I trust the anti-colonialist and anti-racist reasons to oppose most US uses of military force against other countries are clear to most “Alas” readers. I haven’t been discussing that connection because it’s too clear to be missed, not because it’s not important.

In contrast, I am worried, perhaps needlessly, that some readers will read this series of posts as me saying that I’m voting based on foreign policy concerns, not concerns about sexism, misogyny and LGBTQ issues.

I don’t believe the distinction exists. I’ll use this post to discuss why the distinction between a hawkish versus a moderate foreign policy should matter to feminists of all sorts.

And make no mistake — Clinton is a hawk, not just posturing as one for the election. Quoting Stephen Zunes:

…When her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt instrument of military force to deal with complex international problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her husband’s inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to resolve the Kosovo crisis.

Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians’ nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the militant Kosovo Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail Sheehy’s book Hillary’s Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.

The most famous difference between Clinton and Obama is Clinton’s support of invading Iraq — an approach to foreign policy fully consistent with her history, and likely to continue in a future Clinton adminstration, judging from who she’s chosen to lead her foreign policy team so far. From a feminist perspective, it cannot be overemphasized that our decision to invade and occupy Iraq has been a nightmare. Here are just a few examples:

First, from an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

Roz Kaveny writes:

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

Riverbend:

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, writes: (link via Bitch PhD):

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. […] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq.

Melissa at Shakesville writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.[…]

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.

Riverbend again:

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another.

There are no laws that say we have to wear a hijab (yet), but there are the men in head-to-toe black and the turbans, the extremists and fanatics who were liberated by the occupation, and at some point, you tire of the defiance.

I could go on with quotes like this for another fifty screens, easily. The scope of the disaster is almost impossible to comprehend.

What’s important for this election isn’t how bad Iraq is, however. Iraq has happened, and neither Clinton nor Obama can change that. What’s important is how a Clinton or Obama presidency will change what happens in the future.

If Obama’s approach to foreign policy, and his team of policy advisers, comes into power, that will not mean that progressives occupy the White House, and it will not mean that horrible abuses of American power will cease to happen. Obama is not perfect. Obama is not even progressive. He’s just significantly better than the alternatives.

An Obama White House mean that a group of people who are significantly less warlike, and more critical of the U.S.’s use of military power, will become much more important in Washington and in our national conversation than they have been (and will remain so for years after Obama leaves office). It means that questionable invasions and bombings, which Clinton has supported throughout her career, will probably happen less frequently.

If Clinton becomes President, that will be a big improvement over Bush, in that we’ll switch from having a Republican hawk to having a Democratic hawk. It will be a much saner and more intelligent hawkish administration; but it will still be a hawkish administration, and from a feminist perspective — especially a feminism perspective that recognizes that anti-racism, anti-colonialism and LGBTQ issues aren’t separate from feminism — that’s bad.

Clinton didn’t intend the enormous harms I discussed above, of course. (On the contrary, Clinton has a dedication to women’s rights internationally that goes back many years, and which I admire.) But the unintended consequences of hawkishness aren’t less dire because they’re unintentional. The unintended consequences of Clinton’s future hawkish policies could easily turn into thousands of deaths, thousands of rapes, thousands of women under virtual house arrest, thousands of LGBTQ people in prison or worse. For people on the margins, unintended consequences are deadly.

I am not saying that if you’re a feminist, you must vote against Clinton because she’s a hawk. Feminists can vote a variety of ways for a variety of legitimate reasons, and countless feminists I admire will be voting for Clinton, or already have.

But foreign policy isn’t separate from feminist issues. It makes no sense at all to say that you’re voting based on feminist concerns, not foreign policy concerns. Foreign policy is a feminist issue, and anyone voting as a feminist should take that into account as they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate.

Previously, I argued that the differences between Obama and Clinton even on desperately important domestic issues, such as LGBTQ rights or health care, are unlikely to make a real difference in policy outcomes. This is because the differences between the candidates — both centrist Democrats — on these policies are small, and the enormous effects of political constraints and legislative give-and-take will matter so much that the small differences between Clinton’s and Obama’s policies will be a wash.

But Presidents have much more control over foreign policy, especially matters of war and peace. This is an area where even small differences can potentially matter a lot. Specifically, a President’s beliefs about the use of military power, versus diplomatic approaches, is essential. There are areas of foreign policy in which the President will be forced to compromise with Congress, for better or worse: trade policy, for example, and immigration law. But there is no area where the President has more freedom to choose than military and diplomatic policy.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to determine what the differences between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy are. Listening to what they say is of limited use, because currently they’re both primarily concerned with persuading swing voters and superdelegates to support them, and everything they say is tailored to that end.¹

What matters more is who each candidate has chosen to be their foreign policy advisers. The press and public don’t pay much attention to these advisers, except when one gaffes² ; furthermore, the candidates are probably planning to be stuck with most of these advisers for years to come. So the foreign policy teams Clinton and Obama pick probably reflect their real policy preferences — or at least, reflect their real preferences more than calculated candidate statements to the public do.

