Women and U.S. Wars of Aggression

A racist imperialism pervades the Bush administration’s chivalry and public sentiment. The administration has claimed the authority to determine what counts as terrorism globally and what retributive violence is legitimate. Thus the U.S. bombed Afghanistan, killing 5,000, more than the towers, as “collateral damage.” Certainly in the minds of the terrorists, the 3,000 who died in the towers were also collateral damage.

By Dr. Kathryn Poethig
Professor, St. Lawrence University*

I teach in a college composed predominantly of white upper middle class students in a small town called Canton in rural New York, about 20 minutes from the Canadian border. It is so safe in this small town of 4,000 that I never lock my car or the doors to my house even if I am going out for the evening. I can walk outside any time of the night without fear of assault. So it was a great surprise to me that when the World Trade Center towers collapsed, most of the people in my town and college responded in shock, anger and fear. Over and over I heard how they didn’t feel safe in America anymore.

Safe in America? Whose America came down on September 11th? Desiree Taylor, a mixed race woman born into poverty reflects on a picture of a well-coifed businesswoman stumbling away from the towers. “I have never felt safe here,” she states. “The US being attacked is the one the woman in the picture belongs to. Not her.”

Add to this a sense of vulnerability beyond the border. It was more difficult than I had anticipated for our small eager delegation of faculty and students to leave for the Philippines. There was hesitation and panic at many turns from administration, family members and peers concerned about the safety of Americans in the Philippines, and particularly Basilan. The underlying message seems quite clear: if Americans were not safe even in Canton, they would certainly be targets of hostility beyond the border.

I began this talk on US wars of aggression by focusing on the fear of the American public for its own safety at home and abroad because I want to communicate just how powerful this fear for safety is among the general American public and how this dynamic—coupled with a complicit Congress—has muzzled any popular critique of the Bush administration’s hawkish agenda.

When we add women to the analysis of aggression and hegemony we need to look particularly at the forms of social control that “discipline” women into behaving instead of fighting back—forms that reinscribe women’s sense of identity as a victim by the threat of aggression.

This title requires us to look both ways—internally and globally—to understand that the violence elsewhere begins at home.

In my talk today, I want to consider the way President Bush uses language as a patriarch, capitalist, and crusader to feminize the nation, debilitate protest, and create an enemy inimical to an idealized, wounded America.

Let me first return to the problem of safety. Safety in the US was an issue in the last decade as more money was spent on increasing the police force and inmates in our overburdened correctional facility. The US has more inmates than any other industrialized country and most of those are men of color. African American activist and scholar Angela Davis calls this America’s prison industrial complex supported by an American apartheid. It is not difficult to recognize the US military industrial complex set in a global apartheid based on consumer capitalism. Most of the population who are not targets of this violence are inured to its effects on its victims.

A militarized US culture, says Cynthia Elroe, a feminist international relations scholar, “has made it easier for Bush to wage war without most Americans finding it dangerous to democracy. Our cultural militarization, makes war-waging seem like a omforting reconfirmation of our collective security, identity, and pride.” Violence is thus routinized and those considered threats to security. Domestically this means poor Black and Hispanic men, now Middle Eastern men. Internationally, it means “those who are not for us” who harbor US-identified terrorists, or who are critical of US policies and practices in this expanding war on terrorism that is now targeting Iraq.

Militarism raises the masculinist tendency in any patriarchal state; in the US it has also been racialized. Bush as a Texan patriarch from the South effects an attitude of chivalry towards a victimized public. Chivalry acts to honor the purity and chastity of womanhood, and as the stronger sex, protects her from violence that others might inflict on her or that she might inflict on herself. In the South with its history of slavery, it was an ideology based on the counter-intuitive racist logic that white women had to be protected by white men from black men, their former slaves. I say counter-intuitive because the aggression of white men against both male and female slaves were not considered violence but a legitimate way to protect capital and discipline unruly workers. In other words, the patriarchs had the power to define what counted as violence. Their own violence was punishment—or self-defense.

A racist nationalist imperialism pervades the administration’s chivalry and public sentiment. The administration has claimed the authority to determine what counts as terrorism globally and what retributive violence is legitimate. Thus the US bombed Afghanistan, killing 5,000, more than the towers, as “collateral damage.” Certainly in the minds of the terrorists, the 3,000 who died in the towers were also collateral damage.

