Occupation Is Not (Women’s) Liberation:
Confronting
‘Imperial Feminism’ and Building a Feminist Anti-War Movement
March 2005
By Huibin Amee Chew
Iraqi
author and dissident Haifa Zangana, formerly imprisoned under Saddam Hussein’s
regime but adamantly opposed to U.S. occupation, writes, “in the aftermath of
the 1958 revolution ending the British-imposed monarchy [in Iraq]… women’s
organizations achieved within two years what over 30 years of British
occupation failed to: legal equality.”[1]
Two
years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, what are we to make of the Bush
administration’s alleged project to bring democracy and raise the status of
women? Early on following the invasion,
mainstream U.S. media such as The New York Times reported on growing
insecurity, including the escalating rapes and kidnappings of women and
girls. The media tended to frame this
problem as caused by Iraqi men and indigenous patriarchy at its roots – with
skillful U.S. intervention needed to alleviate the situation. The U.S. anti-war, anti-occupation movement
was largely unable to deliver an adequate response to the immediate issue of
daily sexual violence at the hands of Iraqis – how has it failed to tackle
issues particular to Iraqi women, and what is at stake?
This
essay is a plea for greater feminist intervention in the U.S. anti-imperialist,
anti-war movement. It is also about the
relevance of an anti-imperialist perspective to the U.S. feminist movement, in
fighting domestic patriarchy. It comes
in two parts. In Part One, I discuss
how the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have not brought liberation to
Iraqi women – but rather, resulted in the worsening of living conditions along
gendered lines. I underpin the need for
a stronger anti-imperialist feminist movement that opposes the occupation of
Iraq, but hint at the limits of current political discourse. In Part Two, I elaborate on my critique of
the U.S. anti-war movement, calling for feminists to get involved and hold it
accountable, particularly since imperialism operates through the connections
between gendered foreign and domestic oppressions.
Part 1: ‘Liberating’ and
planting ‘democracy’ in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Whose ‘democracy’?
The
justification of imperialism on humanitarian grounds has a sordid history that
U.S. feminists – as stakeholders in the world’s premier military and economic
superpower – would do well to study.
British colonialists pointed to the barbaric status of Indian women as
an argument for their ‘benevolent’ intervention. On sure footing about their own moral superiority, English
feminists were all too quick to lend support for this project. By the late 19th century, the
British government was cynically exploiting the zeal of slavery abolitionists,
as a convenient fig leaf over its scramble for Africa.[2]
Lately,
Third World feminists are rewriting the gendered history of empire. Their observations remain relevant to
current affairs. They draw a complex
picture of patriarchal collusion between male elites of both the occupying and
subject states. And they shed light on
how the supposed beneficiaries of imperial magnanimity are lost in the shuffle
of their rulers’ own more pressing economic and political interests.
This
entangled history of complicity and exploitation should make U.S. feminists
uncomfortable. To raise a few questions
that are pertinent today, and that I hope to resonate with: how do
paternalistic leaders continue to maneuver and manipulate the interests of
certain women and minorities for imperial ends? Have they ‘co-opted’ feminist aims – and if so, whose
feminism? While claiming to stand for
womankind, do they exploit or depend upon the fractures in this
‘sisterhood’? Who do they pit against each
other in this process – and whose agendas are served when feminists willingly
cooperate?
The
Bush administration has flaunted the liberation of Muslim women, and later the
propagation of women-friendly democracy, as central principles justifying its
invasions and subsequent occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq. The ideological coherence of acting as a
humanitarian benefactor is a unifying theme behind the otherwise fractured,
amnesiac rationale to this administration’s foreign policy – where the threat
of terrorism, supposed weapons of mass destruction, and evil dictatorships have
alternately been held as reasons for military aggression. Pursuing the constant thread of
‘humanitarianism,’ let me first briefly detour to revisit what has happened in
Afghanistan, before discussing Iraq more extensively – as a prelude that can
provide lessons and warnings for the latter invasion.
Afghanistan and the
complicity of American feminists
In
the weeks after 9/11, the Taliban’s public executions of women were catapulted
into mainstream view, as a focus of prime-time TV documentaries. Years-old email forwards about the Taliban’s
abuses began to recirculate among socially conscious youth, as the position of burqa-ed
Muslim women grew to a matter of mainstream interest. Following the invasion of Afghanistan, Laura Bush was paraded
before the UN Commission on the Status of Women on International Women’s Day
2002, to celebrate the U.S. attack as a new chapter of “rebuilding” Afghani
women’s lives. Her husband continues to
incessantly remind us how he has birthed a “new constitution, guaranteeing free
elections and full participation by women,”[3]
and opened education to both “boys and girls.”[4]
Ironically,
the originator of the grisly documentary footage of women’s murders that made
national television was the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA) – a group vehemently opposed to both fundamentalist regimes
and U.S. military intervention. RAWA
had their own message on International Women’s Day 2004: “The freedom of a
nation is to be achieved by itself – similarly the real emancipation of women
can be realized only by themselves. If that freedom is bestowed by others, it
may be seized and violated any time.”[5]
A
long-standing group that has resisted occupation since the 1979-1988 Soviet war
in Afghanistan, RAWA has no naïve illusions about outside powers’ ulterior
motives. Today, it points to how the
U.S. puppet regime’s token Ministry of Women’s Affairs and a few “apolitical
and pro-fundamentalist”[6]
female faces in government positions cannot outweigh the problems of “pauperization”
and warlordism that continue to plague the country – with American
collusion. Military action itself
exacted a serious toll on ordinary Afghanis unrelated to the Taliban regime. In a statement on the 2002 anniversary of
9/11, RAWA angrily proclaimed:
…
U.S. military might moved into action to punish its erstwhile hirelings. A
captive, bleeding, devastated, hungry … Afghanistan was bombed into oblivion by
the most advanced and sophisticated weaponry ever created in human history.