Furthermore, it’s important to realize that the advisers a president “brings with” will stick around for years. Some of them will have the President’s ear while the President is in office, which is important. Many of them will be elevated into positions of greater importance within foreign policy circles, which is an effect that can last long after the President who elevated them leaves office. (Many of President Nixon’s foreign policy people remain important foreign policy people today.)

This is one of the most important effects a President can have. In the months before we invaded Iraq, the greatest advantage that the Bush/Cheney pro-war group had is that the bounds of “serious” foreign policy views were being set almost entirely by people who were in favor of invading Iraq; those who were not in favor of preemptive war were not considered serious, and so had a limited impact on the national debate.

The invasion of Iraq has been a disaster, and that disaster will probably continue for many years to come. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who would otherwise be alive are now dead, because of our invasion. Even more Iraqis have not been killed, but have been hurt in other ways; they’ve been horribly injured, their lives have been constrained, their infrastructure (even more) destroyed, their children’s and grandchildren’s prospects for the future dimmed.³ In addition, thousands of Americans have been killed and tens of thousands grievously wounded or traumatized. After that come the less important, but still substantial costs: Costs in money, costs in missed opportunities, and costs to the US’s international standing and effectiveness.

Over the next thirty years, there will be many times when the tenor of the “expert class” of foreign policy thinkers will again set the bounds of what is “serious” and what is not. As we’ve seen in Iraq, when the “serious” opinion excludes all people who oppose wars of choice, the costs to the world are hideous. The foreign policy experts riding on Clinton’s and Obama’s coattails are therefore important to consider.

And it’s here that we find a real difference between the candidates. Stephen Zunes, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, reports:

Obama advisors like Joseph Cirincione have emphasized a policy toward Iraq based on containment and engagement and have downplayed the supposed threat from Iran. Clinton advisor Holbrooke, meanwhile, insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler.

…it may be significant that Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, many of whom are veterans of her husband’s administration, were virtually all strong supporters of President George W. Bush’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. By contrast, almost every one of Senator Obama’s foreign policy team was opposed to a U.S. invasion. […]

Hillary Clinton has a few advisors who did oppose the war, like Wesley Clark, but taken together, the kinds of key people she’s surrounded herself with supports the likelihood that her administration, like Bush’s, would be more likely to embrace exaggerated and alarmist reports regarding potential national security threats, to ignore international law and the advice of allies, and to launch offensive wars.

By contrast, as The Nation magazine noted, a Barack Obama administration would be more likely to examine the actual evidence of potential threats before reacting, to work more closely with America’s allies to maintain peace and security, to respect the country’s international legal obligations, and to use military force only as a last resort.

In terms of Iran, for instance, [Obama advisor] Cirincione has downplayed the supposed threat, while Clinton advisor Holbrooke insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler. This is consistent with Clinton’s vote for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that opened the door to a potential Bush attack on Iran, and with Obama’s opposition to it.

Which experts do you want influencing the boundaries of acceptable foreign policy thought for the next three decades: The ones who supported invading Iraq, or the ones who opposed it?

Matt Yglesias writes:

Obama people are more likely to value international law, strategic restraint, and a narrow focus on al-Qaeda whereas Clinton people are more likely to take a pragmatic/instrumental view of international institutions, worry that nothing will happen without American leadership, and to have more sympathy for the Bushian idea that you need broad confrontation with rogue regimes.

Which expert do you want whispering in the President’s ear for the next four to eight years, when the next important foreign policy decisions come — Susan Rice, who has been arguing for the last six years that humanitarian intervention in Darfur should be among the US’s most pressing foreign policy goals, or Richard Holbrooke, who has been a cheerleader for invading Iraq from the start? (Holbrooke is a leading contender for Secretary of State if Clinton is elected.)

And at the most basic level, which President do you want: The one whose foreign policy team consists almost elusively of people who got the single most important foreign policy question of the last decade wrong, or the one who hires people who didn’t get it wrong?

* * *

Note: The original draft of this post included a section arguing that foreign policy is a feminist issue. The section got to be so long that I decided to make it a separate post, which I will post later today.

* * *

PLEASE DON’T POST COMMENTS ARGUING THAT INVADING IRAQ WAS A GOOD IDEA, or arguing that supporting hawks is a good idea. If you want to do that, use this post instead.

This thread is intended to be an argument for progressives who agree with core progressive ideas, and in particular progressive ideas about war.

* * *

1. Although I hasten to add that what they say is not entirely meaningless. First of all, the political pressures limiting what Clinton and Obama say now, will still operate (although less powerfully) once either of them takes office. And secondly, on the rare occasion that Obama and Clinton’s public statements on foreign policy do diverge, that may indicate a real difference in their approaches to foreign policy. (back)
2. ”Monster.” — S. Powers, 2008. (back)
3. Obligatory Saddam-Was-A-Monster statement: None of this is to say that Saddam Hussain wasn’t a monster. But our invasion has made things much worse. (back)

This thread is the home of arguments about whether or not invading Iraq was a good idea, whether or not the US should attack Iran, whether or not hawkish foreign policies are wrong, etc.

