Bush Sends Anti-Feminist Group To Iraq For 'Women In Politics' Project

by Jim Lobe

(IPS) WASHINGTON -- A U.S. group opposed to government-provided childcare, equal pay for equal work and quotas for women in government service will train Iraqi women in political participation and democracy prior to the scheduled January 2005 elections in that country.

The anti-feminist, Washington-based Independent Women's Forum (IWF) is one of a number of organizations chosen by the State Department to carry out its $10 million Iraqi Women's Democracy Initiative.

But unlike the other groups, which include the Meridian International Center, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), IWF has no experience in international exchange and democracy-promotion activities.

The organization was founded in 1991 by a number of prominent right-wing Republican women to act as a counterpoint to what they called the "radical feminism" of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a grassroots group with about 500,000 subscribing members nationwide.

Among the IWF's founders were Lynne Cheney, the spouse of Vice President Dick Cheney and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Labour Secretary Elaine Chao; and Kate O'Beirne, Washington editor of the right-wing 'National Review' and a former senior vice president at the Heritage Foundation.

Another founder was Midge Decter, the former co-chair -- with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- of the Committee for the Free World and one of the founders of neo-conservatism along with her spouse, former 'Commentary' editor Norman Podhoretz.

Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky, who announced the grant at a press briefing last week, has also served on IWF's board of advisers.

"Talk about an inside deal -- the IWF represents a small group of right-wing, wheeler-dealers inside the Washington beltway," according to Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation.

The IWF, which according to its mission statement was "established to combat the women-as-victim, pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism," has taken a number of controversial positions over the years in pursuit of that goal.

It has strongly opposed the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in part because it would mandate governments to enforce laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work.

"This is 'comparable worth', a system of government wage-setting that Americans have rightly rejected as inefficient and antithetical to free market principles," the IWF has argued.

It has also objected to CEDAW's requirements that governments guarantee "maternity leave with pay" and child care facilities as well as its suggestions for minimum quotas to ensure that women are represented at all levels in governments.

Ironically, the Bush administration adopted the latter suggestion for Iraq in the interim law approved by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which is supposed to guide elections currently scheduled for January.

The IWF has also opposed affirmative action and federal programs designed to prevent sexual discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal government funding. The administration appointed IWF President Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer to the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women despite the fact that the group opposed the Violence Against Women Act.

The IWF has also been accused of partisanship for its staunch defense of Republican Party positions and its attacks on prominent Democrats.

Last May, for example, it issued a statement assailing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for demanding that Pentagon chief Rumsfeld step down to take responsibility for the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, insisting Kerry was publicising the issue "to raise money."

Several weeks earlier, it launched an aborted petition drive to condemn "the bitter political grandstanding" by Democratic members of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, whom IWF accused of "working for Senator John Kerry," instead of for "all Americans."

IWF's staff consists primarily of former Republican activists with extensive government and lobbying experience but little or no experience in democracy promotion, international affairs or the Middle East.

The one exception is Senior Vice President Rieva Holycross, who has a doctorate in anthropology and a 30-year career in academia and work for a multinational engineering firm, as chief marketing officer in charge of strategic communication, according to the IWF website. It is not clear if she will be working on the Iraq project.

Announcing the grant, Secretary of State Colin Powell said each of the recipient groups "will work with Iraqi partners on the ground to prepare women to compete in Iraq's January 2005 elections, encourage women to vote, train women in media and business skills, and establish resource centers for networking and counselling."

IWF Senior Fellow Michelle Bernard, who has practised business law and government relations in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa, said the group had already begun recruiting 150 Iraqi women to participate in a Woman Leaders Program and Democracy Information Center before the grant was officially awarded.

"We'd like to train 150 pro-democracy women on the fundamentals of democracy, women's political activism in a democracy, and to exchange ideas -- basically to enable Iraqi women to participate in their country and help Iraq develop a democracy that best suits the needs of that country," she was quoted as saying in a State Department press release.

Bernard also said IWF has planned a five-day conference in December in Amman, Jordan that will be followed by future meetings on a quarterly basis.

Rather than recruit women to run for office, she said, "we're just looking for people who want to participate at the community level, people who are interested in education (or) people who might want to be policy makers in the equivalent of a think tank here."