The Reality Of Iraq
These days, nobody's talking about turning Iraq into a democracy or instilling Western values -- I think because this fantasy of turning Iraq into some little Muslim version of America or some other free country just seems ridiculous now.
"Mission Accomplished"!
Uh, yeah...right.
What is our goal there now? Our real goal, from those who got us in there, and are about to depart office and leave their mess to the next jerk in The Oval Office?
Because the reality of Iraq, a Muslim country is this sort of thing -- a follow-up story in The Observer about that 17-year-old Iraqi girl who was brutally killed by her father over her friendship with a British soldier. Afif Sarhan and Caroline Davies write that the mother has been gunned down by the father:
Leila Hussein lived her last few weeks in terror. Moving constantly from safe house to safe house, she dared to stay no longer than four days at each. It was the price she was forced to pay after denouncing and divorcing her husband - the man she witnessed suffocate, stamp on, then stab their young daughter Rand in a brutal 'honour' killing for which he has shown no remorse.Though she feared reprisals for speaking out, she really believed that she would soon be safe. Arrangements were well under way to smuggle her to the Jordanian capital, Amman. In fact, she was on her way to meet the person who would help her escape when a car drew up alongside her and two other women who were walking her to a taxi. Five bullets were fired: three of them hit Leila, 41. She died in hospital after futile attempts to save her.
Her death, on 17 May, is the shocking denouement to a tragedy which had its origins in an innocent friendship between her student daughter, Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, and a blond, 22-year-old British soldier known only as Paul.
The two had met while Rand, an English student at Basra University, was working as a volunteer helping displaced families and he was distributing water. Although their friendship appears to have involved just brief, snatched conversations over four months, Rand had confided her romantic feelings for Paul to her best friend, Zeinab, 19.
She died, still a virgin, four months after she had last seen him when her father, Abdel-Qader Ali, 46, discovered that she had been seen talking 'to the enemy' in public. She had brought shame on his honour, was his defence, and he had to cleanse his family name. Despite openly admitting the murder, he has received no punishment.
It was two weeks after Rand's death on 16 March that a grief-stricken Leila, unable to bear living under the same roof as her husband, found the strength to leave him. She had been beaten and had had her arm broken. It was a courageous move. Few women in Iraq would contemplate such a step. Leila told The Observer in April: 'No man can accept being left by a woman in Iraq. But I would prefer to be killed than sleep in the same bed as a man who was able to do what he did to his own daughter.'
Her words were to prove prescient. Leila turned to the only place she could, a small organisation in Basra campaigning for the rights of women and against 'honour' killings. Almost immediately she began receiving threats - notes calling her a 'prostitute' and saying she deserved to die like her daughter.
Even her sons Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, whom she claimed aided their father in their sister's killing, disowned her. Meanwhile, her husband, a former government employee, escaped any charges, and even told The Observer that police had congratulated him on what he had done.
What we should've done in the Middle East struck with awesome force, and flattened the area in Afghanistan where the terrorists who struck us are hiding, instead of going into Iraq, a country that did not attack us, and with too little firepower, and too-large expectations.
Meanwhile, yes, Saddam was a brutal bastard. Are the Iraqi people better off now that we've come in there and toppled him? Maybe the Kurds are, but instead of lifting these people out of Muslim fundamentalism, we've thrown them into it in a way they weren't before. From a UPI story by Ben Lando:
Iraqi women say they are increasingly targeted for anything from their clothes to driving to attending school, as society shifts from Saddam Hussein's brutality to one facing violence in the streets and religious fundamentalism.Iraq's ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaida'ie, began his welcome to the International Women's Day celebration he was hosting this week not with the praises for his countrywomen, but with a moment of silence.
Guests packed into the embassy reception hall bowed their heads -- some covered in the Muslim hijab, most not -- "to remember what Iraqi women have endured and are enduring," he said before dusting off a quick chronology of Iraqi women's achievements: 1923, the first women's magazine; 1935, the first woman law school graduate and doctor; 1938, the first woman judge.
"That was at a time when our neighbors didn't allow their girls to go to school," Sumaida'ie added.
