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?
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.
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.
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The New Iraq ™ will almost assuredly criminalize homosexuality. I would love to see a reporter ask Bush what his intetions are towards GLBT asylum seekers from Iraq.
Would he grant them asylum? Pretty fucking embarrasing to have to grant people asylum from a country he helped set up. It’s also make him look like a total shithead (which he is) if he refused to.
I have been a defender of what’s been going on in Iraq. I think that it was a good thing to get rid of Saddam. I figure that Saddam would have killed more people over the last two years than have been killed due to a resistance by mostly either foreign elements or ex-Baathists. And the fact that a U.N. investigation didn’t find any WMDs doesn’t mean that a) there’s nothing buried out in the sands somewhere or b) that there’s weren’t WMDs in Iraq at the time that this whole thing started.
But I will not defend a reduction in women’s rights. Not at all. Once again we are seeing a lack of planning on the Bush administration’s part on “What happens after we take Baghdad?” The one hope here is that since Iraq has been highly secularized, it may be that over-Islamicization of the proposed Constitution will be rejected by the electorate and that in a subsequent version this will be fixed. But I’m giving no odds one way or another on that happening.
Laura Bush’s husband doesn’t even notice. He’s got his antacids and his bar weights.
Bush isn’t an exercise addict, there’s no such thing. I’ve figured out, though, that he seems to be doing what they say about recovering drug users who pick up a heavy cigarette habit. They call it self-medicating. It’s nothing of the sort.
That is, unless one goes through ten boxes of Maalox in a full moon.
Poor George. He’s living with a clean drawer of silver spoons.
It’s an unspeakably depressing situation. It makes you feel so helpless. Here in the UK the Government are trying to deport some Iraqi assylum seekers because “Iraq is now a safe country” …or at least some parts of it might be safe. Yeah, now that’s a risk I’d love to take if I was an Iraqi.
This subject just makes me too passionate. I think Laura Bush, and even more fittingly, the Bush twins as well as their grandmother should be sentenced to a lifetime of wearing Burkas wherever they go and risking having acid thrown in their face if their hair isn’t sufficiently covered. And while we’re at it, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton as well as all of the female family members of those who set in motion this obscene abandonment of any principle that Americans are supposed to hold dear — whether it’s rejection of empire and theocracy or the promotion of individual rights. For fucking domestic political gain.
I still can’t believe that Hillary Clinton is soliciting money from me. I think any letter I could write to explain why it will never be forthcoming would just draw secret service interest. And BTW — why is everyone so obsessed with the Bush twins “not serving” (notice that they have been deposited in a foreign country for the duration) and no one has said squat about Chelsea whose mother played her small but indispensable role here.
I’m too angry, don’t respond, this isn’t meant to be a real position.
What Barbara said. It’s real enough for me. [scowl]
Russ Feingold, the supposed great White Lefty hope du jour for 2008, says we can surely get out of there in a mere 16 months.
Yup. That’s the “far Left” position: Out in 16 months.
NOTA help us all.
I think it is unfair to say that Bush doesn’t care for women’s rights in the new Iraq. I can see a lot of areas where our invasion is promoting equality for women.
For example, it used to be that only men were employed in the rape rooms; at Abu Ghraib we’re trying to establish that women have just as much right to sexually abuse prisoners as men do.
Ah – gender equality, imperialist-style.
The U.S. generally doesn’t grant asylum to the countries it invades or sponsors coups in. When the U.S. sponsored coups which placed regimes in countries in L.A. which practiced mass murder, torture, kidnapping rape of hundreds of thousands of the country’s residents in the ’70s and ’80s, none of those fleeing like, Guatamala, El Salvador(good L.A. government) had nearly as easy time getting asylum as people fleeing Nicaragua(bad L.A. government).
But that’s okay, radfem. Because we can always send them books. :/
Just this sunday, some middle eastern “expert” on Meet the Press airily declared that women didn’t have the right to vote in the US at the turn of the 20th century, so this is progress! Well, many blacks didn’t really have the right to vote until 40 or 50 years ago after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, so would it be ok by him to tell the Turkomens and the Assyrian Christians that they’re losing their rights too?
This was posted as a devotional message on a site I read today. It is by MLK, I thought it a God thing that it came up while you posted your thread. Blessings.
“Violence as a way of achieving justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”
Wha…whaaa…whaaaaaat the fuck? You have got to be kidding me.