Innocent lives, many more than those who lost their lives in the September 11
atrocity, were taken. Even joyous wedding gatherings were not spared. The
Taliban regime and its al-Qaeda support were toppled without any significant
dent in their human combat resources. What was not done away with was the
sinister shadow of terrorist threat over the whole world and its alter ego,
fundamentalist terrorism.[7]
Noting the U.S. government’s
earlier material support for the Taliban, RAWA considered the real losers of
the military attack – which it cynically regarded as a hypocritical public
relations demonstration of strength against terrorism, achieved partly through
fanning the Americans’ desire for “retribution” – to be Afghani civilians. Three years later, RAWA emphasizes that opium
trade-related corruption and the reigns of local despots remain entrenched,
with dire consequences for the impoverished majority of Afghanis.
The
Bush administration's policy has been to put its own regional interests first –
inevitably resulting in conflicts with real democracy or human rights for
Afghanis, including most women.
Desperate to prop up its shaky control, the U.S. government in fact
proved willing to reopen talks with a faction of the Taliban in the summer of
2003. Moreover, the U.S. military
collaborated with the Northern Alliance from the outset of the invasion, and
now entrusts this group the stability of large portions of the country. RAWA has labeled the Northern Alliance as
the Taliban’s “brethren-in-creed” for its brutality and misogynist human rights
abuses.[8] Propped up by a U.S. military guard, the
influence of Hamid Karzai’s regime remains confined primarily to Kabul even
after much-touted elections, while a mile away young women self-immolate out of
destitution. Warlords were bribed with
tens of millions of dollars to provide at least tacit support to Karzai during
the recent elections, and still control 80 percent of Afghanistan.[9] For these reasons, RAWA berates the legacy
of U.S. invasion: “For the people of Afghanistan, it is ‘out of the frying pan,
into the fire.’”[10]
RAWA
prescribes an alternative method for social change: the intensification of mass
movements and struggles by local Afghanis against their oppressors. Yet despite its fame, including publicity
from celebrities like Eve Ensler, RAWA’s anti-war, pro-local movement stance
has largely been ignored in American press.
Liberal American feminists have helped enforce this silence by not
acting to widely disseminate its analysis.
To
the contrary – prominent feminist organizations were complicit in aiding Bush’s
justification of the war on Afghanistan.
Shortly after the bombardment began, leader of the Feminist Majority
Eleanor Smeal met amicably with war generals: “They went off about the role of
women in this effort and how imperative it was that women were now in every
level of the Air Force and Navy … It’s a different kind of war,” she is quoted
as reporting about their chat.[11] This tete-a-tete rode on years of feminist
campaigning against the Taliban. In Part
Two, I will more fully explore the omissions of liberal mainstream feminism and
some of their consequences for U.S. patriarchy.
What has happened in Iraq? A brief background to women’s status before invasion
Haifa
Zangana, quoted at the beginning of this piece, writes the following in
opposition to the U.S. occupation: “The main misconception is to perceive Iraqi
women as silent, powerless victims in a male-controlled society in urgent need
of ‘liberation.’ This image fits
conveniently into the big picture of the Iraqi people being passive victims who
would welcome the occupation of their country.
The reality is different.”[12]
In
1958, with the end of British indirect rule over Iraq, tens of thousands of
Iraqi women demonstrated in the streets for their civil rights. They won the most egalitarian family civil
code in the Arab world. Aspects of this
progressive family law persisted until the eve of U.S. invasion, when Iraq
still remained exceptional in the region.
Divorce cases were to be heard only in civil courts, polygamy was
outlawed unless the first wife consented, and women divorcees had an equal
right to custody over their children.[13] Women’s income was recognized as independent
from their husbands’.
When
Iraq’s expanding economy needed women in the workforce during the 1970s and
early 80s, Saddam Hussein’s regime implemented policies to encourage their
participation, such as generous maternity leaves, equal pay and benefits, and
free higher education. For instance,
the radical feminist group Redstockings has pointed out how before U.S.
invasion, Iraq provided 62 days of maternity leave with the woman’s wages paid
100% by its social security system. Its
valuable analysis, focusing on economic arrangements and class inequality,
hints towards what U.S. feminists – we ourselves – have to lose if we keep
privileging our own country, with its rampantly privatized healthcare, as the
epitome of women’s liberation. Unlike
the US, in fact nearly all Gulf states have provisions for paid maternity leave. By contrast, Redstockings notes that U.S.