Iraq's Constitution is intended to ensure this doesn't happen. A quarter of Parliament itself is to be female. Women voted in post-Saddam elections, a favorite reminder of the Bush administration. There's little overt U.S. attention to their ongoing struggles, however, as violence forces Iraqi women into widowhood and threatens them sexually.
"Iraqi women have not always been in such desperate state," Sumaida'ie said. They raised families with "remarkable courage and remarkable fortitude ... in extraordinary circumstances."
A new report from Women for Women International notes Iraqi women polled say the situation since 2004 has gotten worse. Nearly 70 percent of Iraqi women respondents think women are increasingly targeted in Iraq and attribute it to "less respect for women's rights than before, that women are thought of as possessions, and that the economy has gotten worse." Just more than 76 percent "said that girls in their families are not allowed to attend school, and 56.7 percent said that girls' ability to attend school has gotten worse since the U.S. invasion."
And here, a bit about life in Basra, where the murdered girl and her murdered mother lived:
Basra, the formerly cosmopolitan oil capital in southern Iraq once known as the "Venice of the Middle East," witnessed specific targeting of women. At least 57 women, warned to cover up by ominous graffiti on city walls, were found killed.
So...if Iraqi women not better off now for our intervention...when do we predict they will be better off? And is this yet another piece of "We had to destroy the country to save it"? When, exactly, will we be saving it?
Apparently Chuck Norris now writes a syndicated column, and he has something to say about Iraq.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/chuck-norris.html
I was horrified by his rosy, fictionalized view, until I realized that he also thinks (from a previous article) that the founding politicians of this country were all Christians.
I had no idea that being an actor in cheesy martial arts flicks qualified one for anything other than...well...cheesy martial arts flicks.
He needs to read this column and do some actual research. Keep up the good work, Amy. This is distressing, to say the absolute least, but I'm glad you're shoving it out there.
Jessica at June 4, 2008 8:28 AM
With 20/20 hindsight, the point of departure in Iraq, from what should have been to what went down instead, came about when we realized we were not going to find any WMD. That was the time to implement some sort of exit strategy.
Instead, Bush continued to fight the war on the cheap, and then finally implemented a surge, which has had some success. But, and this is a HUGE but, we allowed a sharia based government to be installed. If we were going to go the whole Wilsonian 9 yards of nation building (highly questionable), we should have insisted on a 100% secular government.
So now we have American soldiers fighting, getting maimed, and dying all in support of a sharia based government.
That is truly an abomination.
Ken at June 4, 2008 10:44 AM
I'm not at all justifying our policies in the region. Far from it.
But dishonor killings pre-date Islam by centuries. They are nothing new. Long timers in neighboring Jordan have told me that this is the direction that country is going, too (e.g., more conservative from the 1960s and 1970s, more hijabs, more segregation of the sexes, more constraints on freedoms), and there has been no American invasion there. So I can't quite suss out how much of this is "just" baseline trending in the region versus how much of this is attributable to Western intervention.
Ellen R. Sheeley, Author
"Reclaiming Honor in Jordan"
http://www.redroom.com/author/ellen-r-sheeley
ERS at June 4, 2008 12:16 PM
Amy, what did you think of the no-fly zones?
Y'know, if Hillary is Obama's veep, there are going to be a lot of Iraq-withdrawal types who feel her votes on the matter poison the purity of the ticket. And they'll be right.
Crid at June 4, 2008 1:15 PM
You're getting closer Amy.
Eventually you will come to the logical conclusion that there's nothing for it but to wipe all the muslims off of the Earth. It's the only logical endpoint to your argument.
They aren't going to leave us alone unless we discredit their worldview or destroy them all.
Bush is trying to accomplish this without wiping a third of the Earth's population out.
But as more and more people like you lose their patience with the middle east, the "fuck them all" approach will become more broadly acceptable to speak of without anyone batting an eyelash.
And that will mark the beginning of the end for Humanity.
brian at June 4, 2008 2:52 PM
>> So...if Iraqi women not better off now for our intervention...when do we predict they will be better off?
I don't think we consider that part of our problem. It's obvious that whoever wins in November, America will have a similar presence in Iraq for decades. The Saudi family wants it. The Israeli's want it, and our military economy depends on it. Iran is still enriching uranium, and shows no sign of serious cooperation, which Israel will only tolerate for so long.
