No Way To Treat Saddam's Ladies
Ifeminist.com proprietor Wendy McElroy has an interesting column at Fox News about Saddam Hussein's brutal treatment of women–and of organzied feminism's reluctance to comment on it. This is especially odd, given that some of the same groups were among the first to publicize the Taliban's retrograde ways.
McElroy points to an often-unacknowledged dynamic at work in both the anti-war and pro-war camps: Their positions on invading Iraq may have less to do with geopolitics than domestic partisanship. As McElroy writes (in a sentence that when excerpted takes on a number of other possible meanings):
Several reasons may underlie this apparent reluctance [by feminist groups to publicize women's mistreatment in Iraq]. A condemnation of Saddam may be viewed as an admission that Bush is correct on Iraq. And hatred of Bush runs deep in most feminist circles.
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I agree with Wendy. It has EVERYTHING to do with their deep seated hatred of W. If Clinton (or Gore, for that matter) were President and doing the same things (OK, it’s hypothetical), the NOW gang and the rest of the left would be firmly in favor. If W. had an intern giving him a blowjob in the oval office, they’d be on him faster than a duck on a june bug. Politics over principle. Both the left and right do it, but the left is more shameless about it.
This should be a big clue to those libertarians who are currently making alliances with Leftists in support of anti-war positions — THESE LEFTISTS WILL STAB YOU IN THE BACK THE MINUTE A DEMOCRAT IS ELECTED.
Have fun in 2008 watching ANSWER marching on your TV to take away your gun rights. Lie down with dogs….
It’s always been about politics. Clinton has been accused of actual physical harm of women, but what dis NOW do? Nothing, Clinton was their darling. It shows you how worthless PC feminists are. The whole anti-war stance is about the fact that W. is in office. Remember when Clinton UNILATERALLY attacked Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan? Not a peep from the Left. Trust me if Clinton was prez now, the Left and Europe would be singing a different tune.
If Clinton were Prez now he wouldn’t be running this country over a cliff. He wouldn’t destroy every alliance we have in the world and we would be talking to North Korea. There would be no freedom choking Patriot Act, there would be no redundant Homeland Security Department, Richard Perle would still be retired and W would be back in Texas talking to the Christian Coalition, where he belongs.
Once again, for you hard of hearing. SADDAM HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 911.
If you want to be annoyed further, check out codepink4peace.org. These women are running anti-war vigils outside of the White House and also just sent a delegation to Bagdad to hold more vigils and deliver flowers to the French and German embassies (I kid you not). They oppose war because they “understand the love of a mother in Iraq for her children, and the driving desire of that child for life.” Now, whether or not you support war, I think it’s hard not to agree that most Iraqi mothers probably have a “driving desire” for their children to live in a country where they are not in danger of being tortured or raped in front of their parents.
Your right, lefty…..it is hard to think about actually doing the right things when you are getting your weasel wacked…..
I agree with Steve, Wendy, and Sara on this one. If Gore was in the White House, the feminists would be 100% in favor of a war with Iraq to end the oppression of women by Saddam Hussein in that country. But, since Dubya Bush is in the White House, they oppose war for the espoused reasons that Sara mentioned. So, to summarize:
GORE IN WHITE HOUSE: FEMINISTS (AND LEFTISTS) SUPPORT WAR “FOR THE CHILDREN”
BUSH IN WHITE HOUSE: FEMINISTS (AND LEFTISTS) OPPOSE WAR “FOR THE CHILDREN”
Lefty,
You are right! We old Wille back to burn up little kids in religious compounds and stick machine pistols into 5 year old cuban boys.
The selective memories of these leftist “civil libertarians” makes me sick!
Sorry but if you are libertarian you are “right-wing” and therefor “militia” and you can kiss your rights away when your left-wing buddies win in 2008.
In an ideal world it wouldn’t be Corporate Bush versus the Kleptocrats. Sadly this isn’t a perfect world. I am not sending any money to the GOP but I will be damned before I associate with communists.
Lefty:
Bullshit pal. The Patriot Act was everything the Reno DoJ had been asking for for YEARS but Congress wouldn’t pass the bills (largely because every time they tried “we the people” flooded their fax machines and email boxes). It wasn’t because Clinton wouldn’t sign them–he never got the chance.
