reflectivepundit

Why Must a Female Candidate Be like a Woman and a Man (and Sometimes Should Be like a Husband)?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
After writing repeatedly about gender stereotyping with respect to female candidates, I revisit the topic to underline that not the female electorate but female pundits have the greatest problem, when it comes to shedding traditional gender stereotypes in politics. As a result, if a woman is serious about winning the highest office in the land, she is forced to present herself as tough and knowledgeable, when it comes to hard national security/defense policies and as caring and motherly, when it comes to soft social policy issues. But walking this fine line rather well does not mean a decline in gender-oriented reporting and commentary. On the contrary, in today’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd boils Hillary Clinton’s campaign appearance down to this, “In Iowa, her national anthem may have been off-key, but her look wasn’t. It was an attractive mirror of her political message: man-tailored with a dash of pink femininity.” In the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus divorces Hillary and Bill Clinton politically, when she writes, “There's a Clinton in the presidential race. The surprise: It may not be Hillary. The truly Clintonian figure running for the Democratic nomination is Barack Obama.” Moreover, Marcus sees Hillary resembling “Al Gore, more disciplined policy wonk than natural politician.”

Washington Post Op-Ed Article on Hillary Clinton and the “Clueless” Female Electorate

By Brigitte L. Nacos
A week after a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 59% of American women of all ages and educational backgrounds have a favorable view of Senator Hillary Clinton, an op-ed article in the Post by Linda Hirshman, a retired professor of women’s studies, informs us that “there’s no guarantee that Clinton would receive enough votes from women to be elected.” Of course, there is no guarantee. Nor would any campaign worth its salt tailor its appeals to the “gender gap” in the electorate that has been exaggerated in past election campaigns. But the op-ed writer’s assumption based on 20 years of studying women and politics does not tell us anything about female voting patterns in the up-coming campaign, since no woman was ever a serious candidate for a major party’s presidential nomination, let alone becoming the nominee. It is likely that a number of women—and men--will vote for or against Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. But many voters will cast their ballot based on what policy positions on Iraq and other pressing issues candidates take. For the op-ed writer, however, women are “not rational political actors—they don’t make firm policy commitments and back the candidates who will move society in the direction they want it to go. Instead, they vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality.” How is that from a self-described feminist!

Iran’s Growing Influence in Iraq: A Manifestation of U.S. Failures

By Brigitte L. Nacos
As the Washington Post reports today, the Bush administration “authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.” But the idea to counter Iran’s growing influence in Iraq by hunting down Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intelligence agents and in the process convince Tehran to fold its nuclear program seems as unrealistic as so many other features of Washington’s old and new Iraq policies. To be sure, when and where Iranians provide Iraqi insurgents with explosives and rockets, they must be stopped. But as Dafna Linzer reports, “if Iran responds with escalation, it has the means to put U.S.citizens and national interests at greater risk in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.” Moreover, the offensive gainst Iranians in Iraq “has several influential skeptics in the intelligence community, at the State Department and at the Defense Department who said that they worry it could push the growing conflict between Tehran and Washington into the center of a chaotic Iraq war.” One wonders whether the architects of the new policy want to bring about such a confrontation with Iran in the first place.

Hillary Clinton has a Real Chance to Become the First Female President

By Brigitte L. Nacos
America’s women have taken a large leap forward by revealing positive attitudes about a female politician whose presidential ambitions were well known before she officially declared her candidacy the other day via a polished video release on her web site. As the the Washington Post's Lois Romano reports today, “After some rocky moments with female voters over the past 15 years, Clinton begins her historic race viewed favorably by 59 percent of women nationally, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll completed Friday night. She is viewed favorably among women of all age groups and educational backgrounds, and has especially large advantages among core pockets of Democratic women, including non-whites and lower-income women, and among Northeasterners.”

A whole year before the Iowa caucuses and nearly two years before the presidential election of 2008, the field of candidates and likely candidates for the nominations of the two major parties grows by the day. In the run-up to the 2000 election, Elizabeth Dole never looked like a serious contender for the nomination on the Republican side. She did not even survive the pre-primary season. She was unable to match the financial resources of George Bush and some other male contenders and never had an effective campaign operation. Democrat Hillary Clinton now, unlike Elizabeth Dole then, is a formidable candidate with enormous fund-raising capabilities and a first-rate staff in her back.

