Women leaders can better than male ones and a comparison between Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair proves this to be so, as incredible as that may sound at first. Recently, I have argued in this forum that electing women leaders improves society in ways that go beyond the decisions taken by those individual female leaders. I have been surprised to find that most DK commenters disagree with this premise. For example, DK commenters have cited Margaret Thatcher as proof that electing women leaders is not, in itself, a progressive goal.
I would like to address that anecdotal case to show that it tends to prove the opposite of what DK readers intend to prove when offering the Thatcher example (to the extent that one example can "prove" anything at all).
When I propose here at DailyKos that Hillary Clinton will make an excellent president, DK commenters inevitably cite her vote on Iraq as proof that she should not be president, because issues of war and peace are paramount. If so, then Margaret Thatcher - a woman -was a much better prime minister than Tony Blair - a man - on the very issue which is paramount to so many at DailyKos - on the SOLE CRITERIA OF THE ISSUE OF WAR AND PEACE, excluding all other criteria from this analysis. To put it simply, while Tony Blair dragged Great Britain unwillingly into Iraq, yet Margaret Thatcher did not introduce Great Britain into any serious conflict during her entire eleven-year tenure. [
http://en.wikipedia.org/... ] While one hundred and fourteen UK soldiers have died in Iraq during the 1220 days that the UK has been at war under Mr. Tony Blair, there is no comparable example of a similar war under Margaret Thatcher. [
http://icasualties.org/... ]
Thatcher's opportunities for adventurous wars were legion. "She was a philosophic soulmate of Ronald Reagan . . ." [ http://en.wikipedia.org/... ] And yet her only significant overseas adventures were the Falkland Islands war, which lasted for six weeks and resulted in relatively few casualties on either side, and Great Britain's perennial intervention in Northern Ireland, which she did not start and did not expand.
Consider the following Wikipedia article about the Falklands War under Thatcher and ask yourself whether the UK was as isolated and discredited internationally in the Falklands War as it is now, in Iraq under Tony Blair.
Falklands War
The Falklands War of 1982 was the largest armed conflict over the sovereignty of the islands. The War was largely started following the occupation of South Georgia by Argentine scrap merchants. However the UK had also reduced its presence in the Islands, by announcing the withdrawal of HMS Endurance, the Royal Navy's icebreaker ship and only permanent presence in the South Atlantic. The UK had also denied Falkland Islanders full British citizenship under the British Nationality Act 1981.
Argentina invaded the Islands on April 2, 1982. Immediately, the UK severed diplomatic ties with Argentina, and began to assemble a task force to retake the Islands. A diplomatic charm offensive began to gain support from the United Nations Security Council, the European Community and the United States for economic and military sanctions against Argentina. The UN Security Council issued a Resolution, calling on Argentina to withdraw from the Islands. The European Community also condemned the invasion and imposed economic sanctions on Argentina. France and Germany also cancelled several military contracts with the Argentine military. The United States supported mediated talks and initially took a neutral stance, although in private, substantial material aid was made available to the UK from the moment of invasion. The USA publicly supported the UK's position following the failure of peace talks.
The British Task Force began offensive action against Argentina on April 30, 1982 and recaptured South Georgia following a short naval engagement. The Operation to recover the Falkland Islands began the next day, on May 1. A series of naval and air engagements took place over the next few weeks before an amphibious landing at San Carlos Bay. On June 14, the Argentine forces surrendered and control of the islands returned to the UK. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/... ]
In fact, unlike Tony Blair's Iraq adventure, the Falklands war was popular in the UK and had support of Great Britain's allies internationally, which compares quite positively with Tony Blair's increasingly unpopular involvement in Iraq that has become an international embarrassment for him and his country.
Morever, there were clearly international provocations that Thatcher could have used as a pretext for a massive invasion of another country but did not:
On the early morning of October 12, 1984, the day before her 59th birthday, Thatcher narrowly escaped from the Brighton hotel bombing carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army during the Conservative Party conference. Five people died in the attack, including Roberta Wakeham, wife of the government's Chief Whip John Wakeham, and the Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry. A prominent member of the Cabinet, Norman Tebbit, was injured, along with his wife Margaret, who was left paralysed. Thatcher herself would have been killed, if not for the fact that she was using the bathroom at the exact moment that the IRA bomb detonated [citation needed]. Thatcher insisted that the conference open on time the next day and made her speech as planned in defiance of the bombers, a gesture which won widespread approval across the political spectrum. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/... ]
By showing that Thatcher was a better war and peace prime minister than Tony Blair, I hope to make two other points which are much more important:
(1) War and peace are not the only issues on which a president or presidential candidate should be judged, because there are other important criteria as well. This is why we still revile Margaret Thatcher even though she was a better war and peace president than Tony Blair.
(2) If war and peace be the primary criteria, we are forced to admit that, in the case of Margaret Thatcher, electing a conservative woman brought much more peace than electing an ostensibly progressive man.
I have not endeavored to prove in this particular diary that electing a woman is a progressive goal. But I hope that in the future when I assert that it is a progressive goal, DK commenters will refrain from offering the Margaret Thatcher example to prove the opposite. On issues of war and peace, Ms. Margaret Thatcher was a much more moderate and progressive prime minister than her male successor, Tony Blair.
Of course all of this proves nothing at all except anecdotally, as to whether electing women to high office is a progressive thing to do. I always thought that it was obvious that electing progressive women in Government was a progressive goal, [ http://www.emilyslist.org/... ] but, here at DailyKos, this apparently is not obvious at all.