law offers 12 weeks of unpaid sick leave – if your employer has
over 50 employees, and only if you have been working for the same employer for
more than a year (the U.S. is also one of a handful of countries that still
provides no paid parental leave).[14]
Despite
Iraqi women’s significant gains, their condition began to decline after the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq War bankrupted the government. The Gulf War and subsequent US/UN sanctions exacerbated this
process by crippling Iraq’s economy.[15] The economic hardships disproportionately
affected women and girls. In the early
1980s, women had made up 40 percent of the nation’s workforce, filling the
war-time shortage of men.[16] This deteriorated to 22% by 1992. Prostitution increased, and as women became
jobless, their right to travel without a male relative was revoked. Childcare, education, and transportation
became impossibly expensive. Female
literacy dropped sharply after the Gulf War as girls abandoned school to help
with increasingly inconvenient household chores – resulting in the second
largest gender gap in literacy for the region.[17] In post-Gulf War years, more than a third of
girls abandoned formal schooling before completing primary education.[18] UNESCO reports that while 75% of Iraqi women
were literate in 1987, this dropped to under 25% by 2001![19] At the same time, Hussein allowed a shift
towards local religious and tribal codes; he amended the law in 1990 to permit
honor killings without penalty. In the
late 1990s, Hussein implemented new laws dismissing all female secretaries in
government agencies and restricting women from work in the public sector. Economic hardships and political attacks
worked in conjunction with each other to roll back the status of women; the
connections between Iraqi women’s loss of paid economic power and increased
vulnerability to patriarchal attacks demands further exploration.
In
the context of over 12 years of debilitating sanctions, the U.S. occupation
must be viewed as only the latest chapter of our government’s hand in the
dramatic decline of conditions for Iraqi women. Nevertheless, in spite of their fragile position just before the
2003 invasion, Iraqi women constituted a larger portion of the paid workforce
than women of many other Gulf States.
To focus on an elite subsection of the population – more professional
women held positions of power than in almost any other Middle Eastern
country. In 1994, 11% of seats in
Iraq’s congress were filled by women, a percentage significantly higher than in
other Gulf states. U.S. women,
incidentally, held only 10% of seats in Congress the same year. Earlier, in 1987, Iraqi women had filled 13%
of seats, compared to 5% held by U.S. women the same year.[20]
The impact of invasion and occupation in Iraq
The
U.S. invasion and occupation have caused enormous violence and economic
devastation since then. As of October
2004, the Lancet estimated that military action and the subsequent
occupation had resulted in the excess deaths of at least 100,000
Iraqis. Women and children of both
sexes together made up the majority of those violently killed by coalition
forces in this study. [21] Acute malnutrition among children is now
double pre-occupation levels – translating to 400,000 children who suffer from
“wasting,” or dangerous protein deficiency.[22] Unemployment hovers at over 70 percent.
In a
country where 55 to 65% of the current population is female, of course women
and girls are heavily affected by these conditions. Reiterating the pattern during the 1990s sanctions, Iraqi women
are the hardest hit by unemployment.
Men are preferred for the few jobs available – although many women are
widows or single heads of households. [23] Moreover, formerly 72 percent of salaried
Iraqi women were public employees, so many lost their jobs when government
ministries dismantled after invasion.[24] While before the invasion, indigent women
could at least rely on food rationing, today they are left to fend for
themselves.
While
the U.S. continues to bomb Iraqi hospitals, electricity in large cities remains
intermittent, water unsafe, telephones non-operational. At the time of our November presidential
elections, the Bush administration instigated increased bombing runs in Iraq,
secure that the papers and public opinion would be focused elsewhere – but the
tactic of aerial bombardment is particularly deadly to noncombatants who just
happen to be in the way. Almost two
years after the invasion, reconstruction is damningly absent. As of late December, only $2.2 billion of
the $18.4 billion allotted for reconstruction had been spent, according to the
Bush administration’s own quarterly report.[25] Iraqis are facing overwhelming burdens in
carrying out the simplest tasks for household subsistence; Zangana discusses
the extra toil that falls on women responsible for finding clean water and
basic cooking supplies, writing, “In the land of oil, they have to queue five
hours a day to get kerosene or petrol.”[26]
Rapes
of women and girls skyrocketed after the invasion, with the displacement of
usual law and order. But investigating
these were no priority of U.S. authorities, who had toppled the previous police
and court system, only to replace it with makeshift and illegitimate military force. Instead, occupying troops were engaged in
arbitrary roundups and killings in pursuit of ‘terrorist’ insurgents, that
brutalized locals and ransacked their homes.
Misplaced and heavy-handed conduct put together, the occupation has
failed to offer real security; kidnapping and the growth of trafficking now
keeps women and girls in fear of venturing outside – “prisoners in their own
homes,” in Zangana’s words.[27]
A
May 2004 Red Cross report disclosed that 70 to 90 percent of 43,000 Iraqis
detained in the last year were arrested by mistake.[28] Today, in a form of collective punishment,
coalition authorities regularly imprison the female relatives (and even alleged
lovers) of male suspects, to use as hostages.
Needless to say such treatment utterly denies that women have a separate
legal status from their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, or alleged
lovers. Along with the other innocent
detainees, these women are imprisoned for supposed ‘intelligence purposes’ – in
other words, because the occupying authorities deem it convenient and have no accountability
to the public. Belying the focus on
male prisoners in the Abu Ghraib scandal, the sexual abuse and gang rape of
female detainees is widespread – a fact known throughout in Iraq that has
received little attention in the U.S.[29]
Iraq
contains the world’s second largest oil reserves, and the U.S. has already
begun building bases on its soil. The
U.S. government’s priorities – besides establishing control over these reserves
to influence world oil price fluctuation – have been to privatize and sell
entire sectors of Iraq’s economy, as well as lucrative ‘reconstruction’
contracts, to corporate cronies of our military-industrial complex. Besides major defense contractors like
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, which received boosts from the
invasion itself, Halliburton, Bechtel and other corporate heavies have won
no-bid contracts to ‘reconstruct’ Iraq and manage its infrastructure. They have reaped tremendous profits at the
expense of Iraqis and U.S. taxpayers.
