resources and ethnicity and religion which cross bor- ders, it makes total blinding sense that you can do more together than if you are apart.
Can you hold your party together for five years? I certainly hope so. The Liberal Demo- crats recognize that we are doing a lot of difficult things early on, and then we are going to have to grit our teeth and hold on because the prize is great.
If you and David Cameron are successful, do people elect the Conservatives or elect the Liberals? Are you the loser or the winner? What I hope is in five years’ time, I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked, but it has worked. Your kids have got jobs to go to, your schools are well-run, the hospitals are account- able to you, we are cleaning up your envi- ronment, protecting your civil liberties, and we have cleaned up the reform poli- tics. I certainly hope that people give us both credit for doing something very un- usual.
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