If it weren’t so effing depressing, I’d be almost reassured that the US isn’t the only completely lunatic administration with regards to how we see things in the middle east. As is, it’s just depressing.
Damnit, I just hope the Iraqi women know how sorry many of us are for this travesty. Little salve though it may be, my heart aches for them.
As if we needed any more evidence that King George is a heartless, clueless, misogynistic pile of dog shit–and, oh, boy, did I ever NOT want to hear this!
I truly and sincerely hope that some country that doesn’t have its head up its arse (obviously America no longer qualifies), say, Canada? will do the decent thing and offer asylum to any and every woman in Iraq who suffers adverse effects from this utterly revolting batch of fundamentalist male tyranny.
Earth to George: Iraq’s new regieme is freedom like Ann Coulter is a liberal. Like Hugh Hefner is the Pope. Like the sun rises in the west. Like the White House is on Mars (at least George’s brain would be home). Like up is down. No way, no how, and quite the opposite.
Earth to all the assholes in Iraq: Women are adults. ADULTS DO NOT NEED GUARDIANS!!!!! And beating should lead to the woman in question leaving, permanantly, not be allowed by law!
There was an episode of Star Trek: TNG that featured an ancient weapon that worked by turning an enemy’s force against him–he tries to kill, he dies, that sort of thing. It would be so cool if every woman in Iraq were given one that couldn’t be taken away from them and that only they could use.
Actually, everyone should have one. Keep us from hurting each other at all.
Barbara & Alsis–Better yet, George is the one who should be forced to wear a burqa. I don’t know how much the women in his family are liable for this, and I’m really not sure if he cares if THEY have to wear burqas. It’d probably go right over his head, or he wouldn’t be bothered all that much. He doesn’t seem to do much caring about women. On the other hand, I’m fairly sure he cares about himself. Besides, if he had to wear a burqa, maybe some Republicans would be uncomfortable having a male president who dresses like a woman, and finally vote to impeach him. They’re often funny that way–prejudice before ethics. Hmm, I think I just defined the entire platform of the Republican party. Too bad that doesn’t translate into the acronym of GOP–so far the best on that front is Greed Over Patriotism. Or maybe Greedy Obnoxious & Prejudiced. Yeah.
And let’s not forget how few Democrats are making this or any women’s rights an issue. Kudos to those who are, of course, but a whole lot of them seem to be attempting to make DFL stand for Defend Females Last.
Grrr.
Does anyone have a link to, or can quote the parts of the constitution that directly address the women’s rights issues that are being threatened? I’m not seeing the link that I thought I’d made with it, and not finding the actual verbatim.
What that guy on meet the press said was: “I mean, women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy.” Here is the transcript if you would like to read it. (It was their last item – scroll down) When I heard this, I was infuriated and I had to listen to it a few times just to be sure they had actually said that. So, 50% of the people’s rights are not important to the evolution of democracy HOW?!?
I find this situation incredibly frightening.
He simply meant that a society with democracy but without full civil participation for women could evolve on its own to having full participation for women, and that this is an improvement over a situation where women and men have equal rights but in a non-democratic context. The first scenario leads over time to a modern free society, the second does not.
The problem with this logic, even if we grant all the unproven assumptions, is that it’s basically a “get out of responsibility free” card for war advocates; so long as they can show that Iraq has had elections (even crooked faux- elections, such as the one we’ve seen), they can declare success no matter how unbelievably awful the actual situation is.
Bascially, hawks are incapable of ever accepting responsibility for the outcomes of their own policies. Gerecht is saying that it doesn’t matter to him how many Iraqi women are murdered, raped, beaten, scarred with acid, beheaded, etc; no matter how awful the actual situation on the ground, he will claim it’s a victory for the hawks and Bush.
But if the war had been sold on that basis to the American people before it began – “we’re invading, and your sons and daughters will die, to create a sham democracy in which extreme fundimentalist Islamic men will at last have the freedom to splash acid in the faces of women who don’t wear a burka” – I don’t think America would have bought it.
Finally, in many ways, women in American in 1900 were far freer than women in Bush’s Iraq are now.
The problem with this logic, even if we grant all the unproven assumptions, is that it’s basically a “get out of responsibility free” card for war advocates; so long as they can show that Iraq has had elections (even crooked faux- elections, such as the one we’ve seen), they can declare success no matter how unbelievably awful the actual situation is.
So? This is a problem for you – a political opponent of the war. That something creates a political problem for one side or the other does not go to whether the underlying logic is valid or not.