Although reports of fraud abound, the investments of U.S. corporations
in Iraq are backed up risk-free by the Iraq Development Fund – formerly the UN
oil-for-food program – which consists mainly of Iraq’s oil revenues.
The
U.S. occupation authority restructured Iraq’s economy in flagrant violation of
international law on occupation – needless to say, without the democratic
consent of Iraqis. Besides the sale of
national industries to private corporations, its ‘shock therapy’ reforms
included the liberalization of foreign investment, taxes, and tariffs. The corporate tax rate was capped at an
extremely low 15%. J.P. Morgan now
manages the newly formed Trade Bank of Iraq, set up to favor companies from
contributing nations, regardless of the quality and price of their products. Through it, Iraqi ministries can borrow
funds to buy equipment from overseas suppliers – by mortgaging national oil
revenues.
Despite
their profiteering, corporations have actually managed to sue Iraq for millions
of dollars in ‘war reparations’ for ‘lost profits.’ Iraq is now saddled with a debt of $200 million in such
‘reparations’ to companies like Bechtel, Halliburton, Shell, Mobil, Nestle,
Pepsi, KFC, and Toys R Us.[30] What’s worse, this debt is dwarfed by an
unpayable sovereign debt of $125 billion.
The industrialized nations that are its creditors are working to make
the sovereign debt’s partial cancellation contingent on compliance with
IMF austerity programs – that will wreak economic havoc on the majority of
Iraqis. Feminists have extensively
documented the disproportionate impact IMF structural adjustment programs have
had on poor women in other countries.
The
Bush administration is more committed to ensuring control over Iraq’s oil
reserves, and enforcing an economy dominated by U.S. corporations, than to the
rights and well-being of Iraqi people.
Using military control to pursue its economic strategic interests
continues to run in direct conflict with, and come at the expense of,
accountability to the Iraqi public. Its
harsh measures further undermine the occupiers’ legitimacy. The Bush administration’s hypocrisy and lies
have been evident in the conduct of its occupying forces. From the beginning of the occupation, U.S.
forces stopped or nullified elections in a number of cities, repeatedly used
violence to repress peaceful public protests, raided and sacked the offices of
Iraqi trade unions, and shut down newspapers.
The U.S. has installed a series of puppet governing authorities.
Unfortunately,
the newly ‘elected’ regime is will only prove to be the latest in a string of
nominal ‘handovers’ staged to divert public opinion. Naomi Klein has noted that if anything, significant support for
the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) in the elections, and the routing of the U.S.’s
handpicked stooge, Iyad Allawi, represented a strong vote against U.S.
occupation.[31] The second plank of the UIA’s platform
called for a timetable to the withdrawal of multinational forces in Iraq, while
other aspects repudiated the economic restructuring under Bremer. A Zogby poll two days before the election
found that 82 percent of Sunni and 69 percent of Shiites favored U.S. forces
withdrawing immediately or after an elected government is in place.[32] Yet the Pentagon plans troop escalations and
the government has no intention of ending either military or economic
occupation – much less setting a timetable for such. The war is not and has not been about bringing democracy to
Iraq.
Altogether,
the occupation has reinforced and colluded with endemic patriarchy to worsen
the situation of Iraqi women. Its
gendered effects have been to intensify the harms of patriarchy in Iraq, adding
new levels of violence and deprivation.
If Iraqi men are perpetuating the kidnappings and rapes of women, they
do so in the context of the occupying authorities’ carelessness and inability
to foster security. If Iraqi women face
job discrimination, severe economic hardships have only worsened their
plight. Zangana suggests some of
unemployment’s gendered effects: “Unemployment… is exacerbating … prostitution,
backstreet abortion and honour killing.”[33]
Why won’t occupation bring
liberation to Iraqi women?
The
U.S. occupation cannot represent the best interests of Iraqi women because of
the ulterior motives part and parcel to the structures of its enforcement. Its lack of democratic transparency and
accountability to Iraqis – as well as our own government’s lack of
accountability to the U.S. public – are barriers to the reform of the
occupation’s ground operations, and the main motives that shape them. Furthermore, the Bush administration, and
the military-industrial complex it represents, only benefit, at least in the
short-term, from substituting true accountability with P.R. stunts.
Putting
its maintenance of indirect regional control first, the Bush administration has
proved willing to collaborate with conservative elements in its hand-picked
Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), as well as its ensuing puppet authorities –
recalling its tactics in Afghanistan.
