The War Against Women

Even if she is not right on absolutely every point (Iran, in particular), Catherine Bennett writes:

Generally speaking, the less that is heard, politically, from a prime minister's spouse, the better. It was the great achievement of Cherie Blair, even if she justified her ubiquity as a form of feminism, that with every intervention she demonstrated, for the benefit of her successors, the difficulty of convincing an audience that knows you to have zero democratic credentials. To be fair, Mrs Blair was occasionally deployed by her hubby and his mates to dilute their own virility. When Blair invaded Afghanistan, in 2001, it was her job to show that we were mainly fighting out of niceness, for the women.

Goggling through her fingers, to illustrate the view from inside a burqa, Mrs Blair disclosed that the Afghans, our trusty former allies, lagged far behind on diversity, even if they were acting, in a manner she would subsequently consider extenuating, as men of deep religious faith. "The women of Afghanistan still have a spirit that belies their unfair, downtrodden image," she declared. "We need to help them free that spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see."

As "we" know, the better Afghanistan has proved something of a let-down for women, as well as for the many male combatants who have died attempting to create it. Hamid Karzai, the US puppet, was once prepared to give his blessing to Afghan men who want to rape their wives or to keep them imprisoned. Cherie, by contrast, has remained very much at large, with her voice going from strength to strength, so much so that the younger Miliband recently appointed her something or other to do with setting women free all over the world.

Responding to this honour, Mrs Blair said: "We need to look afresh at how countries like the UK, through their development efforts, can help make a real difference to the status and power of women in the developing world." No one, after all, can say the UK, under her own and her husband's leadership, did not make a difference to women in Afghanistan. Now they live with bombing, abduction and rape along with more established forms of abuse – forced marriages, wife-beating, "honour" killings, enforced ignorance.

Nor should we forget Iraq where, in the aftermath of the Blairs' democratic endeavours, women's lives have been transformed. "Militias promoting misogynist ideologies have targeted women and girls for assassination, and intimidated them to keep them from participating in public life," says Human Rights Watch, whose recent report chronicles the loss of social participation and human rights for Iraqi women following the 2003 occupation and the activities of sectarian groups. In Basra in 2008, it records: "Vigilantes killed 133 women, claiming religious or customary sanction." Of these, 79 were judged, by extremists, to be "violating Islamic teachings".

Which brings us to another consort, the exemplary wife of Nick Clegg. In normal circumstances the lawyer Miriam González Durántez would have a strong claim to being left alone, having resisted all attempts to make her the junior partner in her husband's career. Asked why she was not out there worshipping him last year, à la Samantha Cameron, González said: "I don't have the luxury of having a job that I can simply abandon for five weeks." And yet, when a western politician expresses equanimity, as Clegg has done, about the possible triumph of Islamism in Libya, it is difficult for some of us not to speculate about his seriousness when it comes to women's rights, political and personal.

Is he content to help create a society where a Mrs Clegg would campaign on demand, if required to do so by a male Clegg? Or would he rather she just stayed in, where other men can't see her? On his trip to Mexico, Clegg was quoted as accepting that the defeat of Gaddafi might lead to the creation of a "hardline Islamist regime". A Lib Dem source reportedly confirmed that Clegg believes the current dictatorship to be so abhorrent that its British-assisted displacement is worth the "gamble" of an Islamist regime taking its place.

Given a choice of tyrannies, you gather, the coalition plumps for fundamentalist religion over the secular wickedness of a Gaddafi. Or, to put it another way, it prefers the institutionalised oppression and sporadic torture and killing of one sex, as opposed to that of all unhappy citizens, equally. If, numerically, that looks like half the woe, it also represents redoubled misery for women deprived of autonomy inside and outside the home. But the arrangement is certainly tidier, even if the permanently victimised section of a hardline Islamist state is likely to include, if Iran is any guide, other non-people including gays, atheists, adulterers, apostates and Christians.

Clegg not having had the chance to define "hardline Islamist state", it remains unclear just how much female subjugation and torment he would be prepared to tolerate from such a regime before conceding that it might not – for women – amount to an improvement. Is he thinking along the lines of Chechnya, where women can still work, new dress regulations permitting: "Their heads should be covered with a headscarf, a dress that goes below the knee and sleeves that cover three quarters of the arm"? After all, British multiculturalists have repeatedly assured us that Islamic dress is oppression-free. Or are we talking about our friends in Saudi, where the prohibition on women's voting, on top of sharia-style apartheid and physical obliteration, earns it the lowest score (0) in the global league of female empowerment?

Even less than the length of a piece of string do our leaders seem able to disclose anything coherent about Gaddafi's opponents and the political future we have committed, through assisted regime change, to help them create. For all anyone knows, al-Qaida's gloating in its murderous glossy magazine, Inspire, and Niall Ferguson's talk of a caliphate are just as otiose as Blair's jawdropping exhortation, given his legacy of mayhem, for the west to show "the courage of our convictions, and the self-confident belief we can achieve them". Tunisia and Egypt should also be very afraid. "They now need our help," Blair wrote, adding generously: "It is up to the emerging leaders of those nations to decide their political systems."

As in Britain, these leaders have already shown a marked tendency to be male. In Tunisia, only two women serve in the transitional government. In Egypt a "committee of wise men" was formed. After Mubarak's deposition, women's day was marked by assaults on and arrests of women, some of whom endured virginity tests. There are no women on the committee drafting constitutional change. "We are furious," the Egyptian feminist, Nawal El Saadawi told an American interviewer. "We participated in every part of the revolution, and then as soon as it ended we were completely isolated." She was asked what women in the west could do. "They can support us by fighting their own governments, because your governments are the ones that interfere in our life, by going and invading and colonising other countries."