Antidotal on who is
better at promoting women’s rights, conservatives or feminists:
And I don’t understand exactly how Hymowitz thinks conservatives are doing a better job
promoting women’s rights in foreign countries. The standard conservative position on
this seems to be: we’ll liberate oppressed women throughout the world by taking a tough
line on the oppressive fundamentalist Islamic regimes and other illegitimate dictatorships
in which women are persecuted. I believe this to be true–at least as long as undermining
fundamentalist Islamic regimes is also seen to be helpful to American strategic security
interests. But if it becomes strategically useful to deal with these guys, do you really
believe, Lily, that the boys in the White House and Pentagon won’t trade away women’s rights
for the sake of diplomatic convenience in a Washington second? Or am I missing something about
the American relationship with states like Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan? In the 2000
elections, conservatives weren’t reticent about declaring that they didn’t believe in using the
U.S. military to promote any internationalist, human rights, women’s rights, nation-building mumbo
jumbo. We didn’t hear a damned thing about marching on Riyadh from the right back then. The U.S.
military, as Bush put it, should only be used to fight and win war. And the wars that guys like
Bush want to fight are only contingently in the interests of oppressed foreign women.