{"id":41820,"date":"2020-11-24T14:50:37","date_gmt":"2020-11-24T12:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radioislam.org.za\/a\/?p=41820"},"modified":"2020-11-24T14:50:37","modified_gmt":"2020-11-24T12:50:37","slug":"michele-flournoy-might-be-breaking-a-glass-ceiling-as-pentagon-chief-but-even-feminists-arent-buying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/michele-flournoy-might-be-breaking-a-glass-ceiling-as-pentagon-chief-but-even-feminists-arent-buying\/","title":{"rendered":"Michele Flournoy might be breaking a glass ceiling as Pentagon chief, but even feminists aren\u2019t buying"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"President-elect Joe Biden\u2019s pick for Pentagon chief would be the first woman in the role. But a glimpse at her past suggests she\u2019s not only a sociopathic hawk but an ideal vector for a Biden reversal of Trump\u2019s Afghan pullout.<\/div>\n
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As Trump finally began to implement his long-delayed promise of pulling US troops out of Afghanistan, articles bemoaning the sure-to-be-horrific fate of Afghan women without US soldiers around to\u00a0rape<\/a>\u00a0– er, help them, have mushroomed across the media establishment.<\/p>\n

Even though Trump would be leaving approximately 2,500 troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, his decision to belatedly, incompletely fulfill his 2016 electoral promise to bring the troops home has been depicted as a betrayal of both Afghan women and NATO. The Pentagon tried to claim al-Qaeda is excited about the move, while the media have suggested Afghan women are quaking in their burqas at the notion of the admittedly oppressive Taliban resuming power.<\/p>\n

Such conclusions ignore the reality that the Taliban already\u00a0controls more territory<\/a>\u00a0than it has since September 11, when the US made the snap, ill-informed decision to go to war against a country that had nothing to do with those attacks. Or that the US, not the Taliban, has repeatedly\u00a0violated<\/a>\u00a0the ceasefire that was held up as a precursor to peace treaties between the Afghan government and the fundamentalist Islamic group. It\u2019s the threat of ending a hugely unpopular war that has these women supposedly fearing for their lives.<\/p>\n

This is where Flournoy and the feminist angle come in. Such tactics have worked before – former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was gung-ho to bomb the stuffing out of Syria supposedly on behalf of the country\u2019s \u201cwomen and children<\/em>\u201d \u2013 never mind that the Islamic fundamentalist \u201cmoderate rebels<\/em>\u201d would have oppressed them far more than Bashar Assad\u2019s secular government \u2013 while the bogus threat of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi feeding his troops Viagra in order to enable raping sprees served as atrocity propaganda to justify the US\u2019 disastrous regime change in that country. Women are now sold as slaves, but hey, at least that nasty Gaddafi (whose rule saw women achieve one of the highest levels of gender equality on the African continent) is gone!<\/p>\n

The appointment of Flournoy, a Strong Woman\u2122, to the helm of a Pentagon that is going to have to make some very unpopular decisions in order to redeploy US troops in Afghanistan (can\u2019t let those poppy fields\u00a0go to waste<\/a>, after all) is a clever move on the part of the Biden campaign. Even most veterans now think the Afghan war was a terrible mistake, and Trump was arguably elected in 2016 on his promise to bring US troops home. Putting a woman in charge of reversing what would normally be a very popular move has the potential to succeed where the discredited \u201cRussian bounties on US troops<\/em>\u201d fairytale failed.<\/p>\n

Flournoy is admirably suited to this role, as the founder of a think tank (the Center for a New American Security) now run by Ukrainian regime-change cookie-distributor in chief Victoria Nuland. She was on the front lines of the Obama administration\u2019s disastrous wars in Libya and Syria, and helped expand the war in Afghanistan before departing for the private sector in 2012. She was a pioneer of slapping a \u2018woke\u2019 gloss on US militarism, and in 2016 while jockeying for the nom as projected president Hillary Clinton\u2019s Secretary of Defense co-authored a paper urging Washington to move toward war with Iran while expanding the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen and inflating the already bloated Pentagon budget.<\/p>\n

