War-on-terror rhetoric recruits women’s rights to justify imperial conquest

Evidence

One of the most celebrated high-level interventions came when U.S. First Lady Laura Bush, deputizing for her husband in his weekly radio broadcast to the nation in November 2001, took oppression of women in Taliban-held Afghanistan as her topic. “Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror,” she opined, “not just because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.” Here, smuggled in with sympathy for the powerless, we find the additional frisson provided by the final clause: the Taliban and their ilk have their own imperial designs on us, so acting to depose them satisfies both our human altruism and our long-term self-interest. … Laura Bush ended her broadcast by observing that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” effectively challenging the more usual solidarities between feminism and antiwar struggles. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 210

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘smuggled-in frisson’ mechanism of self-interest dressed as altruism maps to the ADDENDUM complaints-about-immodesty article’s moral-panic framework. — connects to: NGOs function as imperial weapons in feminist guise in the Afghan war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 311; Bush used women’s rights and democracy to justify war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 455; Cromer opposed women’s suffrage in Britain while invoking women’s rights to justify empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 157 (+1 more)
• CANDY: Laura Bush claiming the fight for women’s dignity while her husband’s war proceeded is a crisp, shareable detail.