President Bush is not hero material. He’s a bloody fascist. But so was Clinton. Remember Waco? Remember that Cuban kid sent back to the workers paradise of Cuba?
Oh, yeah, “lefty”. You probably think those were good things.
Hey, Lefty…how about a response to Page7’s post. How DID you respond to clinton’s unilateral attacks? Or would an honest response show your intellectual dishonesty?
I rest my case.
Page7 – you forgot about Clinton’s actions in Kosovo and Bosnia.
But put a Dem in office and it is OK to BBQ little kids as long as they are “fundies” or “right-winger” or “militia.”
Sickening.
Kosovo, Bosnia and even Afghanistan were all done as UN peacekeeping missions and passed the world’s smell test. W has made this a personal, religious crusade that has every evil country (that is, any country that doesn’t kiss the U.S.’s ass) making a paranoid grab for nukes.
Look at the news today. Russia has now publicly joined France and Germany saying to let the inspections work. Do we have a new Axis of Evil?
hey Lefty has the war started yet? I checked the DrudgeReport and didn’t see anything yet. From your hysterical post the bombs must have started falling a few minutes ago and hit a baby formual factory.
What is your excuse for Somalia and Hati?
What’s the Republicans’ excuse for Somalia? It started under Bush Sr. & sure looked like a bipartisan war to me.
Re “posted by”, on “lying down with dogs.”
That works both ways. As Jim Henley pointed out a while ago, the neo-libertarians and pseudo-libertarian warbloggers have served Bush’s war agenda with the self-abasement of a bitch presenting its hindquarters for assault, and what specifically libertarian gain have they received in return from the Republicans? NONE! You’ve got Ass-crap’s Homeland Security gestapo, an ever-expanding war on drugs, and what’s left of the Fourth Amendment rapidly being used for ass-wipes. To Bush & Co., pro-war libertarians are useful fools, to be discarded when their usefulness is over. The GOP’s attitude toward neo-libertarian hawks is the same as the Demos toward organized labor: they’ll swallow anything because they’ve got nowhere else to go.
Lefty:
Bosnia and Kosovo sure as hell didn’t pass MY smell test. And BTW, there are plenty of paleolibertarians and Old Rightists who were equally opposed to Clinton’s war in the Balkans AND Bush’s war on Iraq. Hell, antiwar.com was originally CREATED to oppose the Balkan war. Of course, plenty of folks on the so-called “tinfoil hat” left were also opposed to Kosovo back when, as Jared Israel’s “from the wilderness” site attests.
A day after Clinton took office the Right got a special prosecutor and subsequently spent 70 million dollars over 8 years looking into stuff that went back to 1978. Nobody but nobody has ever been hounded like that. They finally got him. He lied about a blow job. The day he was impeached his positive poll numbers were 15 points higher than W’s are right now.
Now, one more time. SADDAM HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 911.
But not one thing from Lefty on the BBQed kiddies at Waco. Sick.
An no I am not giving the GOP a free pass (they are shitheads too). Just pointing out hypocrisy when I see it.
Whether or not Saddam had anything to do with 911 is not the point. This is a war on terrorism and Saddam Hussein supports terrorism. For reasons unknown to me, the admin. has not framed it in those terms, but when you do, the reason for going in is pretty clear. If war on Iraq is a preemptive war, then so was war on Afghan.
And what the hell does Clinton’s impeachment have to do with this?
I don’t see the point of any of this. If a feminist, or anyone else advances an argument, it should be reasonably assesed and supported or opposed on its merits. If on another issue they advance no argument, they should be ignored. If they advance a hypocritical argument, it must still be addressed on its merits. Otherwise we devolve into mere tribalism, as this discussion has.
It is immaterial whether or not the person advancing the argument is a “dog” or not. If you lie down with dogs, you simply have to get up when it’s time. (To abuse a metaphor.)
Jim N.:
Virtually every state in history has “supported terrorism.” So if this so-called “war on terrorism” means anything at all, it means a war on those terrorists regarded as official enemies of the U.S. government, and carefully excluding from the definition any terrorists supported by the U.S. government. In case anybody has forgotten, the Taliban are a direct outgrowth of terrorism supported by the U.S. in the 1980s.
And if Hamas counts as a terrorist group, Israel should be considered a supporter of terrorism, given the role of the Mossad in promoting Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO in its early years.
