This Week's Q Syndicate Cartoon

Retired General John Sheehan testified in front of the Senate Armed Services last week, alleging that back in 1995, the Dutch contingent of NATO peacekeeping soldiers at Srebrenica, Bosnia, were neutralized by Serbian militia; his reason for this was that the Dutch military allows gay soldiers to serve openly and honestly. Serbs slaughtered 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in the most horrific single incident of genocide in Europe since World War II.

Senators were dumbfounded, and the Dutch have taken great umbrage in General Sheehan's testimony:

In a statement, Dutch Ambassador Renée Jones-Bos said, "I take pride in the fact that lesbians and gays have served openly and with distinction in the Dutch military forces for decades, such as in Afghanistan at the moment."

"The military mission of Dutch U.N. soldiers at Srebrenica has been exhaustively studied and evaluated, nationally and internationally," Jones-Bos said. "There is nothing in these reports that suggests any relationship between gays serving in the military and the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims."

Investigations have found that the Dutch contingent in Bosnia was poorly trained and equipped, but even the officer cited by Sheehan as the source of the idea that allowing gay (and unionized) soldiers in the Dutch military facilitated the massacre has issued a denial:

Gen. Henk van den Breemen, Dutch chief of staff at the time of the Srebrenica genocide, called Sheehan's comments "total nonsense" and denied ever having suggested gays in the army might have played a role in the Srebrenica massacre.

--(Quotations from the Washington Post.)