The first seven or so comments were originally in response to this post, but I’ve moved them.

Glenn Greenwald, writing a week or two ago:

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” - 102

“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73

“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16

“Obama and bowling” — 1,043

“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607

“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above.

A few weeks ago I walked into my local supermarket to see that a 10 oz. bar of cheese was “on sale” for $5.39. I did a double take–maybe they meant two bars of cheese for $5.39. Generally, the sale on that brand of cheese is 2 for $4.00 or 2 for $5.00, but sure enough this was somehow supposed to be a sale. I’ve been complaining about this since last year–the cost of food is soaring. Last year, I could generally get out of the supermarket paying around $65-85.00 for two people, now I’m paying $90.00 or more. The higher prices seem to apply across the board–fresh produce, canned foods, flour/rice, and most dramatically dairy. Of course, I’m fortunate to be able to suck it up and pay the higher prices, but many lower income folks in this country and other wealthy countries are struggling, and in poorer countries, people are taking to the streets in protest because they are unable to feed their families.

A quick search of Google news indicates that we really are in a world wide food crisis. I’m not so sure that there is an actually shortage of food, but the crisis appears to be the cost. Some of the countries where people are struggling with soaring food prices, include–Afghanistan, Haiti, South Africa, Namibia, New Zealand, Ivory Coast, and numerous others. The situation is getting so serious that the United Nations (and the World Bank) weighed in last week :

The head of the UN World Food Programme has warned that the rise in basic food costs could continue until 2010.

Josette Sheeran blamed soaring energy and grain prices, the effects of climate change and demand for biofuels.

Ms Sheeran has already warned that the WFP is considering plans to ration food aid due to a shortage of funds.

Some food prices rose 40% last year, and the WFP fears the world’s poorest will buy less food, less nutritious food or be forced to rely on aid.

Speaking after briefing the European Parliament, Ms Sheeran said the agency needed an extra $375m (244m euros; £187m) for food projects this year and $125m (81m euros; £93m) to transport it.

She said she saw no quick solution to high food and fuel costs.

“The assessment is that we are facing high food prices at least for the next couple of years,” she said.

Ms Sheeran said global food reserves were at their lowest level in 30 years - with enough to cover the need for emergency deliveries for 53 days, compared with 169 days in 2007.

Several factors have been cited as causes for the food price crisis including: rising fuel cost, the shift towards biofuels (e.g. ethanol), population growth, the growth of capitalist economies, and weather patterns. The greatest criticism in the range of articles I read has been reserved for government subsidies for bio-fuels, specifically ethanol. Many feel that the shift to ethanol and bio-fuels is environmentally harmful, but now we can add soaring food prices and hunger to the list of arguments against bio-fuels1.

1. If you want more information of about the food crisis, these graphs from the BBC website have useful information about the food price crisis. The only additional point I would add is that (see the chart of trade balances) while some countries like the US will benefit in the area of trade, I don’t think that the average American is benefiting from this. A few corporate farmers may be getting rich, but the vast majority of people are hurting. We’re not hurting anywhere near as much as poor people in poor countries. (back)

The Nation has a detailed article. A woman working for KBR, a private contractor the US hires to operate in Iraq, claims to have been drugged and gang raped by her co-workers, possibly including her boss. The rape was then covered up.

This part enraged me (well, lots of it did, but this part too):

[Rape victims face] two major roadblocks in the fight for justice. The first is the battle to have the perpetrators prosecuted in criminal court — which, because of Order 17, may be nearly impossible. According to the order, imposed by Paul Bremer, U.S. defense contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted in the Iraqi criminal justice system. While they can technically be tried in U.S. federal court, the Justice Department has shown no interest in prosecuting her case. In fact, for more than two years now, the DOJ has brought no criminal charges in the matter. Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican who has taken up Jones’ cause, reports that federal agencies refuse to discuss the status of the investigation; meanwhile, in December, the DOJ refused to send a representative to the related congressional hearing on the matter.

Even more appalling, the Justice Department, which can and should prosecute most of these cases, has declined to do so. “There is no rational explanation for this,” says Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who specializes in the law of armed conflict. Prosecutorial jurisdiction for crimes like Jones’ alleged rape is easily established under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and the Patriot Act’s special maritime and territorial jurisdiction provisions. But somebody has to want to prosecute the cases.

Horton wonders what the 200 Justice Department employees and contractors stationed in Iraq do all day, noting that there has not been a single completed criminal conviction against a U.S. contractor implicated in a violent crime anywhere in Iraq since the invasion.

[…] “You have 180,000 people over there, you’re going to have a few crimes. […] And if you eliminate law enforcement, the crimes are going to get worse because people will quickly learn they can get away with it.”

This is an important point. Rapists exist no matter what the US government does, and that’s not the Republican Party’s fault. But it’s reasonable to expect the government to work to reduce rape and to punish rapists; instead, Republican leaders have chosen to be accessory to rape, by refusing to investigate or prosecute the crime.

