Which side are you on, girls?
tmzz
Which side are you on, girls?
Suzanne Moore
War on Terror: Women - Talk of war has sidelined women. That's because they
don't see the world in black and white, argues Suzanne Moore
Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on? There is no point in asking
us shilly-shallying girlies whose side we are on, because obviously, when it
come to war, we just don't have the stomach. Women and effeminate lefties - I
note Peter Hain used the word effete - tend to be less gung-ho than proper men
about the forthcoming war. Appeasers, anti-Americans, lily-livered liberals,
Clare Short and all other kinds of mad cows: what a coalition we are building.
While Tony Blair strides about blazing moral certainty in his recruitment drive
for endless war, we are being asked to accept that something immensely complex
can be reduced to something incredibly simple.
This troubles many women of all political persuasions. We can discuss at length
whether women are more naturally peace-loving because they give birth; or
whether it is the single-minded mentality required to wage a war, which calls
for a huge suspension of disbelief, that is alien to many women; or, finally,
whether women just can't get excited about the media narratives, with their
Boys' Own tales of SAS superiority and countless spies. And what of all those
maps and helpful diagrams, which signify absolutely nothing, but make you feel
as though you might actually know something that you don't? How about a map of
the cave where Bin Laden is hiding with his fax machine?
The contrast between our heart-stopping knowledge of the specifics of the
attack, and the vagueness of what is being proposed, is deeply worrying.
Language, always one of the first casualties of war, is now being deployed to
obscure rather than convey meaning. Asymmetrical warfare against non-state
actors, anyone?
Yet when we see the list of the terrorist groups that we are all apparently
fighting, the international war on terrorism suddenly looks suspiciously like a
war against whomever America decides must be humbled. When we ask what would
happen to the men inspired by Bin Laden, even in the unlikely event that his
head was brought on a platter to George Bush, we are silenced by talk of the
suppression of such networks in the future. When we see, as we will
increasingly, pictures of malnourished Afghan children and of a desperate people
whose idea of sanctuary is now the hell-hole of a refugee camp; when we see
entire villages cut off by winter, what then? If nearly 7,000 people die, will
that be a proportionate response? What if it's not the right 7,000? What if
these people do not support Bin Laden or the Taliban?
And what if some of the fatalities are soldiers from our country? Not crack SAS
troops, but troubled boys like my daughter's friend, who has just signed up
because he flunked all his exams and is being promised an "education"?
To ask these questions is not to defile the memory of those who died so
tragically in America. It is not somehow supportive of terrorism or the
monstrous Taliban. It is not to say that we should do nothing beyond distribute
a few groceries to the starving peasants of a distant land. But it is to refuse
the war-porn imagery and ugly rhetoric of "you're either for us or against us".
It is to acknowledge that the world has changed, and we have to change with it
instead of relying on old black and white formulas.
The terrorist act itself - supremely wrong, evil and immoral as it was - stems
from a fundamentalism that cannot allow connectedness, complexity, or humanity
itself into its thinking. Our response cannot merely mirror this fundamentalism
in the form of an American jihad.
If women on the whole are more wary of the consequences of war, perhaps it comes
down to simply this: we are used to doing more than one thing at a time and used
to thinking more than one thing at time. The choice that we are being asked to
make here is a very limited one - war or no war. No one I know wants a war. No
one I know thinks that nothing should be done at all. Where is the Third Way?
Where is the joined-up thinking?
We understand, by and large, that a display of military might will be
necessary - a "demonstration", as Max Hastings, the editor of the London Evening
Standard, tellingly referred to it on BBC's Newsnight. Yet it is still not clear
who this demonstration is for. The terrorists already know about US firepower,
which is why they employ methods of terror against civilians - because they
cannot match it. If America needs to "demonstrate" something to itself, then why
should we all have to applaud?
Such sentiments will be deemed anti-American. But what will happen when similar
words start to come from within the US itself? What can be said about the polls
that show nearly a quarter of those interviewed agreeing with the proposition
that "America brought these attacks on itself"? What shall we do with the
continuing denial that US foreign policy had anything at all to do with the
attacks? Will we demand that certain connections be made, or will we further
retreat into the language of good v evil, of an international coalition against
the one man we can name as responsible for everything bad in the world?
In such uncertain times, if more women than men oppose the war, then let us
listen to them. All the current opinion polls show that the public supports a
vigorous debate - it wants to hear all sides of the argument. To date, we have
heard so much more from men than women. In times of war, it as if the advances
of feminism melt away and public life becomes once more a Men Only zone.
Eventually, however, Blair will have to win over far more female support than he
has managed so far. Whose side are you on, girls? Speak up now. Otherwise you
will be spoken for.