Women Aren’t Just “Collateral Damage”

Kathleen Parker is pissed off that foreign policy takes women completely out of the equation. It’s not just the government that think this way, working as a journalist in the Middle East I was constantly told that stories about women were just not important enough to make the paper (presumably on the assumption that it might take up space from the six page pull-out Formula One spread).

Women never seem to make the cut. An anonymous senior White House official recently said: “Gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities. There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.”

That’s right — he compared women to pet rocks.

Parker, disgusted that morality isn’t changing people’s minds, has decided to attack the matter using language that they (and Charlie Sheen) would understand — winning.

• But what if this is a false premise? What if saving women from cultures that treat them as chattel was in our strategic and not just moral interest? What if helping women become equal members of a society was the most reliable route to our own security?
• One needn’t be a visionary to accept this simple tenet as not only probable but inescapably true. Without exception, every nation that oppresses women is a failed and, therefore, dangerous nation.

Part of the the problem is the language that turns a global issue into a “pet project.” Women’s rights is really about whether the whole population has access to human rights.

• The freedom to work, to make decisions about one’s own life, to seek an education and to be safe to walk on the streets without a male escort. To be fully human, in other words.
• Anything less is terrorism by any other name. The insanity that sends jihadists to rain hell on civilized nations is the same that stones women to death for failing to comport to primitive norms of behavior.

The simple fact is that most people in the world are women. By definition they are not a special interest group, yet we seem to give them less political weight than dog owners.

• Women are not collateral damage in the fight for security. They are not pet rocks in a rucksack, nor are they sidebars to the main story. They are the story — and should be the core of our foreign policy strategy in Afghanistan as elsewhere.

Women are not pet rocks. We are the falling boulders that will crush you if you don’t give us enough support.

Contact the author here: mick@morningquickie.com