What can be done about the erosion of women's rights in Iraq?

[dArKeR]

By Margaret Owen

If the women of Iraq ever needed support from the international community, the UN, and, in particular, the UK government, it is now.
With only two weeks until the country's draft constitution is due to be ready (the deadline is August 15) who else can help Iraqi women prevent the total erosion of their human rights -- rights they have enjoyed, in a secular state, since 1959?

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who continues to justify the invasion of the country as the only means to topple a brutal dictatorship and help to establish democracy, now has an obligation to use all his powers to avert a new dictatorship in Iraq -- that of the mullahs over women.

The unparalleled violence of the past 30 years -- three wars, the horrors perpetrated by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the killings of thousands of Iraqi civilians since the occupation -- have meant the majority of the Iraqi population is female.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2005/08/01/2003265980

[Erika]

1. And many sects have already petitioned the govt for Sharia

law to send the women back decades in any civil rights in their "new" constitution. It seems our invasion or Iraq made the globalists rich and hurt women's rights badly. Hussein was secular and gave women freedom that surpassed other Arab States. Thanks W and Laura, for caring so much about women in the ME. You've sent them back decades.

[dArKeR]

3. As I posted 2.5 years ago. Friends who had visited Iraq - Warning Graphic

me.

Iraq was just about the freest country of all the Arab countries. Women could freely walk the streets alone. Women chose or chose not to wear head scarves. Women chose and chose not to wear make-up and perfume. Women freely chose their religion (including freedom to choose to be Christian. Women went out to cafes and pubs alone...

Just how did the American Whore Media lead American children to slaughter? Were their profits worth our childrens and Iraqi citizens blood?

[punpirate]

2. The expectation that Blair can or will do anything...

... in this regard is wholly without merit. He helped pry open the lid of the box, and now, he can't get all the horror back in again.

The Shia, having been oppressed for a long time, now become the oppressors.

It was true in Russia with the people against the czars, then in Israel, then in Iran, after the Shah, now in Iraq. It will take another generation or two, barring a miracle, for the Shia to give way to secular democracy.

If the US tries to interfere (as it has done for two years), the corruption will get worse and the puppet government will tighten around its religious laws--that's about all it has to hang onto--that and its majority--and the help of the US military.

*sigh*

[Teaser]

4. Nothing

it is far, far too late to do a single damn thing about Iraq.

The place is FUBAR. And it's our fucking fault.

[lvx35]

6. Yeah true, or at least there's nothing WE as americans can do about it.

They would never trust us to 'help' again.

[Erika]

5. I wonder how our women troops and the families of those

women who died will think of us setting women's rights back decades.

[wli]

7. not much, really. Offering women who care to leave US citizenship maybe

OTOH with the American analogue of the Taliban plotting their own Holocaust of the "insufficiently pro-war" and "insufficiently biblethumping" along with their deranged vision of turning every woman on the planet into an axolotl tank, they might have second thoughts.

[dArKeR]

8. Does anyone remember that interview a year back. A CNN Whore type

show. Interviewing some American Muslim women in studio. Talking about various Muslim customs. One woman said, "Talk about oppression. What about all the make-up and perfume an American women has to put. What about the informal rules that a woman has to expose her legs."


If one honestly looks at what ALL psychologists say... Men are constantly thinking about sex... One could assume that women are forced to dress almost exposing their vagina and breasts by Power Elite men/governments/corporations.

Most every girl I know says she hates having to shave her legs. So why do they?

[Demeter]

9. Not A Damn Thing

The US lost all credibility when it invaded Iraq. And all power. Bush can kill as many Iraqis as he has the ammo and boots on the ground, but he cannot influence minds--especially those he doesn't own outright. And one thing he's never understood about Arab culture--their minds are not for sale. No men in gray flannel suits out there.