Feminist concern for Afghan women was converted into propaganda justifying the 2001 US invasion.

Evidence

The awareness created during the “Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan” campaign in 1999 to 2001 was relatively easily turned into a tool for justifying the invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of September 11, 2001. Now it was the First Lady, Laura Bush, who took to the stage in November 2001 to link the necessity for Operation Enduring Freedom to the oppression of Afghan women: “Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror—not only because our hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan, we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.” 44 Not unlike the nineteenth-century British colonial ideology, the misogynist Islam trope here served as a tool for the justification of and rallying for US wars. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 544

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘saving women from the savages’ move directly parallels the reader’s Addison article — colonial civilizing rhetoric recycled in current dress norms — and the anti-immodesty moral panics as class/political signaling. — connects to: Afghan women’s conditions did not improve and even worsened after invasion — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 288
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the immodesty article’s finding that moral outrage over others’ bodies masks political and class agendas; here the feminist rescue narrative masks imperial military intent.
• CANDY: Laura Bush using feminist rhetoric to sell the Afghanistan war, then RAWA itself denouncing the Feminist Majority as harmful, is a compact, self-contained irony.
• QUESTION: The RAWA quote in this paragraph suggests a third frame: Afghan women themselves rejected the celebrity feminist rescue narrative on the grounds it endangered them. Worth chasing how RAWA positioned feminism against imperial feminism.