The top three paragraphs from a story in today’s NY Times:

One of four Army infantrymen charged with raping a 14-year-old girl in Iraq last March and then killing her and her family pleaded guilty today to all charges in a military court at Fort Campbell, Ky.

The plea came on a day when a marine is scheduled to be sentenced at Camp Pendleton, Calif., for his part in the kidnapping and killing of an Iraqi man in a town to the west of Baghdad.

The legal actions are part of the fallout of the fighting in Iraq, where insurgent fighters blend in with the civilian population, frustrating soldiers who are subject to roadside bombing and other attacks.

Holy fucking shit!

So when four infantrymen decide to rape a 14-year-old girl and kill her and her whole family, that’s “fallout” from the frustration soldiers feel because “insurgent fighters blend?”

Yes, I’m sure the soldiers thought that the 14-year-old they raped and murdered - not to mention her 7-year-old sister, who they also murdered - were insurgents blending with civilians. In no way was this a problem of a culture of entitlement, racism and misogyny, combined with giving green soldiers absolute authority over civilians that some of them think of as subhuman.

Heck no! It’s the fault of those damn blending insurgent Iraqis!

(The soldier, by the way, plead guilty in order to take the death penalty off the table. The Times says he’ll probably get sentenced to life, but could be out in 20 years.)

It’s besides the point of this post, but I feel obliged to point out that the other case the Times mentioned involves soldiers who planned to kidnap and murder an alleged insurgent, but grabbed and killed the wrong man. That’s a genuine example of a death resulting from “insurgents blending with civilians,” I guess; but it’s mainly an example of the inevitable result of believing that war justifies punishing alleged “insurgents” without trial or defense. George Bush and conservatives have been fighting hard to erode the right of trial and defense, and their thinking may have influenced the murderers in this case.

[Comments on this post at “Alas” are open to feminists and feminist-friendly posters only. Crossposted at Creative Destruction.]

So why does the Lancet study matter? To me, it matters because it reiterates something that too many Americans have forgotten: Starting wars is evil.

A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferencz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting “aggressive” wars–Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime,” the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council.

Ferencz said that after Nuremberg the international community realized that every war results in violations by both sides, meaning the primary objective should be preventing any war from occurring in the first place.

He said the atrocities of the Iraq war–from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of dozens of civilians by U.S. forces in Haditha to the high number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent car bombs–were highly predictable at the start of the war.

According to the most recent study, published in Lancet, somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 Iraqis have died because Americans - both Democrats and Republicans - lost track of the incredibly basic, obvious fact that starting a war is evil. Around half a million people are dead. Is it possible that we’ll learn a lesson from this, and not start a war with Iran?

The important point is not if the “right” number is 655,000 deaths, or 400,000 deaths, or even 250,000 deaths. The important point is that this war - and the whole idea of pre-emptive war - is a tragic, dismal failure, and one that can no longer be in good conscience defended by anyone who values human life. Daniel Davies writes:

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. […]

That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.

This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent. It really could not have happened by chance. Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so. […]

There has to be some accountability here. It is not good enough for the pro-intervention community to shrug their shoulders and say that the fatalities caused by the insurgents are not our fault and not part of the moral calculus. I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue.

I’d love to see Bush, Cheney and the rest of the gang spend the rest of their lives in prison for war crimes - because starting a war needlessly is a war crime, possibly the worse war crime of all. But there’s no chance that will happen. Power protects power, and no number of people imprisoned and tortured without trial, no number of innocent Iraqis raped and maimed and killed, will suffice to see a single powerful American held responsible for the carnage.

At the least, I hope the people who supported this war might go against virtually all their impulses up to this moment and learn from their errors. Learn enough so that they won’t support the US starting yet another needless war, this time with Iran. Learn enough to condemn the evil, sick policy of “pre-emptive war,” which is just an Orwellian way of saying “let’s start a war because we damn well want to.” The Nuremberg judges knew more about war than Bush and the war boosters ever will, because they were actually willing to learn from reality. The main result of invading Iraq - hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths - should be enough to let us say “never again.”