From the first meeting for post-Baathist reconstruction, where only four
out of 80 delegates were women, to the IGC where three out of 25 seats were
filled by women (before one was assassinated), the U.S. government has
decreased the upper-level government representation of women by filling their
former parliamentary seats with men.[34] The former
IGC included conservative forces which passed a resolution for sharia
law to replace the standardized family civil code, essentially allowing for the
despotism of local clerics to legislate the role of women in families. Thousands of Iraqi women took to the streets
and helped raise an international outcry that caused Paul Bremer to eventually
overturn the resolution.[35]
While
this move allowed Bremer to pose as the savior of women’s rights, in reality
the Bush administration has been hedging its political bets, if you will. The Bush administration appointed
conservative Islamists to power, only to defy them when politically practical. The dynamics of the above controversy over sharia
illustrate the limits of the occupation’s commitment to women’s equality,
because the U.S.’s first priority is to remain in control over Iraq’s oil and
economy. Meanwhile, other women did not
even bother to protest the controversial resolution because they felt the IGC
irrelevant and inactive regarding the problems of their daily lives.[36]
At
times, the Bush administration’s gestures at uplifting Iraqi women are clearly
an empty hoax for feminism, that should disturb even liberals who support the
occupation. This winter the U.S. State
department launched a $10 million “Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative,” to
train women in political participation for the January election. Most of the money was allocated to
organizations embedded in the Bush administration – including the reactionary
Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). The
IWF was founded by Lynne Cheney, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, and rightwing
National Review editor Kate O’Beirne in 1991, as a counter to the so-called
“radical feminism” of NOW. Ironically –
given Iraq’s history – IWF is opposed to, among other things, paid maternity
leave, government-provided childcare, equal pay for equal work (because it
violates ‘free market’ principles), minimum quotas for women in government
service, and the Violence Against Women Act. [37]
The
Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative can be seen as just one instance of the
paternalism inherent in the State Department’s democracy trainings more
generally. Past orchestrated events
tutoring what democracy means – because Iraqis need to be instructed about
their own interests – have involved scripted panels performed before audiences,
without any room for confrontational questioning or genuine dialogue. Zangana’s infuriation is understandable:
There
has been no shortage of initiatives to “enlighten” Iraqi woman and encourage
them to play an active role in the country's reconstruction. In one, the Department for International
Development and the Foreign Office declared “the need, urgently, for a women's
tent meeting in Baghdad with a declaration in compliance with 1325”…
Condoleezza
Rice opened a center for women's human rights in Diwanya. In her opening speech – delivered via
satellite – she assured Iraqi women that “we are with you in spirit”… Meanwhile
in Diwanya itself, local farmers (many of them women) were unable to start the
winter season because of unexploded cluster bombs on their land.[38]
Although token women have
been appointed to political positions, Zangana criticizes their role as pawns
of the occupation incapable of challenging its violence: “The silence of the
‘feminists’ of Allawi's regime is deafening.
The suffering of their sisters in cities showered with napalm,
phosphorus and cluster bombs by U.S. jet fighters… is met with rhetoric about
training for democracy.”[39]
Women and resistance – what now?
Rather
than helping Iraqis, the Bush administration’s posturing at defending women’s
interests has delimited a difficult and fraught political terrain for those
committed to women’s rights. Its
pretensions at women’s liberation, combined with the sheer brutality of the
occupation, have only narrowed possibilities for resistance that is both
feminist and anti-imperialist, by placing feminist organizers in a tough
political bind – in terms of both constructing ideological appeals and taking
practical action. For one, as the place
of women becomes a contested battleground between nationalism and occupation,
it grows harder for feminist organizers to independently push an agenda that
risks coming in conflict with nationalist conservatives. That is, the ideological confusion created
by the U.S. occupation posing as feminist lends credence to reactionaries who
further an anti-woman agenda in the name of nationalism – and when patriarchal
actors begin with the upper hand in terms of political power, they may be in a
better place to define the character of a unifying nationalist movement than
feminists trying to carve their own space.
But
moreover, and inseparable from the above dynamic, U.S.-perpetrated violence
itself is a driving force of the course that resistance takes – an insurgency
that has spun out of U.S. control.
Arundhati Roy puts it well when she writes,
…attractions
in New Iraq include … Television stations bombed. Reporters killed. U.S.
soldiers have opened fire on crowds of unarmed protestors killing scores of
people. The only kind of resistance
that has managed to survive is as crazed and brutal as the occupation
itself. Is there space for a secular,
democratic, feminist, non-violent resistance in Iraq? There isn’t really.[40]
The U.S. administration has
purposefully ignored and suppressed non-violent mass movements as contrary to
its geopolitical goals. Since 100,000
Iraqi protesters peacefully called for immediate, direct elections in early
2004, Fallujah has been leveled – a policy of “destroying a city in order to
save it,” to use Tariq Ali’s words – and thousands slaughtered. Violent resistance now maintains its
momentum, with our military barely able to hold its ground beyond key
installations and the Green Zone.
Despite our attempts to bomb Iraq into submission, we are unable to win
the peace militarily; the Bush administration struggles to gather whatever
reserve forces it can find.
Women have not
been absent from participating in violent resistance against the occupation,
even if they are a minority of combatants.
In July 2004, press reported over 150 women in the rebel cleric Muqtada
al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, trained as suicide bombers, weapons experts, and
intelligence agents. Women fought
alongside men during al Sadr’s uprising against U.S. forces in April, and
hundreds have marched in demonstrations as the conservative religious cleric’s
sympathizers.[41] While the insurgency is diverse and not
limited to Islamist groups, it remains to be seen if women in these movements
will effectively claim their place as political and social equals to men.
Women’s
organizing has been shaped significantly and hindered by the occupation’s
direct repression, as well as the attacks on women it has unleashed. When women are afraid to even step outdoors,
their possibilities for political participation are circumscribed. When women must deal first and foremost with
the work of everyday survival, they may be less inclined to devote time to
lobbying an irrelevant and unresponsive occupation authority for abstract
rights; they may be increasingly relegated to the tasks of holding together
their families. Now, when resistance is
propelled by armed insurgency, women’s involvement as equal participants on the
same footing of men, given social norms and political inequality, will be
marginalized until they organize against these conservative forces. At the same time, the brutality of the
occupation lends urgency to those who would unite resistance under a
reactionary agenda.