Furthermore, it claims the right to waive international rights law as a condition of war for POWs in Guantanamo and those held indefinitely in immigration prisons. The US can assume moral authority in its call to bomb Iraq.

And yet, it refuses to recognize the new International Criminal Court or any treaty that would hamper its own misconduct. Its claims to sovereignty have made it the most obstructionist partner of the international community, particularly regarding the women it assumes to protect. It is one of 12 countries that have not yet ratified CEDAW, the only country in the world that refused to sign the Rights of the Child, and treaties to ban landmines and germ warfare. It refuses to acknowledge the importance of the Kyoto Protocol. The list is long and depressing.

Meanwhile at home, citizens are protected by a fatherly state concerned with their safety. What damage has been wrought! If the state assumes the privilege of intervention in other nations, it is intervening at home as well. The evidence is overwhelming. We have a new Office of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, which confers vast and unchecked powers to the executive branch, enhances surveillance, and grants the INS the right to detain immigrants suspected of terrorism indefinitely. Groups are declared “terrorist” at the stroke of a pen. The new Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act controls the alien among us with greater force. Now every foreign visitor must have a biometric ID (fingerprint or facial recognition), there will be “terrorist lookout committees” in all US missions. It also refuses visas to “aliens from a country that is a state sponsor of international terrorism.” I would like to wager that under this new Act, the US denied to Filipino Muslims invited to the US by the Presbyterian Church for a greater understanding of global Islam.

If Bush is a Texan patriarch, he is also an MBA president in the seat of global capitalism, presiding over the corporate and financial mega empires and international funding institutions (WTO, World Bank, IMF) that determine the economic policies of the world. For of course, that was what the towers represented to those who drove the planes into them. I do not need to rehearse here that the extremes of wealth and poverty in the US mirror extremes globally.As an MBA president, Bush’s war has tried to encourage consumer patriotism in the populace, particularly after the attacks. All this while rapacious greed was of corporations that favored Bush’s policies was finally brought to light. When Bush states that the terrorists hated American “way of life” he was referring to freedoms but I heard “wealth” and global dominance.

Finally, Bush’s speeches most often reflect the attitude of a crusader. His religious language unleashed by the language of jihad in his Muslim extremists that he has named as the primary terrorists, reveals a new form of manifest destiny at work in this new war on terrorism.

It is a Crusade against terrorism, but not in the sense that Muslims in the Middle East might recognize from medieval history. This is an American crusade, a Billy Graham version, where there are sinners and the saved, good and evil, innocent and guilty. On September 11 of this year, Bush stated that “this ideal of America is the hope of all mankind...that hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.” Is America Christ incarnate?

This is a crusade to convert the world not to democracy but safety for America and more for US. What is the war on terrorism if not to restore America’s impenetrability while it asserts special rights to intervention (search without a warrant, shoot on sight) due to its role as a global cop?

Why does this rhetoric work on an American public?

It works because of a sense of victimhood shared in the US this year. This chord was played over and over since September 11. Ariel Dorfman, Chilean writer sent out an Open Letter to America warning, “Beware of the plague of victimhood, America.” The world is asking the American public to consider the effects of its silence on the aggression of its government. This was also the sentiment of the Open Letter to the Churchwomen of America sent to you by EWF asking for prayerful resistance. “Beware of the plague of amnesia,” warns Dorfman. Silence will give the US government leave to repeat its many cases of intervention to protect its business or ideological interests. We can name them: Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, the Congo, Indonesia, Granada, Panama, Guatemala, the Philippines. The list could continue.

We who came as US citizens are here to listen to your concerns about our government’s actions abroad, and we are here to share our own thoughts. I know the young women who came with me want to bring your message back to their peers at St. Lawrence, to vote and call our representatives, to demonstrate and write and think and act.

As the projected war on Iraq draws near, we know we need stronger, more organized resistance in the US, like that of a recently circulated statement, “Not in Our Name.” Its signatories include artists, lawyers, academics, and activists.

We are here because we need sisterhood in imaging a culture of peace through laughter, honesty and prayer;
we need to hear each other. Sistering across difference of language, privilege, age and national affiliation is not so easy many times. I know this as you do from many experiences. I hope that this network will help all of us to hear each other into speech as Neil Morton said, to listen to the complexity of our positions. I for one from the US need this exchange to remember that it is not our independence but our interdependence that is a powerful force.

*(Speech delivered at the International Solidarity Forum, Shalom Center, United Council of Churches in the Philippines, Manila, Sept. 22, 2002)   

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