Do I really think that Bush and his managers want Americans raped and the rapists to get off scott-free? No. But they consider that better than the alternative. In Bush’s eyes, for American contractors to be arrested and tried for rape would be unbearable; letting them get away with rape is, in the administration’s view, the lesser evil.

I can’t wait until these cancers in suits are out of office.

That said, even if we had a competent administration staffed by people instead of soulless monsters, there would still be too many rapes committed by Americans in Iraq. ¹ There would be fewer such crimes, but they’d still happen, because the vastly uneven power relations and dehumanization brought about by war and occupation make rape of soldiers and of civilians inevitable.

This is one reason the Bush doctrine, which makes wars of choice inevitable, is evil. The cost of war is always hideous, and the rapes are just a small part of that. War should always be a last resort. It wasn’t in Iraq. The shame of it is that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and thousands of Americans, have paid the price for the fecklessness and warlust of US leaders. It would have been far better — both objectively and morally — if Bush, and Cheney, and McCain, and the rest of the pro-war leadership class had died instead.

1. I’m ignoring for a moment the obvious point that if the current administration was staffed by competent, decent people, there never would have been an invasion of Iraq at all. (back)

The sun was shining as I sat down at the Cenotaph. Like most war memorials it looks like a giant penis. No-one else was there, but I was I knitted a few rows, and the mother of kids I used to babysat for walked by. We talked a bit, mostly about knitting and she left. I knitted a few more rows; no-one else showed up. I packed my knitting away, and walked off. For ten minutes, I’d vigiled alone in solidarity with the people of Iraq.

That was the political action in Wellington on the fifth anniversary of the War on Iraq. Maybe the people who had called the vigil turned up after I left, I don’t know. It’s been a hard six months for many of us here - there are extenuating circumstances

But it’s not just here, the movement against the war in Iraq was at it’s peak in the first six months of 2003. I own this book:

I’ve always loved it, I flick through and look at the sea of placards in London, the shivering scientists in Antarctica, the incomprehensible naked demos and the mass of people in Santiago. I think back to what we were doing on the fifteenth of February 2003, and what a crazy chaotic time it was, and how much we managed to do.

But tonight, I thought different things at I looked at the photos of the young woman in Sydney who had written ‘Make Love Not War’ written on her arm and was making out with an equally young man; the school kids on strike in London, on the first day of the war; the soccer fan who ran on the pitch with “Stop Bush” written on his backs; the hundreds of windows in Milan with peace flags flying; the two women in Washington DC who had written Peace Womb on their pregnant bellies - their children would be five by now. I want to know where they all were on Thursday, the fifth anniversary.

Almost everyone in those pictures must still oppose the war, five years later. It’s not as if it’s gone better than planned. But in those five years they must have lost something, all those people who came out and took action in so many ways. They must have lost hope.

I think we, by which I mean the anti-war movements in the broadest sense, must have done something wrong, not to be able to build on that hope that existed in those months. I can tell you some of the specific things that I would do differently in Wellington. But those details are too specific to explain the world-wide shrinking in the anti-war movement (unless every anti-war group had massive disagreements around meat).

The fifteenth of February 2003 was amazing, but a war cannot be stopped in one day, even one day with millions of people. Anything we do must be sustained longer than the period where urgency overwhelms us. I think the question for those of us who took part is how we can build, next time.

In order to keep the discussion focused, comments on this post are only open to those who supported the goals of stopping, and then ending, the war on Iraq.

The Iranian government is run by Shiites, and hates Sunnis. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni group, spends most of its time trying to kill as many Shiites as possible. Obviously, these groups are interchangeable, right?

AMMAN, Jordan — Sen. John McCain […] said several times that Iran, a predominately Shiite country, was supplying the mostly Sunni militant group, al-Qaeda. […] Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

In recent days, McCain has repeatedly said his intimate knowledge of foreign policy make him the best equipped to answer a phone ringing in the White House late at night.

Thank goodness McCain had a former Democrat standing by him to correct his embarrassing gaffe.

Okay, that’s unfair, because some Democrats — including Texas rep Silvestre Reyes — who is only the fucking chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, so it’s not like his job requires him to know anything about Iran, Iraq, or al Qaeda — are likewise ignorant of the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. (Although neither Clinton nor Obama would have made McCain’s asinine error). Republicans like Terry Everett and [the late] Jo Ann Davis don’t know the difference, either, even though they lead intelligence committees. Neither do the FBI’s leading counterterrorism officers.

Our foreign policy is run by soundbite-vomiting nincompoops who adeptly advance careers — often, like McCain, selling themselves as foreign policy experts — but don’t give a shit about doing their jobs well. And our media lets them get away with it, by and large, because without the mother bird politicians vomiting soundbites, what would baby bird reporters ravenously eat?

