Yes, the situation now is regrettable but at least there is a political process in place that will allow society to evolve in a more transparent manner. As long as Saddam was in power the fundamentalists could chafe and claim that they had the answers. Now they’ll have to put up or shut up.

Part of the problem also is that the Administration has not developed an effective response to Iran’s meddling in Iraq. Progress for women will be much slower in the ME until we have a coherent Iran policy.

i’d be really interested to hear some actual citations of Iraqi women who are “probably glad” about the “bad things” that are “happening”…

And those who make the excuse that our oh-so-learned experts are shocked –simply shocked !– that Fundamentalist religion obtained so ready a hold in a war-ravaged nation already brutalized by years of economic sanctions ? Brutalized by us– the good guys, the supposed secularists and champions of women ? On top of the brutality their own secular leader had already inflicted ?

Oh, please. Iran, in my lifetime, went from being a secular state to a Fundamentalist state, in no small measure because the arrogant fucks who design our foreign policy thought they had every right to displace a duly elected leader they didn’t want and to replace him with a brutal, secular despot that his own people didn’t want. Iran is hardly a unique case. Hell, if Democratic mouthpieces in this country had two brain cells and half a spine, they, too could point to the ascendancy in our Great Homeland of Fundie ideals as the economy goes further and further down the tubes. Our culture, too, is heading toward a dogmatic, regressive, church-state fusion in the face of far less turmoil and pain than the average Iraqi has had to deal with in the last 15-odd years.

But, no, Democrats couldn’t do that. To admit that Fundamentalism in this country offers such an allure would be to acknowledge that Democrats themselves have nothing to offer of comparable allure. Becuase they are yoked to corporate money, which conveniently undermines any professed ideals of helping the average citizen survive, much less thrive. Suffering from a serious lack of nerve and an utter lack of imagination, they can think of nothing to do but to self-servingly ape Fundies themselves (ie– Hilary’s “tragic choice” speech, Dean’s “stay the course” crap, etc). But I digress. Plus, they’d have to stop treating women as a “special interest,” and most aren’t any more evolved on that point than Robert is.

The insulated, sociopathic fuckwit “experts” making the TV-Radio circuit to show off their $800 suits and to indignantly claim that they “just didn’t know” this could happen are either morons, hopelessly self-deluded or lying through their miserable teeth. I lean toward the third. They knew. They didn’t care. Iraqi women are expendable. We all are, and only profit for a few corporate/military elites and their so-called “liberal” boot-lickers in D.C. and in the media ever really matters. The flag-waving, the crocodile tears about 911 ? The promises of “freedom from terrorism ?” Please. Anyone remember the dentist’s epitaph from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology ?

“…Why a moral truth is a hollow tooth
Which must be propped with gold”

http://www.bartleby.com/84/67.html

Nobody ever gets given rights and freedoms; they have to take them. The French did not give America independence. Blacks were not given equal rights, either here or in South Africa. Women were not given equal rights. And we’re not going to be able to give Iraq freedom from tyranny, whether it is a secular dictatorship or a theocracy. We can help them, but they have to step up at the end and make the final sacrifices to take it. That includes the citizenry overall (who are still trying to figure out the transition from being subjects to being citizens) and the women therein.

What the FUCK is wrong with you, Robert? I mean, seriously? Are women that much of a fucking joke to you? You dismiss more than half the population as an interest group? Guess what? YOU’RE an interest group. Let’s see you deal with what women have to.

If I get deployed again, I swear to God, I’m taking you with me. Let me show you what ‘pretty awful’ really looks like. Let me show you the woman in An Najaf, who was shot three times ine face while her four-year-old son watched—she led ‘an impure life.’ That’s where her son came from. Where’s the other participant? Oh, no big deal. He didn’t belong to an interest group.

They cut the little boy’s throat, by the way. Dol you know how long it takes to die that way? They did that to a child. That’s ‘pretty awful’ for you. ‘Pretty awful’.

Christ on a crutch. Pretty awful is when you get a bad haircut.

When you said, “We can’t afford the short-term outlook or the parochial focus on the interest group of choice”, what you really mean is your group of choice, men, is the only group for whom democracy matters.

This is my last post to you in this thread because I am serious, I am rational, and we both know the connotation of “interest group” though one of us is pretending otherwise for curmudgeonly reasons I don’t care to pursue beyond this reply.

Finally, women’s right to be part of the governing of their country isn’t in doubt. It may be in peril downstream, but that isn’t what Amp’s post was about. Conflating the two questions and characterizing my statements as being an assault on the franchise shows that you are either unable or unwilling to rationally taxonomize the issues under discussion. Either way, it again goes to demonstration of a lack of seriousness.