It won’t. But it should.

Different people observe the changing seasons in different ways. For gardeners spring means planting things, for sports fans it means the beginning of the cricket season,* for students spring means avoiding studying for exams, and for Wellington activists spring is celebrated by protesting the conference of the New Zealand Defence Industry Association.

Every year the New Zealand Defence Industry Association holds a forum. To quote from their website:

NZDIA organises the New Zealand Defence Seminars, generally held annually in October/November. This Seminar brings together Australian and New Zealand commercial companies, Asian, Australian and New Zealand Defence purchasing interests together with high level New Zealand Ministerial involvement.

Isn’t nice that they manage to leave off references to the purpose of the ‘defence’ industry is to kill people, and the current wars.

Now obviously on a global scale New Zealand arms trade is insignificant. One of the members of the NZDIA makes grenates in his garage. But that doesn’t make them any less repsonsible for the products they produce. Rakon (while not part of NZDIA), is the most used example of a New Zealand company that makes products to kill people. Their GPS crystals are used in US made Smart bombs, some of which were dropped on Palestine and Lebanon this year (more here.

For the last few years the Defence industry has been held at Te Papa (New Zealand’s national museum. This has angered some people even more - Te Papa’s branding is ‘Our Place.** The Defence Industry conference has become one of the focal points of peace organisation, the other being the war against Iraq. Organising against the New Zealand defence industry brings the links between capitalism and war home.

I’ve been protesting the defence industry conference since 2001. I have to admit that I haven’t had a huge amount of enthusiasm for the protests for the last few years. You organise small protests at things year after year, and in the end you just don’t have the energy to do it again.

So I can say that yesterday’s protest was truly fantastic without blowing my own trumpet (all I did was turn up).

The police were really worried about protesters and had put up blockades all around Te Papa. This made it really easy for protesters outside each entrance to stop those going to the conference getting in or out. There were over 200 people there for most of the afternoon (people came and went), and every entrance to Te Papa was blockaded

In order for this to work the police closed the museum for the afternoon. Which shows where the priorities are, it’s more important that the weapons conference goes ahead than that people can actually use the museum.

What was really amazing about the protests was that no-one got arrested. The trick at a protest is to know your strength. The vast majority of people who have been arrested on protests I’ve been at have got off - they hadn’t done anything wrong. But police arrest people on protests because they can - if the crowd is big enough they don’t arrest anyone because it’ll just make more trouble. It’s often really hard to judge your strength - I’m always very cautious. But this time people knew exactly when to back down - when we were weakening. It was an incredibly well organised and effective action.

*Or not - I could be wrong about either of these facts, since I know slightly more about sports than I do about gardening.

** Personally I don’t think it matters that much where it’s held and I occasionally find the arguments against it being held at Te Papa a little bit precious. It’s not like the museum doesn’t have problems of its own: Women? Kind of absent. Work and the people who do it? Not so much. Struggle over these things? Five minutes in one film.

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

From Gateway Pundit (with a curtsy to Crooked Timber):

What universe are these people living in?

This weeks disgraceful liberal surprise- Another outlandish Lancet Iraqi Death Estimate reporting 660,000 have died in the Iraq War.

To give that some perspective, that’s like:

* 3-10 Hiroshima atomic blasts
* 6-20 Nagasaki atomic blasts
* Or 10 Dresden bombing campaigns

I’ve seen a lot of “it’s soooo biiig” critiques from right-wing bloggers this week - but also from a couple of left-wingers. The most intelligent version I’ve seen is the “reality check” press release from Iraq Body Count. All of these critiques exhibit what I think of as “The Great Wall Of China Fallacy.”

Sherri: Some statisticians calculated that the great wall of China is made out of 3,873,000,000 bricks.

Michelle: That’s an absurd number of bricks! Why, if you combined the Empire State Building with Lenin’s Tomb and added on the Pyramid of King Tut, you still wouldn’t have 3,873,000,000 bricks! Clearly, the methodology used by that study is flawed beyond belief.