Politicians aren’t ordinary citizens. These aren’t shoe salesmen with blogs. These are people are entrusted to take the time to make informed decisions, because ordinary citizens are too busy working for a living. It’s appalling — worse, disgusting, and in a better world impeachable — that after so many years of war and so many hundreds of thousands of lives lost, leading politicians haven’t taken their responsibilities seriously enough to learn the fucking A B Cs.

P.S. “Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.” — Senator Trent Lott.

UPDATE: McCain’s people are now claiming that this was just a slip of the tongue, which McCain corrected immediately. But he only corrected it because he had Lieberman there whispering in his ear — and he made the same slip of the tongue the previous night on a right-wing radio show.

I’ve seen too many Democrats arguing “I will not vote for Clinton/Obama in the general election, because I don’t like the way Clinton/Obama supporters are acting, because I’ve come to hate Clinton/Obama, because Clinton/Obama is running a sexist/racist campaign,” etc etc.

It is not the case that one candidate is being supported by dastardly people while the other candidate’s supporters have never acted with anything but kindness and decency. If you (”you” meaning either Clinton supporters or Obama supporters) can’t see that both campaigns and their supporters have at times acted badly, then with all due respect, you’ve lost perspective.

But that’s not nearly as bad a loss of perspective as that of a Democrat or liberal who would support Clinton in the primary but not Obama in the general, or vice-versa. Many of Obama’s supporters have been sexist, and many of Clinton’s supporters have been racist. But McCain’s supporters are worse. Much more importantly, McCain’s actions in office would be worse for women of all races and for people of color of all sexes.

To pick just one example, consider the UN Population Fund, usually referred to as UNFPA, which funds reproductive health care in many countries that no one else in the world is providing the same care in. You can read more about the UNFPA on this post on my blog. It is virtually certain that either President Clinton or President Obama would restore UNFPA funding, and that President McCain would not.

Reproductive health care saves lives, especially in the developing world. A lot of people in wealthy countries have forgotten that childbirth used to be very dangerous, and still is in some places in the world. (For that matter, it’s still quite dangerous for women of color here in the USA). There are also thousands more women who will live without access to care, but who will suffer from horrible, treatable conditions like fistula, and whose lives would be improved if increased UNFPA funding means they get more health care.

My argument is that refunding UNFPA is a zillion times more important than how Clinton supporters are mistreated by Obama supporters on Kos, or vice-versa on Taylor Marsh. It’s even more important than sexist garbage spouted by Jessie Jackson Jr. in support of Obama, or racist garbage spouted by Ferraro in support of Clinton.

And UNFPA is just one example. I could make a similar argument for judicial appointments, for the EPA, for FEMA, for labor rights, and for a hundred other issues, many of which don’t get much play on blogs. On all these issues, Obama and Clinton are flawed, but McCain would be far, far worse. And given the overall racist and sexist bias of our society, the harms of a McCain presidency wouldn’t be gender-and-race neutral. I don’t see any anti-racist or feminist advantage in refusing to vote against McCain.

Clinton and Obama are both too right-wing for my preferences. Nonetheless, they’re both incredibly smart, and they’d both be better presidents than McCain. I greatly respect many supporters on both sides. I also respect some of those who can’t support any Democrat at all, like my friends in the Socialist and Green parties.

But I can’t respect any Democrat who’d support Clinton or Obama in the primaries, but not vote against McCain in the general election. To me, that’s the ultimate example of having taken ones eyes off the prize.

EDITED TO ADD:

Shorter Ampersand: Whichever candidate you’re supporting in the primary, I want you to know I’m prepared to support the other candidate and hate you bitterly and without reservation for not agreeing with me, you traitor.

(A lot of this post was rewritten from my comments on Tom Watson’s blog.

(Comments from Democrats, progressives, leftists and liberals only please.)

If you listen to audio lectures, this one is interesting. It’s a presentation by Professor Joan Wallach Scott, of Princeton. Scott talks about her book, Politics of the Veil, which criticizes France’s policy forbidding “conspicuous signs” of religion worn by students in public schools (despite the facade of neutrality the policy is unquestionably aimed at Muslims). You can read a chapter from her book here, and the Nation’s review of it here.

Journalist Yasmin Alibhai Brown, who has sworn never to return to France because of the virulent anti-Muslim racism she encounters there, critiques much of Scott’s presentation. Both speakers are excellent.

One thing that I found interesting is that, although France is often admired by US liberals and loathed by US conservatives, the French approach to multiculturalism is in many ways similar to that advocated by American conservatives (that’s my interpretation, not Scott’s). Like US conservatives, the mainstream in France considers “multiculturalism” to be a terrible idea, and instead wants law and institutions to pressure immigrants to assimilate fully to the majority culture. Also, in the US, many conservatives have suggested that the government should have a “colorblind” policy, and so stop gathering demographic information about race and ethnicity; I hadn’t realize that this is actually the law in France.

