Libya: Obama’s ‘women warriors’

last updated 8 January 2015

“Is it just me?” said Brad Knickerbocker in The Christian Science Monitor. Or did anyone else notice the “gender difference in the Obama administration’s move toward war in Libya?” Barack Obama himself and key male advisers such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were all openly reluctant to institute a no-fly zone. According to published reports, Obama was persuaded to launch the cruise missiles and stealth bombers by the all-female trio of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security Council aide Samantha Power. America’s enemies undoubtedly also noticed “who wears the pants in this country,” said Mark Krikorian in NationalReview.com. China, Iran, and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez must be delighted to see proof that the president of the United States is “an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates.”

That is “the single stupidest right-wing reaction to the Libya campaign” so far, said Alex Pareene in Salon.com. You knew that the GOP and its media stooges would find some way of criticizing Obama for his handling of Libya, because they attack everything he does, even if—as in this case—it’s an action they’d applaud if he were a Republican. But the proposition that Obama “isn’t manly enough to stand up to his emasculating staff of harpies” is as ludicrous as it is desperate. Not to mention deeply sexist, said Heather Hurlburt in Slate.com. Clinton, Rice, and Power are all highly accomplished, dedicated public servants, with a track record of supporting interventions to defend people from genocidal dictators, as in Darfur and Kosovo. The implication that they’re “emotional, estrogen-addled interventionists” is an insult to women everywhere.

Yes, but men and women truly do see the world differently, said Elana Sztokman in Forward.com. Due to our cultural roles, women tend to be more compassionate and more proactively moral than men. In the White House debate over Libya, Obama’s male advisers treated the Middle East like a chessboard, and were fixated on “the lack of abstract, strategic value” in a Libyan intervention. But the female advisers insisted the U.S. had a moral obligation to keep Qaddafi from “butchering his own people.” If there really is now a bloc of senior advisers in the White House that believe in confronting evil and protecting the innocent, let’s hope that they keep winning the argument—whatever their gender.