Any social progress will be very slow in coming, and is completely dependent on how quickly oil revenues can be increased and distributed in a way acceptable to Sunni and Shiite, which is a compromise that the Iraqi Parliament is probably not capable of effecting.
The current way we are power brokering, namely throwing dollars at the problems (warlords), is probably going to be the first casualty under the next administration, so I hope the next President has a Plan B when the payoff funds from Congress begin to dry up.
Eric at June 4, 2008 2:57 PM
I hate it when you're right.
Crid at June 5, 2008 12:08 AM
You want to fix the worlds problems you give them something else to focus on.
I say pull all our troops out of every country and bring them all home.
I am sick of america being expected to fix everyone elses problems and having the work complained about at the same time.
Stop importing lead coated chinees crap and go back to a producing economy instead of a consuming econoy.
But that will never happen, it is also why I look forward to the next plauge.
FYI terroists, if you do ever get a nuke detonate it in Yellowstone National Park, kill eveyone on earth with one shot
lujlp at June 5, 2008 10:06 AM
I'm with lujlp on this. I'm damned sick and tired of us acting like we're the boss of the world. And, yeah, we'd get further if we started being more self-reliant than buying stuff from places that, frankly, don't have our standards of quality control (such as the lead-filled toys from China, I don't even want to think about what my grandson's generation is going to be like as a result; my daughter's generation is bad enough). Also, clamp down on our own companies farming work out to these substandard places that will do it cheaper than American workers. Because you're getting what you pay for. There need to be costly restrictions to that that negate the desire to screw the country that made you what you are.
Donna at June 5, 2008 11:37 AM
Donna:
Right. Because those Chinese and Indian people have no right to grow their own economies.
lujlp:
I am sick of america being expected to fix everyone elses problems and having the work complained about at the same time.
Welcome to 1934. I don't think I need to tell you what happened the last time we withdrew into ourselves. Or are you going to argue that we shouldn't have interfered at all and just let Japan and Germany have their way with the world? After all, were it not for lend-lease and oil blockades, they probably wouldn't have messed with us, right?
brian at June 5, 2008 5:29 PM
Japan attacked us and Germany planned to.
I am not suggesting isolationism I am suggesting that we dont spend american lives and money to further business intrests.
Its one thing to defend ourselves, or an ally who requests our help.
But has anyone stopped to consider that not for a couple hundered yrs of direct interference in the middle east we have given these nut job the tech, infrastructure, and convinent excuse to export their shitty ideals?
Wall them off, refuse any type of trade until they grow the fuck up. If some of them strace to death under despotic regimes - who the fuck cares. If they arent willing to fight for themselves why should we do it?
Bin Laden was an ally against the soviets, Saddam was an ally against Iran, the Saudis were an ally against Saddam.
Who is going to be the next ally we need to fight against?
We may as be Sisyphus pushing his fucking boulder.
lujlp at June 6, 2008 12:42 AM
That should read . . STARVE to death under despotic regimes
lujlp at June 6, 2008 12:45 AM
lujlp - you are asking to undo history. If nobody had discovered oil in the middle east, sure, we wouldn't be here now.
And some people think it was a bad idea to come down from the trees in the first place.
brian at June 6, 2008 4:34 AM
I am not saying we should undo history, I'm jut saying we need to stop repeating it over and over ad infinitum
lujlp at June 6, 2008 9:19 AM
OK, you got a reasonable way to do that?
You don't want to repeat history, but you want to remove our military presence from the world. Last time we did that, we got WWII. You'll notice that there's been no all-encompassing war in Europe in the 60 odd years since, when they were going to war every couple decades prior to that.
The middle east has the largest proven reserves of easily extractable oil. Our Congress has hampered any attempt at exploiting our own resources, the NIMBYs have prevented any major rollouts of wind, solar, or nuclear power, the Greens have put a lid on any new use of coal, oil, or natural gas for electrical generation.
Are you on their side? Do you really want the kind of technological devolution that comes with turning out the lights?
So we can kick the crap out of people who want to kill us, we can get our own damn oil (and the people who want to kill us will still have customers for their oil), or we can drill for our own oil AND kick the fuck out of the people who want to kill us.
brian at June 6, 2008 12:16 PM
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