"Women have long been props for war-making. Invasions are often justified in part by pointing to the suffering of women in the countries targeted for attack. “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” Laura Bush said when she took over her husband’s weekly radio address, in 2001, to urge Americans to support the war in Afghanistan. Like McMaster’s miniskirt photograph, Bush’s speech exemplifies the kind of pseudo-feminism sometimes used to justify invasion. The literary theorist and postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak calls it “white men saving brown women from brown men,” an imperial logic that ignores sexism at home to fight sexism abroad, and which disregards brown women’s agency and self-understanding. How women make sense of the situations in which they live—whether, for instance, they see the veil as oppressive or as a symbol of resistance or simply as an important religious practice—is irrelevant. Instead, imperialism is presented as a necessary act of deliverance. They don’t know how to treat their women; our job—really, our moral obligation—is liberation."