A 9/11 Angle Makes for a Front Page Story

By Brigitte L. Nacos
When couples divorce or a widowed spouse remarries, it is not unusual for mothers or fathers to cut off all ties to their in-laws and deny grandparents contact with their grandchildren. The plight of grandmothers and grandfathers in such cases is heart-wrenching and certainly material for an emotion-laden human interest story. But when you link such family problems to the experiences of 9/11, you have the stuff for a New York Times front page article. Under the headline “Parents of 9/11 Victims Torn From Grandchildren,” Paul Vitello writes in today’s Times,” Five years after their father was killed at the World Trade Center, two little girls, ages 7 and 5, sat crying in a car parked at the curb of their grandparents’ home here one December day, refusing to go inside for a court-ordered visit. It was a painful family tableau rooted in a hundred tangled details, but one overriding and uncontested reality: 9/11.” One wonders whether 9/11 was and is indeed the “overriding” factor here or whether the experiences and emotions of the terrorist attacks are exploited to make for a more compelling saga—especially, since the story also reveals that “By most accounts, these situations are the exceptions.”

Al-Fatah and al-Aksa Martyr Brigade and the Ill-Advised U.S. Support for Palestinian Authority Security Forces

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Whether $86.4 million as Reuters reported earlier this month or $98 million as the Washington Post mentions in today’s editorial—it is mind-boggling that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on behalf of the Bush administration agreed to provide Palestinian security forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas and drawn from the ranks of al-Fatah with a large sum of money in the name of strengthening and reforming those who are now involved in the power struggle with Hamas. As the Post’s editorial points out, these are the “same forces it [the administration] rightly condemned in the past as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by involvement in terrorism. Those forces haven't changed…”

The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade that has claimed responsibility for many terrorist acts against Israeli civilians is closely connected to the al-Fatah organization. According to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, 

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is an active terrorist organization committed to the creation of a Palestinian nation-state. The brigade is comprised of an unknown number of small militias, or cells. While never officially recognized by al-Fatah or its former leader Yasir Arafat, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is predominantly comprised of terrorists who also belong to al-Fatah. 

Ironically, the group is also on the the Department of Homeland Security's list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. But this designation and the group’s ties to al-Fatah obviously did not give pause to Dr. Rice or anyone else in the administration, when they decided on the aid package. Perhaps we will never know but it is hard to believe that there will be no terrorists from the ranks of the al-Aksa Martyr Brigade among the security forces to be trained and equipped—although supposedly not with lethal weapons.

Who Is Paying the Price for the Iraq War?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
When it comes to Americans, the question of who is carrying the heaviest burden for the Iraq war is justified. And that’s exactly what U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer did during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week. “Who is going to pay the price?” she asked. "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young." She then told Dr. Rice, "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact." While these statements were true, Washington Post columnist Fred Hiatt writes today, that Senator Boxer was “repackaging the familiar chicken-hawk attack. At its most elemental, this is the charge that President Bush and his associates were too cowardly to fight in Vietnam and now, while their own children choose not to serve, are cavalier in risking the lives of others.”

Quo Vadis, Iraq, Middle-East, and America?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

As he explained the troop build-up in and around Baghdad as the centerpiece of his “way forward” initiative for Iraq, President Bush stuck by his claim that Iraq is the crucial front in the war against terrorism. "The war on terror cannot be won if we fail in Iraq" he said. “Our enemies throughout the Middle East are trying to defeat us in Iraq. If we step back now, the problems in Iraq
will become more lethal, and make our troops fight an uglier battle than we are seeing today.” We all know, of course, that pre-invasion Iraq was not at all a terrorist haven and that it was a costly blunder to focus on Iraq at the expense of our efforts in Afghanistan and the Afghan-Pakistani border region in order to hunt down Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. The post-speech mass-mediated Iraq debate has focused increasingly on the meaning of a failed Iraq invasion and defeat there regardless of whether participants subscribe to or oppose President Bush’s unchanged Iraq
strategy and objectives. According to the White House’s latest “Iraq Strategy Review, “Our strategic goal in Iraq remains the same: A unified democratic federal Iraq that can govern itself, defend itself, and sustain itself, and is an ally in the War on Terror.” Except for the President’s closest advisers and staunchest supporters this goal is more like an impossible dream. Robert G. Kaiser writes in today’s Washington Post,

