Womyn's Hystery Watch

For all the talented people in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle had to choose womyn's hystery professor Ruth Rosen to be its marquee in-house columnist. Rosen's columns display the shimmering ignorance of a woman who has led a fascinating life without ever having bothered to travel outside of her own head. Yesterday she wrote a gushing recruitment advertorial for this weekend's Parade 'o Idiots which will be protesting the liberation of Iraq.

Why, you may ask, should you participate in this demonstration? Because you are a citizen of a great nation that is violating its own democratic ideals, treating the rest of the world with dismissive contempt and refusing to be restrained by international law.

It's fatuous to suggest that defending our own security interests is a violation of our democratic ideals. And I can't find in our Constitution where it says we're supposed to surrender our sovereignty to the United Nations.

And don't get me started on the fantasy of "international law". Laws have meaning only when there is someone who can ultimately enforce those laws (using force), and international law has no such enforcer. To exchange meaningful self-defense for unenforced gauzy laws in a world full of rogue states would be like trying to fight off the man who is raping your daughter by singing the Girl Scout Law at him.

Because you are a citizen of a new global society.

I am not a citizen of a "new global society" I am a citizen of the United States of America. It is not the "community of nations" that protects my freedom or my safety. Rosen might wish to entrust her own liberty and security to the Chinese, Syrians and Cameroonians who sit on the UN Security Council, but most Americans probably wouldn't.

Globalization is about more than free trade. What we are witnessing is the birth of a grassroots global democracy.

Call me on my cellphone as soon as a left-wing Jewish feminist gets a weekly column in a Baghdad newspaper where she can invite her readers to attend anti-government demonstrations. Only then might you convince me that we have a "grassroots global democracy".

To emphasize our membership in this new global society, many protesters around the world will be carrying the U.N. flag, a fitting symbol for a new era.

Yes, the U.N. flag is a fitting symbol for these protesters, and largely because of the U.N.'s accelerating slide into dictator-coddling and irrelevance. This is the same U.N. that recently put Libya in charge of the human rights committe, Iraq in charge of the disarmament committee, and gave Syria a seat on the Security Council and its counter-terrorism committee. That makes the UN as cynical and immoral as Rosen's Saddam-friendly "peace" movement is gullible and insipid.

When people ask, as they eventually will, who stood up for human rights, let your name be among those who opposed an unjust and unnecessary war.

You bet I'll oppose an unjust and unnecessary war. But this isn't one of them. I'll stand up for human rights by applauding the peacemakers who dispose of Saddam and his nightmare of a regime. As will a lot of Iraqis.

UPDATE: Iraqi exiles in Britain react to the "anti-war" demonstrations with contempt. "It's a just war, say Iraq's exiles"

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 14, 2003 12:08 PM