And yeah, the actual situation is pretty awful in many ways. (And pretty good in other ways.) I’m not sure what that has to do with the price of peanuts. We’re in the middle of an unconventional war, and some things have gone to shit. That’s what things do.
Now, I would raise the bar slightly higher than you have. I’d say the elections need to be reasonably free and fair, and they weren’t the first time – which is to be expected, given that a big chunk of the population boycotted them. As that chunk comes to understand that the government is going to be in existence whether they vote in the system or not, that boycott will dissipate and the system will gain more and more legitimacy.
I would not characterize Iraq as a success. Nor would I characterize World War II as a victory for the Allies, if it were 1941.
There are hard years ahead. The left’s willingness to declare defeat now and focus on how best to withdraw from the world is pretty much the entire reason you will never again be entrusted with power by the electorate. We can’t afford the short-term outlook or the parochial focus on the interest group of choice. Bush may be a trudging, stolid Zhukov, rather than a flashy Guderian, but we all know how that one came out.
Before people rightfully trounce Robert’s uber-sexist reduction of half the population to an “interest group” whose right to decide how their country is governed is not necessary for “reasonably free and fair” elections, try to keep in mind that his opinions are disturbingly similar to many leftist men’s beliefs about women’s rights here in America. I remember a certain Democratic presidential candidate from last year who also said women’s rights are a special interest group.
That Kerry said it to a room full of feminist women should have created more waves than it did. Men are not on women’s side, not conservative men and not liberal men. We’ve got to do this ourselves, sisters. I’m thankful for the few pro-feminist men out there lending their hands and hearts to help, but we women really need to get our political selves out there and stop joking about a women’s political party. There are more women than Libertarians, Greens, Constitutionalists, Socialists and Independents.
I’m in the mood for a revolution.
Samantha, women are an interest group. Any entity that isn’t the entire population, is by definition an interest group. You can decry the horrid sexism of this all day long; all that does is establish that you aren’t serious about discussing the issues. In addition, the “women” being discussed in Iraq aren’t a monolith. There are a lot of women who are very worried and scared by the bad things that are happening – and a lot of other women who are probably glad they are happening, who want Sharia and all the rest of it. They’re badly misguided, in my view – but they’re women, and they don’t agree with the feminist position.
Finally, women’s right to be part of the governing of their country isn’t in doubt. It may be in peril downstream, but that isn’t what Amp’s post was about. Conflating the two questions and characterizing my statements as being an assault on the franchise shows that you are either unable or unwilling to rationally taxonomize the issues under discussion. Either way, it again goes to demonstration of a lack of seriousness.
People incapable of seriousness may be in the mood for a revolution, but they’re unlikely to get one.
You’re not fooling anyone. Those of us seriously interested in politics know what you meant by using the phrase “interest group” and it’s not simply another way of saying “millions of Iraqi women”. It’s a specific verbal ploy to make it sound as if millions of Iraqi women’s human rights are an unworthy inconvenience to the goal of democracy and suggests focusing on the women that are more than half the Iraqi population is too small and narrow focused (that’s what parochial means) to bother including in the wider discussion of what successfully bringing democracy to Iraq means. There a world of connotative difference between calling millions of people a group and calling them an “interest group” in political discussions.
When you said, “We can’t afford the short-term outlook or the parochial focus on the interest group of choice”, what you really mean is your group of choice, men, is the only group for whom democracy matters.
This is my last post to you in this thread because I am serious, I am rational, and we both know the connotation of “interest group” though one of us is pretending otherwise for curmudgeonly reasons I don’t care to pursue beyond this reply.
And yeah, the actual situation is pretty awful in many ways. (And pretty good in other ways.)
What the FUCK is wrong with you, Robert? I mean, seriously? Are women that much of a fucking joke to you? You dismiss more than half the population as an interest group? Guess what? YOU’RE an interest group. Let’s see you deal with what women have to.
If I get deployed again, I swear to God, I’m taking you with me. Let me show you what ‘pretty awful’ really looks like. Let me show you the woman in An Najaf, who was shot three times ine face while her four-year-old son watched—she led ‘an impure life.’ That’s where her son came from. Where’s the other participant? Oh, no big deal. He didn’t belong to an interest group.
They cut the little boy’s throat, by the way. Dol you know how long it takes to die that way? They did that to a child. That’s ‘pretty awful’ for you. ‘Pretty awful’.
