Alas, a Blog

For a change, this and several posts to follow (to be posted over the next few days) won’t directly discuss the situation of women in Iraq (although everything about Iraq relates to Iraqi women, of course). Instead, I wanted to recommend several articles and blog posts about the political and military situation in Iraq. Some of this will be very old hat to some readers, but for others it will hopefully be interesting.

First, David Corn very usefully posts an outline of the situation in Iraq, written by Larry Johnson, “a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State Department.” Johnson makes a convincing case that the US, as a matter of cold fact, lacks the political will or military ability to remake Iraq. Here’s a sample, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

We could potentially defeat the Sunni insurgents if we were willing and able to deploy sufficient troops to control the key infiltration routes that run along the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys. But we are neither willing nor able. It would require at least 380,000 troops devoted exclusively to that mission. Part of that mission would entail killing anyone who moved into controlled areas, such as roadways. In adopting those kinds of rules of engagement we would certainly increase the risk of killing innocent civilians. But, we would impose effective control over those routes. That is a prerequisite to gaining control over the insurgency.

We cannot meet the increased manpower requirements in Iraq without a draft. We do not currently have enough troops in the Army and the Marine Corps to supply and sustain that size of force in the field. But, even with a draft, we would be at least 15 months away from having the new batch of trained soldiers ready to deploy. More importantly, there is no political support for a draft. In other words, we’re unwilling to do what is required to even have a shot at winning.

While the insurgency is not likely to acquire sufficient strength to fight and defeat our forces directly in large set piece battles, they do have the wherewithal to destroy infrastructure and challenge our control of lines of communication. The ultimate test of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it can protect its citizens from threats foreign and domestic. Thus far the Iraqi Government has made scant progress on this front.

I have to resist the impulse to quote Johnson’s entire article; it’s short, but it describes concisely the realities in Iraq that hawks have simply refused to acknowledge, let alone provide a realistic response to.

Too many hawks discuss our options in Iraq as if we’re choosing between withdrawal and victory in Iraq. What is “victory in Iraq”? I’d suggest that, at a minimum, victory requires the establishment of a stable democracy in which (to quote Johnson) “the average Iraqi can move around the country without fear of being killed or kidnapped.” (And remember, the average Iraqi is a woman). That doesn’t seem too much to ask for – but it’s far more than the American military or executive branch is realistically capable of offering.

Bottom line: It doesn’t matter how morally correct an outcome is if it’s not something that we can feasibly bring about in the real world.

I have a lot of open links about women’s rights in Iraq – or, more accurately, about the destruction of women’s rights in Iraq, brokered by the Bush administration. It’s amazing – they’ve actually managed to make Iraq, already a pit for human rights, even worse. It’s as if they rushed into a burning building screaming “mission of mercy! mission of mercy!” and then set an additional three floors on fire. And now that they’ve put misogynistic fascists into power in Iraq, they want a medal for a job well done.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, has a must-read article in the Independent, about women’s reality in Bush’s Iraq (link via Bitch PhD). Here’s a bit of Mahmoud’s essay:

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed – notably in the city of Mosul – and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. […] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly – the country’s parliament – have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq. This has been pursued under the name of liberation, but what we actually see is women increasingly losing their freedom, while political Islamists feel free to terrorise them. […]

The constitution is set to add to a growing fearfulness among Iraqi women, as their rights are passed over or signed away to Islamists hostile to Iraq’s entire female population. Women in Iraq face being dragged back into the dark ages. We need to stop this tragedy before it’s too late. A constitution based on enslaving women, religious sectarianism, and tribalism must be rejected.

The USA has replaced a brutal, relatively secular tyrant with thousands of brutal religious fundamentalist tyrants. Without ignoring or soft-pedaling what a monster Hussain was, it’s clear that the US’s invasion has made things worse for women in Iraq. To call this state of affairs “freedom” is a sick Orwellian joke. Echidne writes:

Nobody really cares about women’s rights in Iraq, certainly not within the U.S. government. Bush wouldn’t have attacked the country if he had cared about the rights of women. Iraq used to have one of the most egalitarian legal systems for women, and look what we have wrought! Oh, I forgot, no more rape rooms. Though, they don’t matter much as many women don’t dare to go out in any case, fearing kidnapping and rape.

So who wins? Amanda sharply observes:

If you look at it from that angle–that fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians are just two flavors of the same patriarchal religion–then one thing becomes quite obvious. The winners of the Iraqi War are not the Americans and not the Iraqis, but the fundamentalists. On both sides of the conflict, fundamentalists have been able to use this war as leverage to make progress towards their ideal society–a strict hierarchy where the men on top of society have absolute power over other men and men have absolute power over women.

Click.

Like Amanda, I don’t believe this was a conspiracy. But I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that an administration headed by religious fundamentalists actively pushed for a “compromise” in which women’s rights are to be crushed by religious fundamentalists. The things you compromise on are the things that you consider disposable.

Too often, the question of leaving Iraq is framed as “abandoning” the Iraqis. I have sympathy for this view, I really do. Pam’s House Blend makes a strong, women-centered case for not “abandoning” Iraq.

But then I think, what activities would we be abandoning?

Should we abandon “helping” Iraqi women by using a fixed election to legitimize a government that is so consumed by women-hatred that if it were a person we’d have to put it in a rubber cell? Should we abandon putting into power people who see a woman’s face and their first thought is to splash acid into it?

Put another way, if we refuse to abandon our policy of destroying through horrible alliances and power-plays every part of Iraq we haven’t already destroyed with our boundless incompetence, are we really doing ordinary Iraqis a favor?

Digby writes:

I am now officially an isolationist. Not because I don’t think that Americans should spend its blood and treasure on foreigners. It’s because I don’t think the world can take much more of our “freedom and democracy.”

The “how can we abandon Iraqis” argument assumes that the US is capable of doing some good in Iraq. I don’t have faith in that anymore. It doesn’t matter if helping Iraqis is the right thing to do, because our government is either evil or incompetent. You can’t drain a thousand miles of acid-laced swamp when your only tool is a broken wacky straw.

Shakespeare’s Sister writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

No, it ought not happen. And yes, it’s happening. And somehow we’ll continue thinking of ourselves as “the good guys,” the rescuers, the heroes, the force for freedom, as Iraqi women in fundy-ruled zones drop out of jobs, university, walks to the store and basically the entire public sphere, the entire ball of wax we call participating in society, for fear of state-sanctioned acid and rape and kidnapping and murder. This is how we’ve freed the women of Iraq. The American capacity for self-delusion is awesome; I sit before it and gape, open-mouthed, except perhaps my mouth is really open because I’m screaming. It doesn’t matter, anyway; it’s over, no one is listening, we’ve ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women, and we can’t or won’t fix the damage we’ve done. Time for the victory party.