So what course should be taken? Must we dismiss the political exploitation
of Iraqi women as inevitable, as Roy’s words might be interpreted to
suggest? Iraqi women appear to be in a
tenuous ‘lose-lose’ situation: they lose if U.S. military and economic occupation
remain, plunging the country into further violent polarization and indigence;
and possibly lose if the U.S. military immediately leaves, transferring power
to male-dominated forces. A Women for
Women International survey in 2004 found that 94% of Iraqi women want secure
legal rights for women, around 80% believe in unlimited participation in local
and national political councils, 95% want no restrictions on female education,
and 57% want no restrictions on women’s employment.[42] The Bush administration might like us to
believe there are only two choices in the long-run – U.S. occupation or
fundamentalist authoritarianism – but unfolding events only underline the
imperative for an alternative to this bind.
The struggle of groups like RAWA can serve as inspiration.
What U.S. feminists must realize is that it is not up
to us to save Iraqi women, particularly through the means of a nontransparent,
unaccountable military occupation that has worsened the situation in Iraq with
time – and will only continue to do so.
This strategy is not only paternalistic, it fails to exercise sufficient
skepticism about our government’s ulterior motives. Our government, embedded in a military-industrial complex, does
not want a truly democratic Iraq because then Iraqis might choose to defy its
interests. How many more reports of
torture, abuse, and killing by occupation forces will it take for us to decide
that enough is enough?
I have attempted to illuminate the stakes of feminist collusion in U.S. imperialism, by questioning which women the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have aided, and attempting to demonstrate how these occupations have only helped solidify patriarchal interests. Violence and sexual assault, unemployment, and political marginalization in Iraq and Afghanistan are only some impacts of occupation that have been gendered – rendering the political forces and concerns affecting occupied men and women distinct, even potentially at odds. However, meaningful change must be built and claimed by Iraqi and Afghani women and people as their own – without compromising appeals to U.S. military might and economic dominance.
Part 2: Drawing the lines between imperialism and U.S.
patriarchy – the need for feminist intervention in the anti-war movement
I
now turn to the sphere of domestic U.S. politics, to examine a glaring rift
between current anti-war organizing against the occupation of Iraq, and
mainstream feminist politics. The
occupation of Iraq offers a case study of how imperialism and patriarchy are linked
and mutually reinforcing – nevertheless, neither political group has mobilized
a movement that adequately implicates the relation between these systems. I wish to call attention to the analytical
omissions springing from this divide.
Partly
due to its focus on individual women’s professional advancement rather than
gendered class issues, the U.S. feminist movement lacks a critique of
militarism that its counterparts in other countries, from Chile to the UK,
handle more adeptly. These latter movements
have been influenced by an awareness of the class exploitation required for
militarization, as well as other social inequalities from gendered oppression
to racial strife, incubated in the process.
In contrast, the failure of many U.S. liberal feminists to question
militarism as a system, as well as class society, has too often resulted in
sacrificing the interests of working-class and poor women in the U.S., as well
as in those countries subject to U.S. aggression. Mainstream U.S. feminism’s scrutiny of the military has centered
more on pursuing the institution’s diversification and acceptance of women
within its ranks, than criticizing the role of U.S. armed forces on the world
stage.
Julia Sudbury
has called ‘imperial feminism’ a standpoint that “bemoan[s] the oppression of
Third World women without acknowledging the role of racism, colonialism and
economic exploitation … which claims solidarity with Third World women and
women of color, but in actuality contributes to the stereotyping of Third World
cultures as ‘barbaric’ and ‘uncivilized.’”[43] Disturbingly, as my discussion in Part One
should have made clear, liberal mainstream feminism includes imperial feminist
strains. In the historic April 2004
March for Women’s Lives, the largest feminist activist mobilization in years,
former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked to speak. She described the right to choose as a
“global imperative” related to fighting terrorism and opposing fundamentalists. Yet while serving under Bill Clinton,
Albright defended economic sanctions and military attacks on Iraq, despite
being confronted with their costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
women and children – her now infamous comment was that if 500,000 Iraqi
children had died as a result of U.S./UN imposed economic sanctions, this
“price” was “worth it.”[44] Albright’s
gesture at solidarity during the March typifies imperial feminism, given her
direct role in overseeing foreign policy towards Iraq.
Furthermore,
the ongoing war in Iraq did not receive any mention by the March’s official
speakers. The massive rally fittingly
center-staged the issue of reproductive choice – but the war with its
tremendous costs, as well as the U.S.’s over-bloated military budget, as the
world’s number one military power, are not unrelated to access to healthcare
and reproductive rights. As of November
2004, the war in Iraq had already cost $150 billion in taxes, and the Bush
administration recently asked for $80 billion more this February. The rightwing is conveniently using the
budgetary strains under the supposed necessity of war to lend urgency to social
service cuts; the Bush administration has already targeted Social
Security. Intimidated by the election
year’s climate, the March’s leaders did not publicly make the connections
between public spending for war, and the lack of resources for health services
– ignoring substantial forces shaping patriarchal inequality. The March fell short of articulating concrete
demands regarding the expansion of access to choice related to the
allocation of resources, focusing simply on Roe vs. Wade and exhorting
participants to ‘vote’ (for Kerry, who supported the war). This failure to substantially grapple with
class exploitation, instead concentrating on abstract rights, hinders liberal
feminism’s ability to unite a constituency of women affected by economic
constraints and concerned with broader healthcare access issues. Feminist activists have yet to fully take
advantage of the opportunity to reframe the right-wing’s debate on morality
using war, poverty, and women’s – especially working-class women’s –
lives. Although U.S. imperialism and
its strategy of pre-emptive war will arguably shape the government’s domestic
policies for years to come, the mainstream feminist movement has been stilted
in publicly recognizing this, and constrained in the extent of social change it
is willing to fight for.
