Near civil meltdown in Iraq greets the third anniversary of Shock and Awe. To families who mourn it seems the world has forgottenby: Mary Riddel on: 6th Mar, 06
God will judge Tony Blair on the Iraq war. Or so the Prime Minister told Michael Parkinson. Think back to another television appearance, this time last year. On that occasion, Mr Blair faced a studio of women and a different ombudsman. History would deliver its verdict on him, he said. His audience denounced his war, but he was certain that no tribunal, divine or temporal, would ever find his judgment wanting.
Wednesday is International Women's Day. It will be marked by thousands of petitions for peace, to be handed in at US embassies across the world. Such pleas have rarely looked more hopeless. Hundreds lie dead after the bombing of the golden mosque at Samarra. The old conflict, a daily toll of death and suffering, may soon be swept away by new variant civil meltdown. From Burnley to Baghdad, women warned of this. Obviously, millions of men did so, too, but female opponents outnumbered male ones in Britain, and their Iraqi counterparts faced the hideous fate always meted out to the women and children of war.
It was not that they had prospered under Saddam Hussein and UN sanctions. In Basra, in 2002, 25 out of the 26 obstetrics and gynaecology students were women. Yet their patients were weak and sick, and one in eight of the babies they delivered would not see their fifth birthday.
Grief is more random now. A week ago today, a group of Iraqi mothers watched their teenage sons leave for a game of football. They never saw them again, unless you count a morgue visit to identify body parts scraped from a bombed pitch. Other women will struggle to be heard on Wednesday. Sharia law, they say, has pushed a once-secular society back into a medieval world. Honour killings, beheadings, forced veiling, rape, acid attacks and sexual servitude are a part of everyday life. So are power cuts, dead phone lines, ruptured fuel supplies and no food because the markets are shut and silent.
This time three years ago, the planet echoed to the testosteronic din of men marching to war. The UN said no, but God said yes. Politicians bought the neocon fairy tale that totalitarian regimes would collapse into dust, allowing westernised democracies to spring up in their place. Women, and less credulous men, were not so eager to believe that the God-given goodness of America and Britain trumped law and logic. Nor could they grasp how attacking nation states wipes out stateless terror.
full article:
http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=6741
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