I have a couple of diehard Republican friends, but they’re exceptions; most of my friends would no more vote for a Republican than they’d dine on a slow-roasted digital alarm clock. A more active controversy, among my friends, is whether to vote for a major party candidate at all; many feel that it’s wrong to vote for Bad Candidate when the opponent is Marginally Worse Candidate. Instead, they’ll be voting for third party candidates like Cynthia McKinney. (Edited to add: By the way, if you’re a leftist or a progressive, I highly recommend clicking over and listening to McKinney’s speech — if you’re a progressive who has been following mainstream politics, listening to McKinney really is like breathing fresh air for the first time in a long while.)

I have a lot of sympathy for that view. I was an ardent Nader supporter, and if there were a third-party movement going on right now that seemed vital and growing — a third party movement that I believed could eventually overthrow the USA’s appalling two-party system — I’d seriously consider working for it. I find the anti-democratic laws and tactics designed to keep minor party candidates off ballots disgusting and an insult to human liberty. And, if the vote in Oregon ends up being meaningless (which is often is), I probably will vote for whoever the Green Party candidate for president is.

Right now, however, the third-party movement doesn’t feel to me like it has much life to it. And the differences between a Republican and Democratic president — although much narrower than I’d like — can matter a hell of a lot. Which I was reminded of today by this post on rhrealitycheck, by Florence Machio, who lives in Kenya:

With a maternal mortality in my country high, the World Health Organization has introduced many strategies that could reduce the many deaths. What is often overlooked is the fact that African women are intelligent enough to make their own choices, if those choices are indeed available.

The choices begin from negotiating for sex, using contraceptives and carrying a pregnancy especially where incest and rape are concerned. One of the statements made by Dr. Jean Kaggia, an anti-choice advocate from Kenya, at the Congress was that we needed more money to change behavior. How does one propose that a married woman should change behavior when her husband is the one who makes the decision of whether to go to hospital or not or worse still whether to use a condom or not?

Kenya is a country with 42 tribes, which have varying cultural beliefs — meaning we can’t give a blanket solution to everyone.

I remember during the 2004 elections, many people in my country knew more about the politics of the US than knew what was happening in their own country’s economy. I cannot claim to know exactly why Kenyans did not particularly like the reelection of Bush. People like Dr. Joachim Osur and other doctors who deal with family planning issues in Kenya and Africa would have much preferred a Democrat to win the election. For me it meant that we had to suffer another four years of this policy, which, interpreted by the Bush administration, meant a cut in spending on family planning.

Thanks to the global gag rule, many organizations that provided family planning services had to denounce abortion in writing and also not provide post abortion care. Most of them refused for good reason — but that meant that they lost critical funding for their organizations and the eventual result was a close down of clinics in major districts in the country. This in itself affected many women and of course ended up reducing the gains that had been made over the years in family planning and reduction of unintended pregnancies.

I always say this — give an African woman or any other woman choices and that will go along way in reducing unsafe abortions that have taken away the lives of many of my sisters, mothers and daughters on the continent.

When it comes to reproductive health issues like the global gag rule, or funding UNFPA, the difference between having a Democratic and a Republican president will determine if countless woman get the medical care and reproductive choice they need to make their own choices, and — in many cases — if they live or die. Although I respect those who vote for third-party candidates, I’ll be urging people to vote for the Democrat — whoever the Democrat is — largely because of this issue.

I think ‘imperialist lapdog’ would be the nicest thing that I could say about Suharto, the former Indonesian Prime Minister who died recently. His government secured resources for capitalists, by systemic brutality of the people who lived there. Timor Leste has fought and won independence (of a sort), but West Papua and Acheh are still fighting for their freedom, having withstood decades of attack from the state.

Those who remain silent about his actions at the time of his death are making it explicit that they prioritise West Papua’s Copper and gold over its people.

I will say this at least the American Ambassdor is honest:

Cameron Hume, the US ambassador in Jakarta, said Suharto was a close ally who led his country through a period of “remarkable” development.

Jim Lobe points out that “strong supporter of Israel” is too often used by the press as shorthand for “extreme right-wing views on Israel.” For instance, the Washington Post referred to the founders of “Freedom’s Watch” as “strong supporters of Israel.”

I don’t doubt that the group’s donors consider themselves “strong supporters of Israel”, but what precisely is meant by that? If the phrase means supporters of the government of Israel, then it is inaccurate, because the positions of Adelson and other Watch donors on such key questions as Jerusalem, the West Bank — indeed, any territorial compromise — even Annapolis and a two-state solution, are well to the right of the current Israeli government. In fact, Adelson, like most RJC heavyweights, are strong supporters of former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party which, the last time I checked, constituted the government’s chief political opposition and is maneuvering to bring it down. So, if they oppose the current government of Israel, in what way are they “strong supporters of Israel?”

This kind of journalistic shorthand — associating neo-conservatives and their organizations like the RJC and Freedom’s Watch — with being ‘’pro-Israel’’ or “strong supporters of Israel” — is unfortunately pervasive in the mainstream media. It is not only inaccurate; it is also dangerous. It […] puts those individuals or organizations — particularly in the American Jewish community — that are very concerned about Israel but that believe that the neo-conservatives have actually undermined the country’s security in a kind of political limbo. After all, if Adelson, Freedom’s Watch, and the RJC are considered “pro-Israel” or “strong supporters of Israel,” what does that make Americans for Peace Now or the Israel Policy Forum, both of which consider themselves “pro-Israel” and “strong supporters of Israel” but also believe, contrary to hard-line neo-conservatives, that a two-state solution with major territorial compromises that include East Jerusalem are the only way to ensure Israel’s security and long-term survival?

