Gay bomb surely the answer

Any moment now, we’re going to hear the right wing’s newest explanation of why things are going badly in Iraq:

The anti-military Clinton administration refused to fund the gay bomb.

Just a little more military procurement spending, the argument will go, and Iraq would today be a peaceful, pro-American Middle Eastern country wrestling with the question of same-sex polygamy.

We learned about the gay bomb this month through the Sunshine Project of Berkeley, which gathers government documents on defense spending and found a 1994 proposal for a “gay bomb.” The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio – a long way from the thinking of Wilbur and Orville – envisioned a weapon that would spray opposing fighters and turn them gay, immediately making them more interested in each other than in shooting Americans. It asked for $7.5 million to get the weapons program started.

The proposal suggested cheerfully, “One distasteful but nonlethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

The idea was not pursued, possibly because there was an obvious defense against a bomb releasing a gay-making gas:

Don’t ask, don’t smell.

Last week, the Pentagon confirmed to the CBS TV station in San Francisco that the proposal, along with other strategies such as giving enemy troops bad breath and making them powerfully attractive to bees and wasps, had indeed been on the table. A spokesman explained, “The Department of Defense is committed to identifying, researching and developing nonlethal weapons to support our men and women in uniform,” and to further that policy had considered a plan to get opposing soldiers immediately out of their uniforms.

Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project told the station the plan was to “cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another.”

Air Force spokesmen said the idea was quickly dropped, but the Sunshine Project said it had found mentions of the gay bomb project as late as 2000 and 2002. Now, at least, the proposal seems to be as dead as “Will and Grace.”

Still, a weapons program always tells you as much about the people imagining it as about the people it was supposed to attack.

The gay bomb proposal, in 1994, came right after the big 1993 fight over allowing gays to serve openly in the U.S. military, which produced the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise.

That whole argument becomes clearer if we understand that at the time, people involved thought that gay people were by definition unable to keep their hands off each other to focus on fighting. That may be a tempting belief if you think you can turn the other army gay, but it’s not a useful principle when you’re trying to assemble your own military forces.

We may have given up the gay bomb, but today, we’ve just expelled 58 Arabic-speaking servicemen from the U.S. military for being gay – even though we have desperately few Arabic-speaking soldiers as we try to maintain order in Iraqi cities.

Don’t ask, don’t Tal Afar.

Maybe there’s a plan for a bomb that would make soldiers Arabic speakers.

If the gay bomb is gone, the theory behind it endures, which is why our military recruitment policies now prefer high school dropouts, enlistees with criminal records and people with previously unacceptable test scores to gay servicemen and women.

Still, we cling to this idea, because we know that gays can’t be effective soldiers.

That would be a surprise to many of our allies, including Britain, Canada, Australia and Israel, who have gays serving openly in their armed forces.