Oh, yeah– how about those terrorist death squads in Central America?
Reminds me of an article back when Clinton was caught cattin’ around. The Fems gave him a break saying that women know better than men how to deal with reality; i.e. purity sometimes has to take a back seat. “At least he does the dishes and doesn’t beat the kids.”
Lefty – actually the one that really killed me was the comment from one lesbian comedian and outspoken feminist who said, “I’d gladly give Clinton a blow job just for keeping abortion legal.” Radical feminists do have some weird priorities.
“Their positions on invading Iraq may have less to do with geopolitics than domestic partisanship.”
No doubt. But then, they’re not the only ones. Bolstering one’s own “side” and diminishing the “other side” I think is a very deep human motivation that runs rampant throughout the political spectrum and through all political philosophies.
Luckily, libertarians seem to be a wee bit less prone to this just because they have so few other steady allies, i.e., they have no natural “home” in either the Dem or Rep parties or in the political right or left.
Get your hands off our feminists! They aren’t upset because Saddam doesn’t discriminate against women.
Iraqi women are just as likely to be shot, tortured, mutilated, imprisoned, or raped to death as Iraqi men.
And besides, he is willing to ratify Kyoto.
I hear that NOW is in Augusta this week looking for prime protest spots. They’ll have Hootie Johnson with a black mustache and a turban.
Lefty – that’s a good point. To today’s feminists, the way Saddam treats women is no big deal. But the fact that women can’t join the private country club at Augusta is a crime against humanity.
Well, I wouldn’t say “no big deal”. I think it’s pretty well established Sadam’s an equal opportunity ogre (Omni-Bill says he rapes men, too).
Hooty, on the other hand…
Keven, “has supported” and “supports” are two different things. So what if we once supported the taliban or anyone else? If we are supporting terrorists anywhere, then we should withdraw our support and then immediately stomp them. I don’t see why anything we may have done in the past should prevent our doing the right thing now.
That being said, my opinion on whether we really should attack Iraq changes pretty much hourly. Most of the arguments put forward for both sides have been so pathetically inadequate that I get mad and generally take the opposite side of whatever is being advocated. When I see lefty’s posts telling us that “SADDAM HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 911” I become a raging hawk. On the other hand, I was listening to Jim Bohannon earlier tonight telling us all the reasons he thinks we should go to war, so I am now feeling fairly pacifistic. If you want to support war again, just tell me how much oil is in Iraq.
Jim:
My point was that any claims by the U.S. government to be fighting “terrorism” as such are disingenuous. The U.S. government has, is now, and will in the future support terrorists because it suits the mercantilist interests of global corporations. The U.S. will simultaneously identify any group it doesn’t like as terrorists. Never take anything any state does at face value. There are no “good guys” among governments. The U.S. government is not “we,” it’s THEM. And even if their intentions WERE good, they’d fuck it up and bring another terrorist attack down on us ten years from now as blowback from the present war, just as 9-11 was blowback from the funding of Afghan Muslim terrorists 20 years ago.
Kevin, you are obviously much better informed than I am and I’m not going to argue that we don’t support terrorists, but that is not the point. I can even grant what you say and still say we should fight (or they should fight; however you want to say it, we both know what is meant). Suppose I told you that you should stop beating your wife, and you pointed a finger back at me and said that I also beat my wife. Have you proved that wife beating is ok, and I have no right to stop you?
Kevin: Dogs guy here. Yes I agree that the GOP is less than libertarian. But I also would argue that the libertarianism has made inroads into that party. Witness Ron Paul. Read the WSJ today:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/ac/?id=110003062
Libertarians are at least RESPECTED by those on the Right. Yes, also ignored and sometimes belittled.
But at least Ashcroft et al seems to understand the reality of 1.5 million gun owners out there who love liberty. He may for political reason still take a shit on them, but he knows the reality of pissed off wingnuts quoting Jefferson and Hamiton with scoped deer rifles.
But the Left and the Democratic Party make no such claim — nobody on the Left even pretends to give a SHIT about individual liberty.
They HATE Bush and Co. PRECISELY because the Right-Wing gives lip service to Liberty. And they will protest the War because it is a Bush policy, even if ironically it serves their agenda (increasing size of Government, locking up gun owners, centralizing economy, etc.)
Would love to read your response Kev. I am a big fan of your work and enjoy your new site!