Rockville, MD ¨ 23 April 2001 ¨ wshingleton@juno.com

The Soapbox Archive

Why Major Martha McSally Is Wrong

On the front page of Wednesday's USA Today was a stark reminder of why countries from Italy to Japan are debating the presence of U.S. forces on their territory. Major Martha McSally, the U.S. Air Force's highest ranking female fighter pilot, absolutely skewered the rules governing U.S. military women in Saudi Arabia. In the process, she showed exactly the kind of narrow-mindedness that breeds perceptions of the ugly American around the world.

Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist Islamic state. Courts in the kingdom are run according to Islamic law, and the House of Saud feels that it is the divinely appointed protector of Islam's two most holy cities, Mecca and Medina. From the Western perspective, women in Saudi Arabia have a very low social status. They are forced to cover everything except their hands and their faces when going outside. They do not have the right to drive or vote (although there are no meaningful elections in Saudi Arabia to begin with). Like other Gulf states, the social assumption is that any woman who is alone outside, especially at night, is a prostitute.

When the United States first sent troops to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Bush (I) administration had to negotiate the rules for women affiliated with the U.S. forces. Women in every branch were required to wear a head scarf and a neck-to-toe robe known as an abaya any time they left their bases; they were not to drive. Men are required to wear pants and collared shirts.

Maj. McSally has been fighting the dress restrictions for several years. In 1995, she appealed directly to then-Secretary of Defense Perry in an attempt to get the dress code for military women in Saudi Arabia changed. At one point, she threatened to directly disobey orders by refusing to wear an abaya and headscarf off base. Frustrated with the pace of change wrought by these internal efforts, Maj. McSally finally had a front-page interview with USA Today, claiming that the U.S. policy treated her "like a Muslim piece of property." (The full text of the article is available at http://usatoday.com/news/acovwed.htm)

Major McSally is wrong. The abaya, like many traditions associated with Muslims, is not Islamic in origin at all. Like the headscarf, the abaya dates from the Arab conquest of Persia and has since become intertwined in the culture and religion of Wahabbism, the political, cultural, and religious belief system that is the foundation of the Saudi state. Other Muslim states, such as Pakistan, Indonesia, or Nigeria, have very different rules.

More to the point, Major McSally, like all of the 5,000 Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia, is there as the guest of the Saudis, and in Saudi Arabia it is politically, culturally, and religiously incorrect for women to be dressed as they are in the West. Why should an American guest be flaunting the morality of her hosts? Ponder, for a moment, a similar situation. In Europe, it is completely acceptable for women to go topless at the beach, particularly in the Mediterranian states. However, if the wife of a French ambassador (or a French ambassador herself) were to go topless at an American beach, she would probably be visited by the police. Americans at that beach (other than the odd pervert) would be offended. In the United States, the boundaries of acceptability are different than they are in Europe. In Saudi Arabia, they are different than in the United States. But each country and each culture gets to set its own rules.

Part of living in another country is adjusting to such rules. When I was in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, it took me only one experience to realize that it was perfectly acceptable for women to wear miniskirts but it was by no means acceptable for me to wear shorts. As the foreigner, it is not my place to claim that this cultural rule was somehow wrong or should not apply to me, even though I was working at the U.S. embassy. Whatever one thinks of President Bush, he is right about one thing - U.S. foreign policy needs to get a lot more humble and a lot less preachy about things like this.

Major McSally also makes the argument that "I understand for security reasons why we need to be allied with the Saudis. But, it is also part of our national security strategy to promote American values abroad." However, promoting American values is not the U.S. mission in Saudi Arabia. There is an undercurrent both in the article and in general public sentiment that we are in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to do those states a favor out of the goodness of our hearts. This is a fiction that has lived since the days of the Gulf War, when people believed that we were fighting for the freedom of Kuwait. Nothing can be further from the truth. We are in the Gulf for one reason and one reason only - oil. We did not stop the Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of Congo. We did roll back the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The difference in the situations is the oil card. The U.S. government feels that it is in America's interests to protect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Happily for those states, these interests coincide with their interests in deterring Saddam Hussein. Promoting Maj. McSally's Christian or American values is counterproductive toward that goal, and is certainly not the mission of U.S. military forces.

Besides, this is not an issue of the state. Even without the Saudi government, having American women trucking around Saudi Arabia in what to the Saudis is shocking dress is the surest way to build opposition to the U.S. deployment there. The rest of the world already has the impression that the United States is amoral, rude, and has more interest in pop culture than foreign culture. Maj. McSally just gave the rest of the world one more reason to believe that.

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