This kind of lazy journalistic labeling has very real and very unfortunate political consequences.

I’d take issue with the “best interests at heart” phrase, which gets into motives. I do think it’s true, however, that calling right-wing policies “pro-Israel” implies that these policies are good for Israel, which is a partisan opinion that many would disagree with. The mainstream media should find a more neutral term to use.

Nothing I could say about Palestinians forcing open the Gaza-Eygypt border at Rafah could possibly measure up to that action’s power.

Egypt is already trying to close the border. Maybe by the time I wake up tomorrow this relief will be shut off again, but maybe the Egyptian government will find it hard to shut people back in. It’s the world’s biggest prison break and should remind everyone of the possibility and power of resistance.

For more Raising Yosuf, brownfemipower has a great collection of links, and Al Jazeera is always good.

From The Local (a site with Swedish news translated into English):

…special government rapporteur Eva-Maria Svensson suggested the creation of a law “banning advertising containing sexist content.”

Sexist advertising is defined in the report as any message distributed “with a commercial aim” that can be “construed as offensive to women or men.”

“Sexist advertising affects the shaping of people’s identities and is counter-productive to society’s goal of achieving gender equality,” said the report, which calls for a new law to go into effect on January 1st, 2009.

The report was submitted to the government on Tuesday for consideration.

I’m not sure what to think about this. Although I believe in strict protection of free speech for political and artistic speech, I think advertising — with the exception of political ads — should receive a lower level of protection. But I wonder about how the law of unintended consequences would operate if this proposal becomes law.

Although I don’t often link to it — its focus is mainstream politics and foreign policy, subjects I don’t often blog about — one of my most frequently read blogs is Obsidian Wings. One of the co-bloggers at Obsidian Wings, Andrew Olmsted, who posts — posted — as G’Kar, is a soldier (as well as a considerable Babylon 5 fan). He was killed in Iraq this week.

A man of foresight, G’Kar had written a post to be published in the event of his death. That’s panache.

In his post, G’Kar requests his death not be used as ammunition in either pro-war or anti-war arguments; please respect that if you leave any comments, either here or at Obsidian Wings. And please think some good wishes at his family, his friends, and his co-bloggers.

So why am I posting this link? Well: the man was a blogger, after all. He’d want his last post to get a hell of a lot of linkage.

A few weeks ago, Jacob Zuma was named the new head of the African National Congress. This is part of a larger struggle in South Africa against the policies of the ANC, which has been carrying out a neo-liberal agenda ever since it gained power. Zuma is the left-wing candidate; Zuma’s supporters sang Lethu Mshini Wami (bring me my machine gun). I haven’t read much discussion of this on the blogs I read, which surprised me. I don’t know enough about South African politics to offer any analysis of the ANC. But I wanted to comment on the discussion of Zuma’s election, or the lack of it. There’s definitely been more attention among the socialist blogs I read than the feminist blogs, and the analysis is a little bit like the paragraph above. From Lenin’s Tomb:

Zuma is far from the ideal man to lead such a fight, burdened as he is with corruption charges over bribes from a French arms company, and he is actually doing his best to present his policies as pro-business. He is in all probability an opportunist who has harnessed a unique chance based on the unrest. However, the fact that he has successfully channelled the energy of this revolt into a leadership bid which may lead to him taking power in the ANC (but not the country) is itself significant. And however disappointing Zuma is likely to be (Chavez, he ain’t - even Chavez isn’t always Chavez), the very fact of ousting the wretched Mbeki may give further confidence to the already insurgent working class.

There’s something missing from these stories. Zuma is a rapist. He was acquitted - they always are. But in 2005 he raped 31 year old woman who was a friend of the family. I wrote about the trial last year:

The trial sounds hideous, and familiar. She was put on trial and her sexual history, including other times she had been raped, was put into evidence. When Zuma took the stand he argued that she consented by wearing a knee-length skirt and complaining that she didn’t have a boyfriend: “She had never in the past come to my house dressed in a skirt. Including times when I was living in Pretoria. When she came to me in a skirt after those talks I referred to earlier on, well, it told me something.”

This has been treated as a side-note by many different people. From AP Zuma was acquitted of rape last year, but could still face bribery charges in a multimillion-dollar arms deal. From WSWS “Zuma was sacked from office as deputy president by Mbeki and then faced a further trial on rape charges last year, in which he was acquitted.”

Maybe it’s just that the New Zealand left has developed some clarity on these issues, but if a powerful man is accused of rape and is acquitted that doesn’t mean he’s not a rapist. It means he is a rapist.

