{"id":1806,"date":"2005-08-26T08:40:46","date_gmt":"2005-08-26T15:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/08\/26\/links-about-womens-rgihts-in-iraq\/"},"modified":"2005-08-26T08:40:46","modified_gmt":"2005-08-26T15:40:46","slug":"links-about-womens-rgihts-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1806","title":{"rendered":"This is how we've freed the women of Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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. […]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So who wins? Amanda sharply observes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> makes a strong, women-centered case for not “abandoning” Iraq.<\/p>\n

But then I think, what activities would we be abandoning?<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Digby writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The “how can we abandon Iraqis” argument assumes that the US is capable <\/i>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.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare’s Sister writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iraq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}