For
their part, anti-war activists have rightly and frequently noted the tremendous
impact of the U.S. occupation on Iraqi women in terms of sheer physical
violence and death, wrought upon women as ‘civilian’ casualties. Women along with children are sprinkled
throughout anti-war literature, used as archetypes of the ultimate innocent
victims of U.S. military violence.
Unfortunately, however, the anti-imperialist movement frequently does
not extend a gendered analysis beyond this mere observation of carnage. By gendered analysis, I mean an analysis of
patriarchy that does not simply note a few of its effects where convenient, but
attempts to dissect its workings and processes – the gendered power dynamics by
which these effects are produced.
This
is different from simply the observation that women are harmed, or even that
women are disproportionately harmed. It
is also the examination and acknowledgement of how gendered exploitations
produce those harms; and how this exploitation is irreducible to just class or
economic exploitation that would otherwise apply to men or women equally. Furthermore, it involves a broadened
consideration of which women are harmed to include those who are not
just the most convenient for male-dominated interests – in the case of the
anti-war movement, this might include prioritizing the development of a
response to the rape of Iraqi women by Iraqi men, not just U.S. occupiers, or a
response to U.S. patriarchy.
In
fact, the U.S. anti-war movement, in its ground operations – in its speeches,
its articles, its events, and brochures – has for the most part failed to
connect the dots between the current conditions of Iraqi women, and the Bush
administration’s fallacious hypocrisy in claiming to bring democracy and
women’s liberation. Because it simply
does not place the situation of women in the center of its analysis as a high
priority, it has failed to frame its observations within an articulation of the
above argument, and moreover, a gendered analysis of why imperialism has failed
Iraqi women particularly. This has made
anti-war activism weaker as a movement – we have so far failed to effectively
use the situation of women in Iraq to dismantle the Bush administration’s
ideological pretexts for war and reveal the true motivations of the
occupation.
Unfortunately,
the lack of appreciation for the situation of Iraqi women has been indicated by
an absence of information in brochures and anti-war databases, of curiosity,
and inquiry. For example, while www.occupationwatch.org includes an invaluable
collection of news articles about Iraqi women reprinted from mainstream and
alternative press, for a year it neglected an inquiry on the effects of
occupying forces on women in terms of sexual violence and prostitution –
paralleling the general press’s neglect of this topic until articles began to
appear in the UK. As noted in the
beginning of this article, early on in the occupation before Iraqi women’s
organizations became famous in Western media, the mainstream press usually
couched women’s predicament in the assumption that continued occupation was
necessary to improve their situation, focusing on Iraqi patriarchy as the
problem. The anti-war movement has
barely begun to deliver a response on that.
In
male-dominated anti-imperialist groups that focus on economic exploitation,
there has been a lack of attention to the economic effects of the occupation on
women. Anti-war groups have handled the
escalating sexual and domestic violence against Iraqi women by Iraqi men
awkwardly, unable to present practical alternatives to immediately address this
problem beyond vague calls for a male-dominated resistance to replace the
occupiers. Most oddly, they have been
silent on the abuse of female detainees.
Perhaps this is because female detainees are few, but as a result the sexual
power and patriarchal implications of this abuse has dropped off activists’
radar. Ignoring female detainees
allowed the anti-war movement to ignore striking connections between
imperialism and U.S. rape culture.
These omissions appear to reflect an analytical confusion about how to
understand the collusion of two patriarchies within imperialism, as well as the
course resistance to these systems should take.
When
leftist groups from the Nader campaign to the Campus Anti-war Network fail to
take seriously the predicament of Iraqi women, who constitute as much as 65% of
the Iraq’s population, they deflect anti-imperialist attention and resources
from the following questions: posed at the crudest level, what does it mean
when resistance, whether union strikes or muhajideen violence, is led by men? And more importantly, what would it mean on
a practical level, for a nationalist movement to be feminist in priorities and
methods? Anti-war activists have failed
to imagine and articulate an alternative that incorporates Iraqi women as equal
political actors. While it is not the
place of American organizations to command the Iraqi resistance and women’s
organizing for them, the inability to dream, to think of the possibility for
better alternatives, weakens our anti-occupation message – as well as our
ability to find Iraqi actors to work in solidarity with towards a truly
progressive vision.
When
we speak of supporting the right of Iraqi resistance to oppose U.S. occupation,
this does not mean we necessarily have to lend verbal and material support to
every tactic of resistance, or every ideology everyone fighting the occupation
stands for. Constantly drawing
attention to how resistance is fostered as a response to much larger-scale U.S.
violence and wrongdoing, does not mean supporting it uncritically. Rather, we must be on the lookout for the
diversity of forms of organization that are developing in Iraq, and ready to
offer solidarity to progressive struggles.
We must build a different sort of internationalism to counter our
government’s exploitation.
For
example, above I criticized the anti-war movement’s narrow handling of sexual
assault perpetrated by Iraqi men. One
possibility for a different approach might have been to promote or seek to
support the struggles of Iraqi women’s organizations demanding a better
response to rape – whether in terms of proper health services, a end to
punishing the victims with honor killing, or the creation of democratic
neighborhood militias to ensure security.
