Opinion Fight of the Valkyries

We’ve come a long way from feminist international relations theory two decades ago that indulged in stereotypes about aggression being ‘male’ and conciliation being ‘female’. And from the days of Helen Caldicott,the Australian pediatrician and nuclear-freeze activist who disapprovingly noted the ‘psychosexual overtones’ of military terminology such as ‘missile erector’ and ‘thrust-to-weight ratio.’

There have been women through history who shattered gender stereotypes,from Cleopatra to Golda Meir to the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher,whose critics on the left sniffed that she was not really a woman. As UN ambassador,Madeleine Albright pushed back against Colin Powell on a Balkans intervention—“What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” she asked him—and Condi Rice pushed ahead with W. and Dick Cheney on invading Iraq.

When President Obama listened to his militaristic muses,it gave armchair shrinks lots to muse about. As one wrote to me: “Cool,cerebral president chooses passion and emotion (human rights,Samantha,Hillary,Susan) over reason and strategic thinking (Bob Gates,Tom Donilon). Is it the pattern set up by his Mom and Michelle—women have the last word?”

White House aides smacked back hard on the guys vs girls narrative. A senior administration official e-mailed Politico’s Mike Allen that Power,Smith and Hillary Clinton weren’t even in the meeting where the president decided to move forward and tell Rice to seek authority at the UN for a no-fly zone. Maybe they were already nervous that the president was sightseeing in Rio with his own girls and watching drum performances while senators like James Webb and Richard Lugar were charging him with overstepping his authority in Libya,and Dennis Kucinich talked impeachment.

Whatever the reason,the spinners were so afraid that the president would seem to be a ditherer chased by Furies that they went so far as to argue that three of the women were not even in the room for The Decision. So the women were in their place? Where,the kitchen?

As compelling as the gender split is,it’s even more interesting to look at the parallels between Obama and W. Candidate Obama said about a possible strike on Iran,“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorise a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Yet both men started wars of choice with a decision-making process marked more by impulse and reaction than discipline and rigour.

Denouncing the last decade of ‘autopilot’ for presidents ordering military operations,Senator Webb told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC: “We have not had a debate…This isn’t the way that our system is supposed to work.”MAUREEN DOWD