Women Must Unite to End War :: Feminism Feminist Women Criticism

War, war machines, jihad. These words suck up entered the vocabulary of everyday practice during the past twenty years. They punctuate a new stage in the discourse of Empire, what Hardt and Negri call a global project of network power, that knits the world together in a dynamic fabric of exchange, flows but also of conflict. 9-11 was a catastrophic utilization of the ways in which the threads in this fabric tighten and break. American citizens felt for the first time how the app arntly innocent business of moneymaking(a) in New York City and of policymaking in Washington DC are seen as criminal elsewhere. The daily deals struck in the financial and military-political capitals of the U.S. have direct and mostly negative consequences for most of the rest of the world. These consequences are lightless to the average American citizen, they are searingly obvious elsewhere. 9-11 has a long muniment going back through the Gulf War to the establishment of Israel in 1948. It is a histo ry that spans the length of the heatless War and is witness to the maturement suspicion and fear of U.S. policies in the region. Indeed, the decease great battle of the Cold War took place in a dry dusty inland backwater called Afghanistan. Having been chosen for this showdown between the two superpowers placed Afghanistan squarely on the stage of world history. It is hard to know who got there first, to find the origins of the last great battle of the cold war. One version, which I find compelling, has it that when, on December 24, 1979, the Soviets invaded and took over rule of the country with the help of Afghan tribesmen in the north, they were not venturing into virgin territory. Six months earlier, President Carter had signed the first leading for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Zbigniew Brzezinski claims in a Jan. 15-21, 1998 hearing for the French Le Nouvel Observateur that the U.S. government didnt push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increase the probability that they would. The CIA recruited Afghan tribesmen separated from their birthplaces by war and displaced into dehumanizing refugee camps where religious raising provided their only anchor. The U.S. government armed these men with guns and capitalist ideology and they won. The U.S. declared the Soviets defeated, the cold war over, and their warriors were left to fend for themselves.