On October 7, 2002, the President warned the American people about "the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," repeating what Condoleezza Rice and Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke had said a month earlier. Congress voted to grant Bush the power to invade Iraq on the 11th. Although she served for ten years on the board of directors of Chevron and used her Sovietology skills to secure oil contracts for that company throughout the Caspian and the former Soviet republics, Rice isn't perceived as an oilman of Dick Cheney's ilk. She is, but thanks to the stereotypes of our age, to most people she doesn't look it. Lest the public begin to perceive her too as part of the war machine oiligopoly, Rice constantly redirects attention to her personal "narrative" about growing up in segregated Alabama. Indeed, although African-Americans disproportionately opposed the US first-strike invasion of Iraq, and thanks to what amounts to a poverty draft are overrepresented among the occupation's US dead, Rice claims that the whole Iraqi operation is really about civil rights.

In August 2003 Rice addressed the National Association of Black Journalists: "Like many of you, I grew up around the home-grown terrorism of the 1960s. The bombing of the church in Birmingham in 1963 is one that will forever be in my memory because one of the girls who died was a friend of mine.... [Forty years later] we should not let our voice waver in speaking out on the side of people who are seeking freedom." Denying people the right to freedom, she said, "was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad."

Looking ahead, the worse things get for Bush, the more the Bushwomen will be busy. Who better to reassure an anxious nation than these women, whom most Americans know almost nothing about--thanks to the shallow coverage provided by a stereotype-sodden media? In public relations terms, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, whose personal story involves growing up on a family peach farm, is perfectly suited to the task of reassuring consumers that US food is safe to trade and eat, mad-cow disease and E. coli outbreaks notwithstanding. This past Christmas Day, Veneman told the nation she would be serving beef to her family. Not mentioned were her years of work on behalf of the nation's biggest industrial food corporations.

As the President's promises on job creation fall flat, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao fronts the Administration line that the economy is full of opportunity. Who better for that job than a self-described Chinese immigrant who is perceived to have risen to high office by dint of family determination, smarts and hard work alone? (Chao's well-connected family, her elite Mount Holyoke education and her marriage to one of the Republican Party's leading men, Mitch McConnell, rarely come up.)

As US fatalities crossed the 500 mark this January, Chao turned up in Baghdad with a message for Iraqi women. "In a democracy the most important factor is energy," she said. For their part, the Iraqi women requested that the United States institute quotas for women in the US-appointed Governing Council. Just weeks before Chao's visit, conservative clerics on that council had led a vote to scrap Iraq's 1959 family laws and place such issues under Muslim religious jurisdiction. Women, who make up a majority of the Iraqi population, received only three seats on the twenty-five-member council; no women participated in the Constitution-writing committee. Chao rejected any form of quotas--women should rise by their own efforts, she said. At the very same time, MADRE was reporting that Yanar Mohammed, founder of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq, was receiving death threats for her efforts to stand up for women's equality.

Iraq's women "are fighting for the soul of your country," Chao told the women she met there. Iraqi women hardly needed telling that they face a fight; their pressure ultimately helped defeat the Governing Council's family law resolution. The message they took from their meeting with Chao is that they can't expect much US help. Chao appears to have uttered not one word about Yanar Mohammed's plight. She did, however, leave the women of Iraq with a present: a framed photograph of her and other senior women officials at the US Labor Department.

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