Sherri: What flaws are those?

Michelle: Weren’t you listening? More bricks than the Empire State Building, Lenin’s Tomb and a pyramid combined!

I hear again and again that it’s absurd to think that the Iraq government could be undercounting deaths by a large degree, but never an explanation of why this is absurd. It seems to me that if you want to measure how well official statistics measure death rates, the way to do it is to conduct a random representative sample study of the population. The foundations of statistics have not, contrary to what many conservatives believe, collapsed; but the Iraqi government has collapsed; surely the former is therefore a more reliable source.

Meanwhile, in Iraq itself, it’s clear that there are a hell of a lot more bodies than have been counted.

Speaking of Lenin’s Tomb, Lenin’s Tomb has a lengthy response to the Iraq Body Count press release, which is well worth reading. Here’s a sample:

The next implication is that “Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq.” IBC doesn’t like this because - well, in fact, they do not say. They simply tell us that this is what is implied. One assumes that they think this is inherently unlikely, but surely they were supposed to be testing that implication? Another version of this argument would be: “one implication of the report is that close to 655,000 people may well have died in Iraq. Furthermore, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a further implication is that close to 600,000 of those have died violently. In Iraq! In one of the most violent societies in the world right now! Could you credit it?”

There is no inherent reason it’s impossible for an incredibly large number of people to have been killed in Iraq, any more than it’s inherently impossible that nearly 4 billion bricks were used to build The Great Wall of China. Large events sometimes happen, and to date the best-conducted study of mortality in Iraq indicates that, measure by mortality, Iraq is one such event.

More links:

An epidemiologist discusses the Lancet study.

Tim Lambert responds to the Iraq Body Count critique (scroll down).

Echidne explains the Lancet study’s methodology. And a similar post from health blogger Stayin’ Alive.

Iraqi blogger Zeyad reacts to the study: “I have personally witnessed dozens of people killed in my neighbourhood over the last few months (15 people in the nearby vicinity of our house alone, over 4 months), and virtually none of them were mentioned in any media report while I was there. And that was in Baghdad where there is the highest density of journalists and media agencies. Don’t you think this is a common situation all over the country?”

Fred at Stone Court points out that the death rate suggested by the Lancet study is hardly unprecedented in history.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments fail to be recorded by official statistics here, try there.]

UPDATE: The Lancet Study can be downloaded here (pdf link). A companion paper, which provides some additional details, can be downloaded here (pdf link).

The New York Times coverage of the new Lancet study of Iraqi deaths, while maintaining an objective tone, is heavily slanted against the study; many of the painfully bad right-wing arguments against the earlier survey are repeated by the Times, usually without rebuttal. For example:

Violent deaths have soared since the American invasion, but the rise is in part a matter of spotty statistical history. Under Saddam Hussein, the state had a monopoly on killing, and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds that it caused were never counted.

The implication is that perhaps these new numbers underestimate pre-invasion deaths due to “spotty statistical history.” But the Lancet study does not draw on the counts of Hussein’s government for it’s pre-war mortality estimates, so this is irrelevant.

Gilbert Burnham, the principle author of the study, said the figures showed an increase of deaths over time that was similar to that of another civilian casualty project, Iraq Body Count, which collates deaths reported in the news media, and even to that of the military. But even Iraq Body Count puts the maximum number of deaths at just short of 49,000.

The Iraq Body Count tallies only those deaths which are reported by at least two reputable news organizations. No one associated with the Iraq Body Count claims that their results represent “the maximum number of deaths.” From the Iraq Body Count website:

Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media.

Back to the Times coverage:

Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”

But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.

But as this example from The Roper Center’s “polling 101″ illustrates, it’s accepted statistical methodology to extrapolate from small to large numbers - in their example, from 30 purple jelly beans in their sample to the conclusion that there are approximately 20 million purple jelly beans in the huge jelly bean jar.

The new Lancet survey is based on interviews with over 1000 Iraqis. The Times - and all major news organizations - routinely report numbers extrapolated from surveys which interview 1000, or sometimes just 500, people. Mainstream newspaper FAQs about polling methodology (example 1, example 2) suggest that a sample of just 500 is sufficient for surveys representing all Americans.