People incapable of seriousness may be in the mood for a revolution, but they’re unlikely to get one.

That Kerry said it to a room full of feminist women should have created more waves than it did. Men are not on women’s side, not conservative men and not liberal men. We’ve got to do this ourselves, sisters. I’m thankful for the few pro-feminist men out there lending their hands and hearts to help, but we women really need to get our political selves out there and stop joking about a women’s political party. There are more women than Libertarians, Greens, Constitutionalists, Socialists and Independents.

I’m in the mood for a revolution.

So? This is a problem for you - a political opponent of the war. That something creates a political problem for one side or the other does not go to whether the underlying logic is valid or not.

And yeah, the actual situation is pretty awful in many ways. (And pretty good in other ways.) I’m not sure what that has to do with the price of peanuts. We’re in the middle of an unconventional war, and some things have gone to shit. That’s what things do.

Now, I would raise the bar slightly higher than you have. I’d say the elections need to be reasonably free and fair, and they weren’t the first time - which is to be expected, given that a big chunk of the population boycotted them. As that chunk comes to understand that the government is going to be in existence whether they vote in the system or not, that boycott will dissipate and the system will gain more and more legitimacy.

I would not characterize Iraq as a success. Nor would I characterize World War II as a victory for the Allies, if it were 1941.

There are hard years ahead. The left’s willingness to declare defeat now and focus on how best to withdraw from the world is pretty much the entire reason you will never again be entrusted with power by the electorate. We can’t afford the short-term outlook or the parochial focus on the interest group of choice. Bush may be a trudging, stolid Zhukov, rather than a flashy Guderian, but we all know how that one came out.

He simply meant that a society with democracy but without full civil participation for women could evolve on its own to having full participation for women, and that this is an improvement over a situation where women and men have equal rights but in a non-democratic context. The first scenario leads over time to a modern free society, the second does not.

The problem with this logic, even if we grant all the unproven assumptions, is that it’s basically a “get out of responsibility free” card for war advocates; so long as they can show that Iraq has had elections (even crooked faux- elections, such as the one we’ve seen), they can declare success no matter how unbelievably awful the actual situation is.

Bascially, hawks are incapable of ever accepting responsibility for the outcomes of their own policies. Gerecht is saying that it doesn’t matter to him how many Iraqi women are murdered, raped, beaten, scarred with acid, beheaded, etc; no matter how awful the actual situation on the ground, he will claim it’s a victory for the hawks and Bush.

But if the war had been sold on that basis to the American people before it began - “we’re invading, and your sons and daughters will die, to create a sham democracy in which extreme fundimentalist Islamic men will at last have the freedom to splash acid in the faces of women who don’t wear a burka” - I don’t think America would have bought it.

Finally, in many ways, women in American in 1900 were far freer than women in Bush’s Iraq are now.

I find this situation incredibly frightening.

And let’s not forget how few Democrats are making this or any women’s rights an issue. Kudos to those who are, of course, but a whole lot of them seem to be attempting to make DFL stand for Defend Females Last.

Grrr.

I truly and sincerely hope that some country that doesn’t have its head up its arse (obviously America no longer qualifies), say, Canada? will do the decent thing and offer asylum to any and every woman in Iraq who suffers adverse effects from this utterly revolting batch of fundamentalist male tyranny.

Earth to George: Iraq’s new regieme is freedom like Ann Coulter is a liberal. Like Hugh Hefner is the Pope. Like the sun rises in the west. Like the White House is on Mars (at least George’s brain would be home). Like up is down. No way, no how, and quite the opposite.

Earth to all the assholes in Iraq: Women are adults. ADULTS DO NOT NEED GUARDIANS!!!!! And beating should lead to the woman in question leaving, permanantly, not be allowed by law!

There was an episode of Star Trek: TNG that featured an ancient weapon that worked by turning an enemy’s force against him–he tries to kill, he dies, that sort of thing. It would be so cool if every woman in Iraq were given one that couldn’t be taken away from them and that only they could use.

Actually, everyone should have one. Keep us from hurting each other at all.

Here in the UK the Government are trying to deport some Iraqi assylum seekers because “Iraq is now a safe country” …or at least some parts of it might be safe.

Wha…whaaa…whaaaaaat the fuck? You have got to be kidding me.

If it weren’t so effing depressing, I’d be almost reassured that the US isn’t the only completely lunatic administration with regards to how we see things in the middle east. As is, it’s just depressing.

Damnit, I just hope the Iraqi women know how sorry many of us are for this travesty. Little salve though it may be, my heart aches for them.

“Violence as a way of achieving justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”