Via Barroom Philosophy comes this Guardian article by Katharine Viner.
Just as he bombed Afghanistan to liberate the women from their burkas (or, as he would have it, to free the "women of cover"), and sent out his wife Laura to tell how Afghans are tortured for wearing nail varnish, so now Bush has taken on the previously- unknown cause of Iraqi women – actually, look at the quotes, it’s women everywhere! – to justify another war. Where next? China because of its anti-girl one-child policy? India because of widow- burning outrages? Britain because of its criminally low rape conviction rate?
At home, Bush is no feminist. On his very first day in the Oval office, he cut off funding to any international family-planning organisations which offer abortion services or counselling (likely to cost the lives of thousands of women and children); this year he renamed January 22 – the anniversary of Roe vs Wade which permitted abortion on demand – as National Sanctity of Human Life Day and compared abortion to terrorism: "On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life… Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life."
[…]"feminist" George Bush has abandoned the women of Afghanistan: where is his concern (or Laura’s, or Tony Blair’s, or Cherie Blair’s, who was also wheeled out by her husband) for the very many Afghan women who live in fear of the marauding mojahedin who now run the country and are in many ways as repressive as the Taliban? Where were their protests when Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s women’s affairs minister and one of only two women ministers in Hamid Karzai’s western-installed government, was forced from her job this summer because of death threats?[…]
And in the west, feminists are left with the fact that their own beliefs are being trotted out by world leaders in the name of a cause which does nothing for the women it pretends to protect. This is nothing less than an abuse of feminism, one which will further discredit the cause of western feminism in the Arab world, as well as here. When George Bush mouths feminist slogans, it is feminism which loses its power.
Of course, anything bad for the Taliban is wonderful for the world. But helping the women of Afghanistan requires more than overthrowing the Taliban; it requires a level of commitment and follow-through that the US is lacking.
(Cartoon I drew last December which is unfortunately still relevant.).
