Remember: It's Not

November 20, 2001 -- On November 17, First Lady Laura Bush used her husband's regular Saturday radio show to speak about the oppression of women under the rule of the Taliban. Inasmuch as Mrs. Bush is not a public official, one might suppose that she was simply using her position as First Lady to speak out against an indisputably deplorable situation that is of particular concern to her.

But whatever the facts may be, observers have not construed her talk as a matter of heartfelt concern. According to the New York Times (November 19): "Democrats reminded anyone who would listen that President Bush lost women voters by 11 percentage points in the 2000 election." Nor is that interpretation unduly cynical." Karen P. Hughes, the senior presidential advisor who dreamed up the information campaign publicizing the plight of Afghan women, said: “If through this initiative women who might not have previously wanted to support the president can see him in a different light, then I hope they will see his compassion and his sincere concern for human dignity." If that is indeed the significance of Mrs. Bush's talk, it represents bad tactics and bad strategy.

Linking the war on terrorism to women's rights is wrong as a matter of tactics, because it is likely to backfire very soon. If and when that war moves on to targets in Latin America (where three-quarters of anti-American terrorism takes place), the United States may well find that the Marxist terrorists it is fighting have supposedly more "advanced" ideas about women's liberation than the traditional, Catholic societies against which the terrorists are waging war. What shall Mrs. Bush say when our domestic feminists accuse Washington of being on the wrong side?

But linking the war on terror to women's rights is wrong on a much deeper level, the strategic level, because the two are currently tied only in the most coincidental way: through the connection between the Islamists' employment of terror and their repression of women. It is only the terrorism, not the repression, that was implicated in the assault on the United States, and we need to keep that in mind. Although the war was, briefly, given the operational name "Infinite Justice," that was quickly and mercifully abandoned. Infinite justice is not any part of what the United States should be striving to achieve.

Worldwide liberty—for individuals, not for any group—is indeed the legitimate, ultimate goal of American foreign policy. But that is only in the perspective of centuries. The administration and the American people need to remember that the narrow purpose of this war is to end terrorism. Thus, when Sameen Nazir, of the Women's Right's Advocacy Program at the International Human Rights Law Groups, says of American intervention in Afghanistan, "It's about time," it's about time for someone to tell her that this is an egoistic war for American security, not an altruistic war to liberate women or anyone else.

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