George and Laura Bush invited a number of their closest Afghan and Iraqi women friends to a reception at the White House the other day. In his remarks, Bush was nostalgic about his first meeting with the guest of honour: Raja Habib Khuzai, one of three women on the US-appointed Iraqi governing council. Apparently she turned up for her audience at the Oval Office weeping tears of joy, declaring: ”My liberator.”
It is a fairly safe guess that would not be a typical female reaction to meeting Bush. On the very first day of his presidency, he imposed a ban on US foreign aid to any agency offering abortion advice. A year later, the US government withheld more than $30-million for a United Nations population control programme because it espoused ”reproductive rights”. It also opposed UN measures to help girls and women raped during times of war in case that assistance included advice about the morning-after pill or abortion. Programmes for Aids victims have been advised not to mention the word ”condom”.
At home, the White House closed its office for women’s outreach, the labour department’s network of women’s offices and other agencies monitoring gender discrimination at the workplace. Last September, Bush proposed diverting $2-billion in welfare funds to programmes promoting marriage. Two months later, he presided over the most significant retreat on abortion rights in 30 years by signing into law a ban on late terminations.
But with an election next November, that record is inconvenient. Bush would much rather be remembered in his new role as the global saviour of downtrodden women, the liberator of Khuzai and so many other hapless, hijab-wearing millions.
To that end, Bush enlisted his normally retiring wife, Laura, to make an opening speech. He also announced the appointment of both his sister, Dorothy, and a daughter of the vice-president, Dick Cheney, to a UN commission on the status of women.
The centrepiece of Bush’s argument was that America went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan not to fight al-Qaeda or to hunt out and destroy a dictator’s weapons of mass destruction, but to improve their sorry lot in life.
The argument was intended to appeal to a well-meaning and well-heeled coterie of American women who adopted the cause of Afghan women when the Taliban was in power. It also has appeal for the Christian right. The salvation of Afghan women and other veiled females from the east (though a worthy cause) is not as threatening to conservatives as a modern feminist agenda.
”Just think about it,” Bush said. ”More than 50-million men, women and children have been liberated from two of the most brutal tyrannies on earth — 50-million people are free. And for 25-million women and girls, liberation has a special significance.”
He said the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was ”incredibly barbaric” and that Afghan women are far better off with its departure.
So too were the women of post-war Iraq, according to the Bush doctrine. ”Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed. He is a barbaric person,” Bush said.
The reality is far from clear. Hania Mufti, the representative in Iraq for Human Rights Watch, agrees with Bush that Saddam Hussein’s worst atrocities have ceased. But she also notes that post-war violence and chaos has banished many women indoors, keeping girls out of school and female graduates from venturing out to seek work for fear they will be kidnapped and raped. ”What good is freedom if you are afraid to step out in the street?” she asks.
Women also fear for their rights in the future after the Iraqi governing council came close to imposing the sharia code, dismantling Saddam’s secular laws on property and marriage.
In Afghanistan, women and girls remain at the mercy of warlords and of a male-dominated legal system, Kate Allen, a director of Amnesty International UK, wrote in The Guardian last month. She quoted an NGO worker to describe the difference made by the fall of the Taliban: ”If a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh she would have been flogged — now she’s raped.”
For President Bush, how ever, the linkage makes perfect political sense. Commentators regularly describe Mr Bush’s main campaign asset as his appeal to the ”Nascar Dad” — a follower of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (Nascar) circuit. In America, that is shorthand for a working-class, white male, more often than not one from the south where car racing is a tradition.
Bush has not been able to carry over that appeal to women. His approval rating lags nearly 10 points behind that of the Democratic contender, John Kerry. But there is a chance that the women of Afghanistan and Iraq can help him out by standing in as living examples of his generosity. Now that they have been ”liberated”, it’s the least they can do. – Guardian Unlimited Â