Christ on a crutch. Pretty awful is when you get a bad haircut.
“We’ve got to do this ourselves, sisters. I’m thankful for the few pro-feminist men out there lending their hands and hearts to help, but we women really need to get our political selves out there and stop joking about a women’s political party. There are more women than Libertarians, Greens, Constitutionalists, Socialists and Independents.”
Nobody ever gets given rights and freedoms; they have to take them. The French did not give America independence. Blacks were not given equal rights, either here or in South Africa. Women were not given equal rights. And we’re not going to be able to give Iraq freedom from tyranny, whether it is a secular dictatorship or a theocracy. We can help them, but they have to step up at the end and make the final sacrifices to take it. That includes the citizenry overall (who are still trying to figure out the transition from being subjects to being citizens) and the women therein.
Ronf, did you miss the part about how we inflicted this mess on the Iraqis in the first place?
[snort] Sure, it can “evolve on its own now,” and we can smugly leave the women to “take” their own freedom, or whatever catchphrase Righties want us to use. After all, we have the oil and the bases, which is what this was all about from the start. No one with any common sense at all should have believed that this was ever about helping any woman, except perhaps the handful who might be on the boards of oil companies or munitions companies.
And those who make the excuse that our oh-so-learned experts are shocked –simply shocked !– that Fundamentalist religion obtained so ready a hold in a war-ravaged nation already brutalized by years of economic sanctions ? Brutalized by us– the good guys, the supposed secularists and champions of women ? On top of the brutality their own secular leader had already inflicted ?
Oh, please. Iran, in my lifetime, went from being a secular state to a Fundamentalist state, in no small measure because the arrogant fucks who design our foreign policy thought they had every right to displace a duly elected leader they didn’t want and to replace him with a brutal, secular despot that his own people didn’t want. Iran is hardly a unique case. Hell, if Democratic mouthpieces in this country had two brain cells and half a spine, they, too could point to the ascendancy in our Great Homeland of Fundie ideals as the economy goes further and further down the tubes. Our culture, too, is heading toward a dogmatic, regressive, church-state fusion in the face of far less turmoil and pain than the average Iraqi has had to deal with in the last 15-odd years.
But, no, Democrats couldn’t do that. To admit that Fundamentalism in this country offers such an allure would be to acknowledge that Democrats themselves have nothing to offer of comparable allure. Becuase they are yoked to corporate money, which conveniently undermines any professed ideals of helping the average citizen survive, much less thrive. Suffering from a serious lack of nerve and an utter lack of imagination, they can think of nothing to do but to self-servingly ape Fundies themselves (ie– Hilary’s “tragic choice” speech, Dean’s “stay the course” crap, etc). But I digress. Plus, they’d have to stop treating women as a “special interest,” and most aren’t any more evolved on that point than Robert is.
The insulated, sociopathic fuckwit “experts” making the TV-Radio circuit to show off their $800 suits and to indignantly claim that they “just didn’t know” this could happen are either morons, hopelessly self-deluded or lying through their miserable teeth. I lean toward the third. They knew. They didn’t care. Iraqi women are expendable. We all are, and only profit for a few corporate/military elites and their so-called “liberal” boot-lickers in D.C. and in the media ever really matters. The flag-waving, the crocodile tears about 911 ? The promises of “freedom from terrorism ?” Please. Anyone remember the dentist’s epitaph from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology ?
“…Why a moral truth is a hollow tooth
Which must be propped with gold”
http://www.bartleby.com/84/67.html
Robert speculates: There are a lot of women who are very worried and scared by the bad things that are happening – and a lot of other women who are probably glad they are happening, who want Sharia and all the rest of it.
i’d be really interested to hear some actual citations of Iraqi women who are “probably glad” about the “bad things” that are “happening”…
Where do people get this notion that women had “rights” under Saddam. Safety at the indulgence of a tyrant is no “right” at all, and it certainly isn’t freedom. This is one of the core values that was espoused in our own Declaration of Independence. And excuse me if I missed the part where Iraqi women were denied the right to vote. That’s a huge jump start over how our own democracy began.
Yes, the situation now is regrettable but at least there is a political process in place that will allow society to evolve in a more transparent manner. As long as Saddam was in power the fundamentalists could chafe and claim that they had the answers. Now they’ll have to put up or shut up.
Part of the problem also is that the Administration has not developed an effective response to Iran’s meddling in Iraq. Progress for women will be much slower in the ME until we have a coherent Iran policy.
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