Of course, the Lancet survey - due to methodological issues having to do with collecting data in a war zone - has a wider confidence interval than most surveys. But that doesn’t mean that the study is unreliable, or its methods incorrect; it just means that the results have a wide confidence interval. We can be reasonably certain there have been between 426,369 and 793,663 excess Iraqi deaths since our invasion. That’s extraordinary, and appalling. If the occupation is intended to protect Iraqis, it is a dismal failure.

Curtsy: Deltoid

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

UPDATE: The Lancet Study can be downloaded here (pdf link). A companion paper, which provides some additional details, can be downloaded here (pdf link).

A new study, due to be published on The Lancet’s website today, has found that there have been 655,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths since the US invaded, compared to how many would have died if previous death rates had continued. The confidence interval is from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths. From the Washington Post:

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country. […]

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then — a finding likely to be equally controversial.[…]

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods.[..]

They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

According to the survey results, Iraq’s mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post-invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The difference between these rates was used to calculate “excess deaths.”[…]

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

As I argued last year, the earlier survey is “controversial” only in the sense that global warming and evolution are “controversial.” The dispute over the earlier study was not a genuine dispute about survey technique; it was more of a dispute between reality and right-wing ideology.

Like the earlier study, this study found that the large majority of Iraqis killed have been male:

Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old.

Curtsy: Deltoid.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

Tim at Balloon Juice quotes from news stories (one, two):

Torture in Iraq may be worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein, with militias, terrorist groups and government forces disregarding rules on the humane treatment of prisoners, the U.N. anti-torture chief said Thursday. […]

A report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq’s Human Rights office cited worrying evidence of torture, unlawful detentions, growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in “honor killings” of women. […]

According to the U.N. report, the number of Iraqi civilians killed in July and August hit 6,599, a record-high that is far greater than initial estimates suggested, the U.N. report said Wednesday. […]

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat […]

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

And from a report quoted on Liberty & Power:

A confidential Pentagon assessment finds that an overwhelming majority of Iraq’s Sunni Muslims support the insurgency that has been fighting against U.S. troops and the Iraqi government, ABC News has learned.

Officials won’t say how the assessment was made but found that support for the insurgency has never been higher, with approximately 75 percent of the country’s Sunni Muslims in agreement.

When the Pentagon started surveying Iraqi public opinion in 2003, Sunni support for the insurgents stood at approximately 14 percent.

As Daran points out (one two), male Iraqis - mostly non-combatants - are being slaughtered and abused in Iraq, by both insurgents and US forces.

[According to the Lancet study of deaths among Iraqis,] the plurality of the causalties were adult men. The next largest group was boys. There were more boys killed than female adults and children put together. Males accounted for nearly three quarters of the deaths.

As I’ve blogged about before, the decline in women’s freedoms has been enormous. From Iraqi blogger Riverbend:

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime.

From an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

The war advocates will, of course, claim everything is fine. Violence in Iraq is “just a comma” in a future history book, according to President Bush. (As the Carpetbagger says, Bush’s comma is a spectacular achievement in denial of responsibility; there is no presidential failure, however awesome, which can’t be excused as “just a comma” with a long enough historical view. As John Maynard Keynes sarcastically pointed out, in the long run, we’re all dead.) Norman Podhoretz, editor of the conservative magazine Commentary, argues that even the intensity of violence in Iraq proves democratization is going well:

…The terrible violence being perpetrated by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”… is in itself a tribute to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the “insurgency” there?

At the point when attacks on Iraqis and Americans are seen as proof that things are going well, is there any possible scenario which can be described as going badly? (A reader at Crooked Timber aptly referred to the above as “sane-people-baiting.”)

Tim at Balloon Juice writes:

I could imagine an argument that things are going through a bad spell right now, just like I could imagine arguing that space aliens will have pity on us and relieve the 2nd Marine Regiment in Fallujah. Things can get better and they can get worse. Hypothetical arguments can go both ways. Right now things look pretty bad and no reason in the world exists to think that they cannot get worse.

