NOW Opposes War but Backs Women in Combat

The National Organization for Women opposes the war in the Persian Gulf but supports giving female soldiers equal rights to do the killing, Patricia Ireland, NOW’s executive vice president, said Monday.

Ireland said the feminist group’s position on women in combat rests on the belief that female officers who participate in the fighting will be promoted to more powerful military posts from which they will be able to influence, and presumably prevent, future armed conflicts.

Without women in the higher ranks, Ireland said, “we will always have an all-male Joint Chiefs of Staff. Our voice and perspective will never be heard in military policy and foreign policy-making bodies. Like it or not, women have a different experience in life.”

She said the blanket exclusion of women from combat duty also promotes the impression that women are weak and inferior and need to be protected. Federal law prohibits women from serving in combat positions, and the U.S. Supreme Court several years ago upheld the nation’s draft registration law against a challenge based on the law’s exclusion of women.

“We are calling for an absolute withdrawal of the law that keeps women out of combat,” Ireland told political reporters in Sacramento.

Ireland said the group condemns Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait but believes President Bush should have given economic sanctions more time to work. Although she described Hussein as a “villain of a world-class nature,” Ireland said she did not think the United States had a moral imperative to oust him.

She noted that U.S. government leaders looked the other way and privately applauded when Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 and carried on a decade-long war with the nation that had antagonized America in 1979 by occupying its embassy and seizing hostages.

“What we have is a selective morality in our foreign policy,” Ireland said.

Ireland also pointed out that U.S. soldiers are being asked to rescue and defend male-dominated Arab governments and societies--in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia--whose discrimination against women represents a form of “gender apartheid.” She said it is a “tragic irony” that women, albeit in support roles, were part of such a force and were being instructed not to offend the sensibilities of their Arab hosts.

“I do not believe these governments are worth fighting for,” she said.