Putting women on the front lines of propaganda has historically been a near-bulletproof defense for a bloodthirsty regime trying to pass off the abuses of empire as \u201cresponsibility to protect<\/em>,\u201d and Flournoy would by no means be the first woman embraced by the war machine\u2019s propaganda apparatus for her ability to pass off killing thousands of innocents as \u201chumanitarian intervention<\/em>.\u201d It\u2019s of a piece with the sick fiction popularized by fellow former Secretary of State and fake feminist icon Madeleine Albright when she declared 500,000 Iraqi children who died because of US sanctions were \u201cworth it.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

One might think that 26,000 dead Afghan children \u2013 that\u2019s about five murdered kids per day \u2013 over the course of the nearly two-decade quagmire in that country is enough carnage, never mind that the Trump administration has increased bombing levels, even from his predecessor Barack Obama\u2019s record-setting drone strikes, and civilian casualties have soared accordingly.<\/p>\n

But the incoming Biden administration, as well as many in Trump\u2019s own party, would have the US stay there indefinitely. The excuses they come up with run the gamut from the aforementioned \u201cthink of the poor women!<\/em>\u201d to a claim that terrorism will spiral\u00a0out of control<\/a>\u00a0if the US isn\u2019t there to\u00a0fund<\/a>\u00a0– er, fight back against the bad guys. While it\u2019s hard to ignore that terrorism has spiraled out of control\u00a0precisely because<\/a>\u00a0of the US declaring \u201cwar<\/em>\u201d on it, like many other US \u2018wars\u2019 (drugs, cancer, poverty, etc) and illicit activities like opium production have skyrocketed following the collapse of the Taliban government, hiding behind the skirts of Afghan women appeals to pure emotion, no facts required.<\/p>\n

There are encouraging signs this faux-feminist fiction is wearing thin, however. Even the mainstream media establishment has raised tentative objections to the notion that Flournoy\u2019s nomination would be a win for feminism. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to celebrate the first woman Secretary of Defense<\/em>,\u201d corporate-feminist outlet Jezebel reassured its readers, explaining that Flournoy as a career Pentagon functionary had \u201cbeen party to some of the country\u2019s worst imperialist, hawkish pursuits<\/em>.\u201d In a surprising diversion from the site\u2019s paean to VP-elect Kamala Harris earlier this month, Jezebel acknowledged that lionizing female \u201cfirsts<\/em>\u201d in war-criminal roles (like the Trump administration\u2019s CIA director and torturess-in-chief Gina Haspel) was counterproductive.<\/p>\n

The time-honored tactic of \u201cpinkwashing<\/em>\u201d may have reached its pinnacle in the literal\u00a0pink paint job<\/a>\u00a0given a retired Navy fighter jet in 2016, but the cracks showing in the female-empowerment facade adopted by the worst elements of the US empire provide some hope for the future. Bombs dropped by women are just as destructive as bombs dropped by men, and the faux-feminist dream that women should be able to commit war crimes on the same level as men is long overdue for retirement.<\/p>\n

By Helen Buyniski an American journalist and political commentator at RT.<\/div>\n

SOURCE: https:\/\/www.rt.com\/op-ed\/507595-flournoy-fake-feminist-afghanistan-women\/<\/p>\n

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Rii.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President-elect Joe Biden\u2019s pick for Pentagon chief would be the first woman in the role. But a glimpse at her past suggests she\u2019s not only a sociopathic hawk but an ideal vector for a Biden reversal of Trump\u2019s Afghan pullout. As Trump finally began to implement his long-delayed promise of pulling US troops out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[132,5451],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion-and-analysis","category-political"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/download-13.jpg?fit=270%2C188&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pc0QIf-aSw","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 02:27:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radioislam.org.za\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}