Tim is right on the mark: Anything short of Heaven could be said to have “prospects to improve”; in fact, the more horrible a situation is, the more evident the potential for improvement.

The question is, given the truly astonishing record of being wrong war advocates have so far compiled, why should we trust their judgment that improvement is just around the corner? These are the people who thought we’d be greeted with cheers and flowers. War advocates have said “improvement is just around the corner” for over three years; when Saddam’s sons were killed, when Saddam was captured, when elections were held, over and over.

You’ve heard of the boy who cried wolf? War advocates are the boy who cried “improvement!” The war hawks have proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they can no more successfully judge what’s around the corner in Iraq than they can flap their arms and fly around the moon. A Iraq war hawk is like a baseball player who has struck out 20 times in a row claiming that if he gets just one more chance, he’ll hit a home run. And when he strikes out for the 21st time, he won’t learn a thing; he’ll just move on to claiming that he’ll surely hit a home run the 22nd time, the 23rd, the 24th, etc etc..

How many pathetic failures, leading to the violent deaths, rapes and maimings of thousands of Iraqis — and of US soldiers — should Bush’s Iraq policy get before it loses all credibility?

Podhoretz points out that three elections have been held. Elections are great. But political freedom - the freedom to vote, which Iraqis allegedly have (never mind the ways in which the elections were less than ideally democratic) - is not the only freedom in the world, nor the only one that matters. If I am free to vote but not to walk the streets, I am not substantively free. If I am free to vote but the political system lacks the will to protect me from being kidnapped, raped and sold into sexual slavery, I am not substantively free. If my odds of being violently killed are high enough so I live in perpetual fear, I am not substantively free.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA vet who specialized in studying bin Laden, answers six questions for Harpers. The bit that will be quoted the most, I think, is this: “In the long run, we’re not safer because we’re still operating on the assumption that we’re hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we’re hated because of our actions in the Islamic world.”

I’m posting a couple of excerpts, but it’s worthwhile to read the whole thing.
Read the rest of this entry »

From the UK newspaper The Observer:

Hardline Islamic insurgent groups in Iraq are targeting a new type of victim with the full protection of Iraqi law, The Observer can reveal. The country is seeing a sudden escalation of brutal attacks on what are being called the ‘immorals’ - homosexual men and children as young as 11 who have been forced into same-sex prostitution.

There is growing evidence that Shia militias have been killing men suspected of being gay and children who have been sold to criminal gangs to be sexually abused. The threat has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Iraqi homosexuals now seeking asylum in the UK because it has become impossible for them to live safely in their own country.[…]

Graphic photos obtained from Baghdad sources too frightened to identify themselves as having known a gay man, and seen by the Observer, show other gay Iraqis who have been executed. One shows two men, suspected of having a relationship, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs - guns at the ready behind their heads - awaiting execution. Another picture captured on a mobile phone shows a gay man being beaten to death. Yet another shows a corpse being dragged through the streets after his execution.

But it’s not just the insurgent groups killing off gays. It’s also our good friends and allies, the Iraqi government.

One photograph is of the mutilated, burnt body of 38-year-old Karar Oda from Sadr City. He was kidnapped by the Badr Brigade in mid-June. They work with the Ministry of Interior and are the informal armed wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who make up the largest Shia bloc in the Iraq parliament. Oda’s family were given an arrest warrant signed by the Ministry of Interior which said their son deserved to be arrested and killed for immorality as a homosexual. His body was found ten days later.

Don’t get me wrong — queers were horribly abused under Saddam. That we are able to take a situation that bad and (if this Observer report is correct) make it worse is astonishing. At the very least, the U.S. (and the U.K.) should be offering asylum and citizenship to gay Iraqis who want (or, rather, need) to flee here.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, with the lovers, the dreamers, and me.]

