Women's Liberation

by hilzoy

George W. Bush:

"In the last four years, we have also seen women make great strides in Afghanistan and Iraq -- countries where just a few years ago women were denied basic rights and were brutalized by tyrants."

George W. Bush:

"The advance of freedom in the greater Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women. And America will do its part to continue the spread of liberty."

George W. Bush:

"In the face of great challenges, Iraqi women are building a better nation for themselves and their families."

From the Washington Post:

"Browsing the shelves of a cosmetics store in the Karrada shopping district, Zahra Khalid felt giddy at the sight of Alberto shampoo and Miss Rose eye shadow, blusher and powder.

Before leaving her house, she had covered her body in a billowing black abaya and wrapped a black head scarf around her thick brown hair. She had asked her brother to drive. She had done all the things that a woman living in Baghdad is supposed to do these days to avoid drawing attention to herself.

It was the first time she had left home in two months.

"For a woman, it's just like being in jail," she said. "I can't go anywhere." (...)

Bushra Shimirya, 42, had considered herself an independent woman. That changed dramatically in just a few months, she said. She knew things were bad when she could no longer drive her car.

"Anyone who's in her 20s and drives a car for the first time, you feel very happy and very independent," she said. "Like you can do anything."

Since the Samarra bombings, she said, she has felt she can do almost nothing.

Relatives had seen fliers warning women not to drive. They pleaded with her to stop. She resisted.

Shimirya, who has a doctorate in psychological studies, had been driving since she was 20.

But the stares started to bother her. They came from men anytime they saw her behind the wheel of her 1984 Toyota Crown.

So she hired a car service to take her to her job at Baghdad University. She stopped going out unless it was necessary. No more dinners with her girlfriends. No more walking the streets of her affluent Mansour neighborhood.

"It's become so bad that a woman who drives a car will be slaughtered, and a woman who doesn't put a scarf on her hair will be slaughtered," she said.

When classes ended in July, Shimirya and her husband, an engineer, sold their cars, locked up their large, modern-style house and headed to Dubai."

We report; you decide.

Comments

[Ugh]

You know, I can see how people think that women in Afghanistan are better off(in terms of their rights) after the invasion (and I would guess still are), how anyone could get that impression of women in Iraq is beyond me. IIRC six to eight months after the Iraq (if not sooner)invasion there were reports of women not having the freedom to do things that they could under Saddam.

Do people not tell this man anything that doesn't comport with his world view? Can someone place sit him down and explain to him exactly WTF is going on in the world today?

Jim Webb should have slugged him.

[John Thullen]

This proves that Saddam was a femi-Nazi.

Which rhymes with Obama.

I don't know why the ladies just can't be satisfied with shock and awe and get on with a couple of more centuries of second-class status.

You know, we took Saddam out because the 9/11 hijackers couldn't handle western corruption, especially the part where women learn to drive a stick. By restoring Sharia, would-be terrorists will stay home and find better things to do than bother us.

Add 12 more paragraphs that begin "Hilzoy, you seem to think.." or "Hilzoy, I suppose you want us to....".

There, I've saved a couple of people some hot air and shortened the thread. With that sort of efficiency, we should be able to fire 721,489 bloggers on Monday.

[CaseyL]

I think most of the Right has dropped that fig-leaf claim that Bush liberated the masses, in favor of proclaiming the virtues of destroying "lousy little Third World countries" for the randy-making hell of it.

Bush - who, to answer Ugh's question, does not know or care what goes on outside the fantasies in his head - will no doubt continue to think of himself as the man who's freed more people than anyone else in history. (And, yes, he did make exactly that claim.)

[Pooh]

Freedom is messy.

[CharleyCarp]

Ugh, I think it's fair to say that the situation for women in Afghanistan is not better than it was in late 2002. I've never believed in the whole transformative domino effect thing -- I mean, what impact does Canadian politics have in the US, after all -- but if one ever wanted to have a "model," you'd think the country where the invasion was (and remains) relatively popular, where the moral highground was obvious, and where the downside risks (in terms of [a] oil's role in the global economy and [b] our rivalry with Iran, and [c] our relationship with the Saudis) were considerably less.

Nothing ventured nothing gained, I guess.

[Ugh]

Charley - I would agree with that, I just meant that I think that women in Afghanistan are better off now than they were pre-invasion; there's no doubt there worse off now than they were in late 2002.

My prescription for Afghanistan after we invaded was to "kill them with kindness" and undertake a massive rebuilding campaign for that country. The MBF in the whitehouse had other plans, sadly.

[jpe]

This was eminently foreseeable. Getting rid of a secular tyrant and allowing a conservative religious populous the right to self-determination makes it fairly obvious that women won't fare as well.

[ScottM]

If I remember correctly, in the 1980s Iraq was a relatively good country about Women's Rights. It was the 1990s, after his defeat in Gulf War I, that Saddam started swerving fundamentalist to appease his people.

Did his increasing capture by Sunni fundamentalists spur more Shia fundamentalism? Was the majority of the country far more religious, just too oppressed to inflict their view on others, or were they inflamed by Saddam's desperate attempt to paint his regime as religious?