Men Should Care about the War on Iran

Containing foreign powers is prudent. But demonizing entire countries in order to launch endless wars is driven by the same alliance of feminists and neocons/tradcons that scold and demonize men.

An updated version of my piece on Iranian-American relations has just been published by the Forum for Democracy International, a Dutch think tank. The result provides essential background about the conflict that no one else is making.

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As expected, my posting of the original version received less interest and more pushback that most of my posts. Though a bit off-topic for me, it is connected with the issues I normally address.

Men who resist the feminist agenda are increasingly conservative and often religious, but as they move right they encounter nothing but hostility from the professional conservative political class, including churches. These “tradcons” are the same well-paid establishment conservatives as the “neocons” who embroil us in pointless “forever wars” in Ukraine, the Middle East, and globally. Among their favorite rationalizations for permanent warfare against the world is the relentless holy crusade against “misogyny”. As historian David Starkey puts it, men must die for the right of women to wear miniskirts. Feminists like Naomi Wolf and Phyllis Chesler personify this alliance.

And why have leftists become precisely the militarists they opposed so stridently during the Vietnam War? The same reason they have become lock-’em-up authoritarians: The Left has been taken over by feminists, who have consisistently been the most militaristic and authoritarian pressure group in American history.

I explore this realignment in my recent book, Who Lost America? (esp. chap. 5). But here is a brief excerpt from my earlier book, The New Politics of Sex (pp. 375-376):

“When the war in Afghanistan began, the liberation of Afghan women was one of the most important justifications for military intervention,” Wazhma Frogh points out in the Washington Post, and the words of the Bush administration bear her out. Feminists seemed quite content to see the war in Afghanistan continue, even after every other military or political justification had evaporated, in what strategist William Lind calls the “war for women”: “The important question…is which stipulations the Obama White House regards as domestic political requirements. One leaps from the page: ‘the equality of women.’”

While feminists are embarrassed by this newfound source of power, it does not stop them from using it. “Women for Afghan Women deeply regrets having a position in favor of maintaining, even increasing troops," says one Western feminist group, whose regrets about the position they hold are evidently not deep enough to prevent them from holding it. "We are not advocates for war, and conditions did not have to reach this dire point, but we believe that withdrawing troops means abandoning 15 million women and children to madmen who will sacrifice them to their lust for power." This is not the first time that feminists have justified war and male deaths for the sake of gender equality. Esther Hyneman of this group, who apparently believes the US (and especially US men) can do nothing right, justifies her demand for prolonged endangerment and sacrifice of American male lives by the US failure to provide adequate psychotherapy. “The United States have done a terrible job there," Hyneman declares. "We've promoted the warlords, financed the warlords. We should have demanded that the warlords be bought before a court, a trial, a reconciliation process.” Even Code Pink, the leading feminist anti-war group, came to believe that war is peace, or at least a method for liberating women: “Without international troops…armed groups could return with a vengeance—and that would leave women most vulnerable.” Much as Western feminists were long the main lobby for increasing police and incarceration, so they are now emerging as the foremost domestic pressure group advocating war. “A growing number of Afghan women say the development process is far removed from their needs, and hampered by foreign donors' focus on short-term wins,” or at least the Christian Science Monitor says it. War brings faster results. "Those who are against the progress of women are stronger than we are," says journalist and activist Jamila Mujahed, who also wants more troops. Here once again the ironies demonstrate that the feminists cannot transcend — they can only politicize — the “stereotypes” they so stridently attack. What the media cannot bring themselves to admit is that feminists are insisting that women need men to protect and die for them. "In the current situation of terrorism, we cannot say troops should be withdrawn," Shinkai Karokhail, an Afghan woman activist. "International troop presence here is a guarantee for my safety."

Yet after risking and sacrificing their lives for the women, these troops will not be lauded as protectors. They will be demonized as killers. “American feminists are no doubt willing to see the war go on indefinitely in pursuit of their fantasy,” writes Linn. “After all, most of the American dead are male soldiers and Marines, a type of man feminists particularly loathe.”

The “oppression” of women in Muslim countries is problematic, to say the least. I am grateful to a reader for sending a video by Karen Straughan, and I have described a more complicated picture of the relationshiup between feminism and Islamism in “The Sexual Jihad”, published in New Male Studies. I invite further discussion of how far men are obligated to die for Western notions of women’s liberation. More information on the true status of women in Islamic countries would be especially helpful.

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Better Ways to Deal with Iran

25 June 2025 (updated)

Hostility between America and Iran is not the norm. The history of their rich and mostly amicable relations suggests more constructive approaches to the Islamic Republic than war.

Most Americans do not realize the tragedy that is represented by the current estrangement between Iran and the United States. Past generations of Iranians and Americans enjoyed cordial and even warm relations. Persia (as it was long known) was familiar to American school children and churchgoers from the classical histories of Greece and from the Bible as the empire that freed the Israelites from the Babylonian Captivity and allowed the return to their homeland. When Russian and British imperialists carved up Persia into spheres of influence in the nineteenth century, Americans remained aloof and retained the favor of Persian liberals in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11. An American economist, Morgan Shuster, served in the Constitutional government, and his book, The Strangling of Persia, excoriated the power grabs by Russia and Britain. Like the British, the Americans eventually disappointed Persia’s resistance fighters by refusing to support the liberal Revolution. Yet one exception stands out: my great uncle Howard Baskerville. (…)

You can read the rest at the Forum for Democracy International.

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If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you can find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Now available: Ask this book a question using ChatGPT.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.