Judith at Kesher Talk engages in a little feminist-bashing:

News flash! Saddam Wasn’t a Feminist. Well, duh, you might say. But some on the left have already started to spin Saddam’s Iraq as a time of equal opportunity for women. This includes equal opportunity to be falsely imprisoned, tortured (with the added bonus of guaranteed gang rape), murdered, and having your culture threatened with obliteration (if you were a Kurd or Marsh Arab), but they don’t mention that. […]

There is no doubt that women in Iraq are threatened by theocratic militancy that Saddam’s regime kept at bay, and that they will need constant support to hold their own in the new government and enforce their right to be secular if they choose. (For that matter, many Iraqi men want a secular civic space as well.) But let’s not paint Saddam’s era with a rosy glow.

Uh-huh.

Who, exactly, are these feminists who are not mentioning atrocities under Saddam, and “paint[ing] Saddam’s era with a rosy glow?” Funnily enough, Judith doesn’t say who she’s criticizing. When I emailed her to ask, she was able to provide just one citation: this Wall Street Journal op-ed which Judith linked in her post, written by A. Yasmine Rassam of the Independent Women’s Forum. The article criticizes this report (pdf link) by the feminist organization Code Pink, accusing Code Pink of “revisionist history-writing,” and implying that Code Pink has called Saddam “a champion of women’s rights.”

Much of the anti-war propagandists’ defense of Saddam as a champion of women’s rights rests on his willingness to allow women to vote (for him), drive cars, own property, get an education and work. What they choose to ignore, however, is the systematic rapes, torture, beheadings, honor killings, forced fertility programs, and declining literacy rates that also characterized Saddam’s regime.

Judith is not alone in linking to this WSJ piece and uncritically repeating its claims. House of the Dog writes:

I don’t see how anyone can call themselves a feminist and not be thrilled that Saddam is out of power. Continue to fight for the rights of current Iraqi women, which are in danger if there is a return to a theocracy, but acknowledge the horrors that they have been freed from.

Jim Lindgren at Volokh says that feminists have been trying to “whitewash” Saddam’s record. This blogger goes further, calling feminists “Saddam enablers” - ironic, since Saddam didn’t depend on feminists to enable his rise to power, whereas the woman-hating theocrats currently running much of Iraq were in fact enabled by right-wing Americans.)

Here’s the problem: The accusations against Code Pink are blatant lies, as any of these bloggers could have easily discovered if they had bothered to read Code Pink’s report. As Blargh Blog points out, Code Pink’s report doesn’t whitewash Saddam’s activities. Here’s some of what Code Pink’s report said about Saddam:

Although a great deal of policy and law continued to women’s advantage when Saddam Hussein became president, his voracious appetite for dictatorial power over the entire population could not but undermine women’s gains. Women, like men, were jailed, tortured, raped, and murdered. […]

To extract information from dissidents, suspected dissidents, and opposition members abroad, Hussein was fond of sending them video tapes showing their female relatives raped by members of the secret police. […]

By 1990 Hussein was courting support for his warweary regime from neighboring Islamic states and from religious and tribal leaders. Hussein’s public embrace of Islam’s moral authority changed many of the laws governing divorce, child custody, and inheritance rights so as to limit women’s rights and freedoms. Laws restricted women’s ability to travel abroad without a male relative and reintroduced single-sex education in high school. […]

Honor killings of women who were suspected of pre-marital sex or victims of rape, thereby “dishonoring” the family name, dramatically increased after Hussein reduced the prison sentences of male perpetrators from 8 years to no more than 6 months—a punishment in any case rarely imposed. […]

The GFIW stopped promoting women’s rights to work and education and focused primarily on humanitarian aid and health care. … Impoverishment forced families to keep their female children out of school, and illiteracy soared. […]

By 2000, a militia founded by Hussein’s son, Uday, was beheading women in a campaign against prostitution.

That’s the sort of thing that Judith of Kesher Talk calls “spin[ing] Saddam’s Iraq as a time of equal opportunity for women”; what Lindgren of Volokh calls a “whitewash” of Saddam’s record. These are blatant lies; the only question is if all these conservative bloggers are just mindlessly spreading the IWF slander without having bothered to skim the Code Pink report, or if they read it but are just as willing to lie as the IWF is.