The inability to call a rapist a rapist displays an indifference to rape as a political issue. When asked in 1999, 1 in 3 Johannesburg women said they had been raped in the last year - they deserve more than one line in an analysis of the political meaning of Zuma’s victory.

From Rozk:

All of the religious factions and militias and Kurdish nationalists and government police in Iraq have one thing that they can agree on, which is killing queers.

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

Great article in Mother Jones by Elizabeth Larson, whose daughter was adopted from Guatemala.

For those of you who don’t know, there’s been a lot of pushback against the “saving children from the benighted countries they were born in” narrative, led by those who were adopted.

The article covers much too much ground for me to sum up, so I’ll just quote the article’s comments on open adoption.

“One of the ways that wrongdoers hide their child-laundering schemes is by the closed-adoption system,” says David Smolin, a law professor who’s written extensively on corruption in transnational adoption. He and his wife adopted two sisters from India only to find out that they had been stolen from their birth family. Last March, a Utah adoption agency was indicted in an alleged fraud scheme involving 81 Samoan children whose parents were told that they were sending their children away to take advantage of opportunities in the United States—that there would be letters, photos, and visits, and that the children would return when they turned 18.

Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as “rescuing” children. “There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption,” he says. “But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment.”

As it stands, families who have forged relationships with birth parents often find it impossible to turn their backs on their economic needs. Some send a monthly stipend; others pay for the education of their child’s siblings, help finance businesses, or buy computers or cell phones to make it easier to stay in touch. And while all this is legal once the adoption is finalized, it’s a lot messier than writing a check for Save the Children. “We need to be careful what kind of impression that makes with other people in the village or area,” says Linh Song, the president of Ethica, a nonprofit organization that advocates for transparent adoptions worldwide. “Will they receive aid if their child is sent abroad?”

If you’re interested in reading further about Transnational Adoptions, there are a bunch of excellent blogs that write about this issue. Harlow’s Monkey is a great place to start, both because the blog is excellent and for the blogroll.

This statement from John , of the UN’s field office in Gaza, seems worth quoting extensively:

Will the siege of Gaza and the plan to periodically cut off its electricity distance the residents of the Strip from the bad guys and bring them closer to the good guys? According to John Ging, who has been the director of UNRWA’s Gaza field office for the last two years, the mood is swinging in the opposite direction. He says that the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza is turning the Israeli government’s designation of the Strip as a “hostile entity” into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This was the main message of a speech the senior UN official delivered last week to a group of British legislators in London.

Here are a few particularly sharp quotes: “Recently, Israel declared Gaza a hostile entity, and on that basis has been implementing a new series of crushing sanctions, significantly adding to the human misery and suffering of 1.5 million civilians in Gaza. Public statements on behalf of the government of Israel link these sanctions to protection of the Israeli civilian population, under daily assault from rockets fired from Gaza. This presupposes that the civilian population is somehow more capable of stopping the rocket fire than the powerful military of the occupying power… Not only are these sanctions not working, but because of their profound inhumanity, they are in fact counterproductive to their stated purpose; and while Gaza is not yet an entity populated by people hostile to their neighbor, it inevitably will be if the current approach of collective punitive sanctions continues.

“You must be on the ground for days and weeks to begin to appreciate the full horror of the situation. … Their [the Gazans’] living conditions continue their relentless downward spiral, to what can now only be described as truly appalling. … This year, 649 Palestinians have been killed and 2819 have been injured, in those figures are the deaths of 63 children with 86 children injured. … Living in the midst of the civilian population are those who are bent on the violent destruction of Israel; they fire rockets into Israel on an almost daily basis, terrorizing the civilian population within range. A total of two Israelis have been killed and 99 injured this year as a result of this rocket fire…

“The impact on the medical situation for those affected is quite simply atrocious: 91 of 416 essential drugs are in chronically short supply or have run out altogether. Almost 800 patients needing treatment abroad are currently denied permission to leave Gaza. It is very difficult to convey through words their physical suffering and the mental anguish caused to their families by these decisions to deny them access to the life-saving medical care that they need.

“The food situation is equally bad, with almost 1.2 million Gazans now relying on handouts from the UN. It is all the more tragic as this is a man-made problem rather than the result of a natural disaster.”

According to UNRWA data that was forwarded to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, prior to his departure for Annapolis, “our available resources are now so overstretched that we are only providing 61 percent of the daily calorie intake needed to sustain life, which means that those who have no other means to supplement our ration are hungry and their nutritional status is in significant decline. At present we do not have sufficient funding to provide just one high-nutrient biscuit per day to the 200,000 school children in UN schools.”

According to Ging, years of living with the occupation, poverty, violence and shortages have led to the collapse of the education system in the Gaza Strip. “The collapse revealed [itself] in failure rates of up to 90 percent in basic literacy and numeracy.

“I am compelled to discard the usual niceties of diplomatic speak and say to you bluntly,” Ging ended his speech to the parliament members, “the current policy of collective punishment and inhumane illegal sanctions against the civilian population in Gaza is actually supporting the agenda of the extremists.”