Bush's latest initiatives -- like all his earlier ones -- will not produce the desired political result, because Americans cannot accomplish political objectives in Iraq. Americans are outsiders, occupiers, foreigners in every sense of the word. Only Iraqis have a chance of finding a political resolution for their divisions. So now we await the fate of this latest gamble like a high roller in Las Vegas watching a roulette ball in a spinning wheel. We have about as much control over the situation as the gambler has of that ball. The outcome is out of our hands, and it would be foolish to bet that we will like the way the conflict ends.

As for the latest Iraq announcement, George Will likens it to a hail-Mary pass.

Minor Terrorist Incident in Athens/Major Problem in Afghanistan

By Brigitte L. Nacos
When a rocket-propelled missile hit the U.S. Embassy in Athens the other day, the shot from a building across the street caused only minor damage. The attack was reminiscent of a similar incident in the heart of London in 2000, when unknown persons, presumably renegades of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, hurled a rocket from a hand-held launcher and a distance of only a few hundred yards onto Britain’s foreign intelligence center MI5. As in Athens this week, there was no real damage in London more than 6 years ago. But it was surprising, if not shocking that such attacks on highly symbolic targets could be launched in the first place. Regardless of their location, size, and strength, terrorist groups learn from each other and embrace those methods that promise them the greatest success with respect to their goals at a given time. By targeting the embassy in Athens, the Greek terrorists imitated the admittedly harmless strike against Britain’s MI5. Yet, in both cases the groups were successful in one important respect: they received world-wide publicity. Like the London incident earlier, the one in Athens was reported instantly, extensively, and often as lead item by all-news radio and television; print coverage followed--not only in Greece and in the U.S. but in countries around the world as well. Once again, even without causing harm, a terrorist gang showcased its “propaganda by deed.”
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Afghanistan's problems with terrorists/insurgents, on the other hand, may well deserve more attention than the  Athens incident. As Pamela Constable of the Post reports, the bodies of insurgents killed by NATO and Afghan troops in Afghanistan were sent into Pakistan’s border region to receive “martyrs” funerals by Taliban leaders. That much for the claim that the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan defeated the Taliban und Al Qaeda! Instead, it becomes increasingly clear that “that Pakistan's tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan have provided a haven for Islamic militia groups seeking to destabilize the Western-backed government of Afghanistan.”

Instead of sending more American troops to Iraq, we should think about "augmenting” NATO forces in Afghanistan.Otherwise, the Taliban and Al Qaeda could return sooner rather than later.

The President’s new Iraq Plan

By Brigitte L. Nacos
As already revealed during the White House’s pre-speech public relations push, President Bush’s new Iraq strategy is a slap in the face of the Iraq Study group and the U.S. commanders that rejected a military escalation of the war. The Baker-Hamilton bipartisan group is out of business and the generals are being replaced by more agreeable commanders. The President ignored also the growing anti-war sentiments of the American public and members of Congress. But unlike the Iraq Study group and the generals, public opposition and dissent in Congress will not go away. Indeed, the President’s announcement that he would send some 20,000 more troops to Iraq did not change the anti-war attitudes as a post-speech Washington Post/ABC News poll and the reactions in Congress demonstrated. Yet, the President stuck to the neo-conservatives’ impossible dream of using more military power to turn Iraq into a western-style democracy and a model for the Middle East. In reality, more U.S. soldiers and more direct involvement in fighting insurgents in Baghdad could put “U.S. military commanders in exactly the sort of tough urban fight that war planners strove to avoid during the spring 2003 invasion of the country,” as Thomas E. Ricks and Ann Scott Tyson write in the Post.