(Alone among all these bloggers, Lindgren later updated his post to begrudgingly admit that the critique of Code Pink’s report was inaccurate. He nonetheless defends the criticism of Code Pink, because they didn’t mention the exact same atrocities he would have mentioned. That seems like pretty weak tea to me; somehow I doubt that Lindgrem would hold right-wing organizations to the same standard).

Blargh Blog’s critique is very well-done, but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s not only that right-wingers have falsely accused Code Pink of whitewashing crimes against women. It’s that right-wingers are themselves guilty of doing what they accuse Code Pink of.

Even when writing about a report on crimes and violence against Iraqi women post-invasion, not one of these right-wing bloggers - nor the IWF article in the Wall Street Journal - mentions the current problems of Iraqi Women - including virtual house arrest, rape (including rape by US military personnel), kidnappings, and honor killings - described in Code Pink’s report.

Judith’s weak, oblique reference to “theocratic militancy” is the most any of these conservatives do to acknowledge current problems for women in Iraq (the vast majority ignored the subject entirely). Apparently they approve of reporting violations of Iraqi women’s rights only when those crimes happen under Saddam; post-Saddam violations are simply not mentioned.

Lindgren was right to say that there’s a “whitewash” going on, but it’s not a whitewash of Saddam. It’s a whitewash of the attacks on Iraqi women that have gone on since the US invaded Iraq. (Actually, the damage to Iraqi men - who have suffered a much higher deathcount than Iraqi women - has also been whitewashed, but that’s not the subject of this post).

Quoting from the Code Pink report again:

Numerous witnesses and victims have testified and investigators have confirmed that coalition forces and U.S. contractors have committed horrific crimes of sexual abuse, torture, and physical assault. There is copious reportage about rapes, including gang rapes, and routine sexual humiliation as well as accounts of women falling prey to honor killings after leaving U.S. detention centers. Amal Kadhim Swadi, an Iraqi lawyer who represented women detainees at Abu Ghraib, claimed that sexualized violence by U.S. forces was “happening all across Iraq” and was not confined to a few isolated cases. […]

American assaults on Iraqi women have not been confined to sexual abuse. U.S. forces have used Iraqi women as “bargaining chips” to get Iraqi men to turn themselves in or to confess to aiding the resistance. And U.S. personnel have physically assaulted female detainees. […]

An Iraqi police inspector testified that “Some gangs specialize in kidnapping girls, they sell them to Gulf countries. This happened before the war too, but now it is worse, they can get them in and out without passports.” […]

Some radical religious groups are using alleged Shari’a principles to justify assaults on women. Freed from Hussein’s vengeful eye and increasingly in control of local and regional governments and local resources, several radical clerics, conservative Shi’a political parties, and paramilitary forces have gained followers and influence in Central and Southern Iraq. As a result, radical religious groups can more openly harass women who defy their interpretations of Shari’a. Many girls and women in urban areas who might have previously worn western clothes will not now leave home without wearing the hijab or the abaya. Although choice of dress does not necessarily mean insecurity or loss of freedom, women’s rights advocate Yanar Mohammed claims, “If you go without the protection of the scarf, [armed men] can stop you and you may get assaulted…Being good and chaste means you put a veil on. They tell you it’s voluntary, but how can it be voluntary when there’s that much pressure on you?” […]

Radical religious groups are also apparently guilty of more severe crimes against women. A group of men in Mosul threw acid in the face of a Christian female lawyer whom they had previously warned to wear a veil or face death. In 2005, on a highway near Baghdad the body of pharmacist and women’s rights activist Zeena Al-Qushtaini turned up ten days after assailants had abducted her at gunpoint. Al-Qushtaini had two bullet holes close to her eyes and was reportedly dressed in an abaya; she normally wore Western clothes. Pinned to the abaya was a message that read, “She was a collaborator against Islam.” In Latifya, a city south of Baghdad, Sunni radicals have covered walls warning women and girls not to go out in public without covering their heads and faces and threatening death to the violators.

