Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Good News



This:

US President Barack Obama announced Friday the creation of a new foreign policy position designed to tackle global women's issues.

Obama named Melanne Verveer, an aide in former president Bill Clinton's administration, as ambassador-at-large for international women's issues. She will serve at the State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The appointment, which has to be approved by the Senate, "is unprecedented and reflects the elevated importance of global women?s issues to the president and his entire administration," the White House said in a statement.

Clinton has put efforts to improve the lot of women at the heart of boosting international development, which she says must be an "equal partner" with diplomacy and defense in US foreign policy.

This is good news, because it's important to view international relationships with other countries not just through their mostly male leaderships, and because the usual way of thinking tends to make us blind in some ways. As an example of the latter, remember how George Bush was to liberate Iraq? Yet that liberation was seldom viewed from the point of view of the majority of living Iraqis, women. It was as if the term 'citizen' only applied to men.