facilegestures

by John McMahon

Robert Dreyfuss, whose views I usually agree with, had this commentary to offer for The Nation on the decision to intervene in Libya, and “Obama’s women’s” role in pushing the US to do so:

We’d like to think that women in power would somehow be less prowar, but in the Obama administration at least it appears that the bellicosity is worst among Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. All three are liberal interventionists, and all three seem to believe that when the United States exercises military force it has some profound, moral, life-saving character to it. Far from it. Unless President Obama’s better instincts manage to reign in his warrior women—and happily, there’s a chance of that—the United States could find itself engaged in open war in Libya, and soon. […]

Similarly, the Washington Post reports that yet another administration woman, Gayle Smith, joined Ben Rhodes and the troika of other women to push for war: “Obama’s decision to participate in military operations marks a victory for a faction of liberal interventionists within the administration, including Rice, Rhodes and National Security Council senior directors Samantha Power and Gayle Smith.” Opposed, or leaning against, were Secretary of Defense Gates, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief.

Where to begin on this shockingly absurd gender narrative? Most outrageous, I suppose, is Dreyfuss’s formulation of the Clinton-Rice-Power-Smith group as “Obama’s women.” While technically correct, I suppose, in that these individuals work in the Obama administration, and thus are in some sense under the direction, so are all the other people in his administration. But if we’re going to formulate this group as “Obama’s women,” where is Dreyfuss calling the Gates-Donilon-Brennan axis “Obama’s men?”

Then there’s the simplistic assumption that women really should be more peace-loving and less militaristic. As Laura Shepherd has pointed out in a 2006 article on gender discourses and US military action in Afghanistan for the International Feminist Journal of Politics, women who enter the sphere of masculinized, militaristic power are often expected to surrender their femininity. I also am concerned about the juxtaposition of the women concerned with the “moral life-saving character” of the mission and the administration’s (apparently all-men) realists, over whom the women “rode roughshod.” I mean, what’s with those agency-asserting women disagreeing with the rationality of the male realists?

The narratives about masculinity in the post are similarly problematic. Narrative number one is that of a man (Obama) possessing women. The second narrative about men is that they were more rational, hard-headed, and realistic than the women; Dreyfuss laments that “Obama’s better instincts” didn’t manage to “reign in” these “warrior women.”

Finally, the tone of incredulity in Drefuss’s post exoticizes the fact that the Obama administration has some women that have important roles in making policy decisions. This, especially when viewed in light of Obama’s apparent possession of these women, suggests that there is some sort of shock value that these women are in roles of power.

I’m all for criticism of the US decision to intervene in Libya. I, like Dreyfuss, refuse to equate US ‘humanitarian intervention’ with automatic moral righteousness. In fact, once Dreyfuss gets past this women hang-up, the rest of the article is quite good. I doubt that Dreyfuss had any intention to degrade women in general, or these women in particular, when he wrote this. But when the left is articulating anti-war positions, we should avoid suggesting the ownership of women by men and the deployment of oversimplified gender stereotypes. I thought that was something the anti-war movement got over in the 60’s?

Ed. note – Dreyfuss later changed the title of his post to get rid of the “Obama’s Women” frame.