Why is freedom from rape different from the right to food, safe water,
or electricity? A variety of women’s
organizations opposed to occupation are springing up, and the U.S. anti-war
movement should examine how it can concretely help local struggles by Iraqis
around issues affecting their lives, whether by donating resources, supporting
protests to pressure occupation authorities, building an International
Solidarity Movement.
But
most pressingly considering our standpoint as U.S. feminists, male-dominated
leftist groups have demonstrated their bad faith, their willingness to dismiss
problems of systemic exploitation by gender and sexuality, when they do not
tackle the interconnectedness of imperialism with U.S. patriarchy. Beyond taking up the cause of Iraqi women
wounded by the U.S. military – in a manner quite undistinguishable from Iraqi
nationalism of any stripe – the movement fails to explore what
imperialism/patriarchy means for U.S. women.
Addressing this nexus requires an expanded view of who is affected by
war beyond the traditional focus on our troops, the enemy combatants, and even
their immediate families. The U.S.
anti-war movement has already attempted to force the public to acknowledge a
wider view through its slogans like “Money for Jobs, Healthcare, and Education,
not War and Occupation” – but a bias towards placing our own male soldiers at
the center of analysis, to the exclusion of those whose interests might
conflict, persists.
As
hinted above, one direction of analysis that has not been sufficiently
addressed, are the connections between imperialism, violent masculinity, and
rape culture. U.S. Congress was well
aware of brutal gang rapes of women in Abu Ghraib concurrent to the scandal
involving Lyddie England – the anti-war movement should have been, too, since
reports were available from international press. However, the treatment of female detainees never became a public
scandal or issue. Would the behavior of
male troops have been too divisive for the anti-war movement to bring up – or
was it simply taken for granted as business as usual? If activists were afraid of making our boys look bad, surely the
problem could have been tackled in the same manner that the movement responded
to the scape-goating of low-level personnel for torture – by trying to
implicate the full system, not just the behavior of individual actors.
Feminists
have pointed out how the military nurtures a culture of sexual violence and
misogyny linked to the abuse of women in occupied countries and countries with
U.S. bases – as well as the abuse of women in U.S. prisons, and the high rates
of rape in U.S. cities with military bases.
Phoebe Jones of Global Women’s Strike and Survivors Take Action Against
Abuse by Military Personnel (STAAAMP) explains:
It’s
all connected… You have prison guards here, like Charles Grainer [implicated in
the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal], who go to Iraq and abuse people there. Then you
have soldiers come back from Iraq or Afghanistan getting jobs as prison guards,
and they rape and abuse people. The military could stop it if they want to, but
they don’t want to. They’re socializing men into doing this.[45]
Prison torture in Abu Ghraib
was outsourced to U.S. companies using personnel from domestic prisons. Of course, outside the prison-military
complex which Jones begins to outline, the impact of rape culture nurtured by
the military can be traced through U.S. society further.
Another political direction that the anti-war
movement has not fully pursued are the gendered economic effects of imperialism
not just for Iraqi women, but poor U.S. women.
Again, even as our soldiers are valorized for making the deepest
sacrifices, the casualties of war extend much further, and poor U.S. women bear
the brunt of war’s economic costs. For
instance, in Massachusetts, most Medicaid recipients, graduates of state and
community colleges, welfare and subsidized childcare recipients, are women –
and all these programs are facing budget cuts.
Most families living in poverty are headed by single mothers. In addition to slogans such as “Support Our
Troops, Bring Them Home,” perhaps anti-war activists should consider the
importance of Global Woman’s Strike’s call to “Invest in Caring, not
Killing.” This latter slogan critiques
social service cuts and patriarchy’s undervaluing of women’s labor.
Perhaps
the anti-war movement thinks it more convenient to ignore the conflicted plight
of Iraqi women – where a less-than-ideal resistance are not necessarily their
saviors, imperialists not their only enemy.
But the anti-war movement must skillfully address this complexity,
because the conundrum of humanitarian justification for imperialism will surely
recur. Maybe anti-war activists feel it
is more timely to focus on arguments likely to appeal easily to our patriarchal
culture – focusing discourse on caring for our troops. Eventually, the occupation will become
militarily and economically untenable, and our troops will be withdrawn. But will this mean the death of imperialism,
in terms of both its domestic and foreign effects?
As a
social movement, anti-war activists have an important ideological role – in
expanding social consciousness, regardless of the difficulties of countering
dominant assumptions. We must expand
our analysis to address the connections between U.S. patriarchy and
imperialism. Doing so will help counter
imperial feminist myths which validate military intervention by assuming the
U.S. is the pinnacle of feminist liberation.
Above I have barely scratched the surface of implicating U.S. patriarchy
with imperialism – however, I have attempted to show how these connections exist
not merely in terms of ideological reinforcement, but also in terms of the
real, sexual, and material conditions of people’s lives. We must raise awareness of the whole
beast.
A
last note to anti-war feminists. Let’s
revitalize feminism at the local, grassroots level, and fight to have our
voices heard in public space. Meredith
Tax writes to those feminists who would rest easy on their 1970s gains: “We may
be everywhere, but to be everywhere is to be nowhere if it means nobody can
find you.”[46]
Huibin Amee Chew, 22,
recently graduated from Harvard University with a joint degree in Social
Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She was formerly a
member of the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice (HIPJ) and Progressive
Student Labor Movement (PSLM). She can
be reached at hachew@gmail.com.
Occupation 
Is Not (Women’s) Liberation:
Confronting ‘Imperial Feminism’
and Building a Feminist Anti-War
Movement