A survey of Iraqi women’s rights groups shows that these groups - who are probably better positioned than anyone to form a judgement - feel that as bad as Saddam was for women, the post-Saddam regime is even worse. From an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

This is doubly troubling. It’s troubling first because the Bush administration used the issue of women to justify its now widely criticized invasion of Iraq in part by promising to improve the situation of women.

It’s troubling second because the administration has issued news releases, held public meetings and tried to gain media attention (as well as U.S. public support) for all the “good” it’s supposedly doing the women of Iraq via this invasion.

The poll was released last week by the Integrated Regional Information Networks, a U.N. news agency covering sub-Saharan Africa, eight countries in central Asia, and Iraq.

IRIN reports the survey findings as follows: ” … women’s basic rights under the Hussein regime were guaranteed in the constitution and more importantly respected, with women often occupying important government positions. Now, although their rights are still enshrined in the national constitution, activists complain that, in practice, they have lost almost all of their rights.” […]

The report says more men are ordering women to “take the veil” (wear coverings from head to toe), and fewer women are working in professional jobs than when Saddam was in power.

I highly recommend reading Code Pink’s report, which is well-organized and thorough. In particular, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Code Pink emphasizes that women in Iraq today are not inactive, any more than they were under Saddam; as bad as things are, women are nonetheless organizing and resisting their oppression in every way they can.

That said, the IWF’s slander of Code Pink in the Wall Street Journal - and the way that right-wing bloggers uncritically repeated the slander, apparently without bothering to read the report they criticized - shows a great deal of what’s wrong with conservative discussion of Iraq women. Conservatives are unable (or, at least, unwilling) to honestly discuss reports of harm to Iraqi women; they reflexively fall back on dishonestly calling anyone who criticizes Bush or the invasion of Iraq pro-Saddam; and they are committed, probably for partisan reasons, to whitewashing current and ongoing crimes and violence against the women of Iraq.

* * *

See also Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I suspect that this particularly silly wrinkle in the “objectively-pro-Saddam” routine is going to become more common among people who care about women’s rights only when they can be used as a pretext to defend hare-brained imperialist schemes…

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction, where moderation is much lighter.]

At TomDispatch, a horrifying but not surprising article by Ruth Rosen on women’s conditions in Iraq post-invasion.

There’s no way I can quote all the important parts of this article, but here’s a few samples:

Amal Kadham Swadi, one of seven Iraqi female attorneys attempting to represent imprisoned women, told the Guardian that only one woman she met with was willing to speak about rape. “She was crying. She told us she had been raped. Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off, and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, ‘We have daughters and husbands. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone about this.’”

[…]

Sexual Terrorism on the Streets

Meanwhile, the chaos of the war has also led to a rash of kidnappings and rapes of women outside of prison walls. After interviewing rape and abduction victims, as well as eyewitnesses, Iraqi police and health professionals, and U.S. military police and civil affairs officers, Human Rights Watch released a report in July, 2003, titled Climate of Fear: Sexual Violence and Abduction of Women and Girls in Baghdad. Only months after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, they had already learned of twenty-five credible allegations of the rape and/or abduction of Iraqi women. Not surprisingly, the report found that “police officers gave low priority to allegations of sexual violence and abduction, that the police were under-resourced, and that victims of sexual violence confronted indifference and sexism from Iraqi law enforcement personnel.” Since then, as chaos, violence, and bloodletting have descended on Iraq, matters have only gotten worse.

After the American invasion, local gangs began roaming Baghdad, snatching girls and women from the street. Interviews with human rights investigators have produced some horrifying stories. […]

As recently as June 2006, Mayada Zhaair, spokeswoman for the Women’s Rights Association, a local NGO, reported, “We’ve observed an increase in the number of women being sexually abused and raped in the past four months, especially in the capital.”

No one knows how many abducted women have never returned. As one Iraqi police inspector testified, “Some gangs specialize in kidnapping girls, they sell them to Gulf countries. This happened before the war too, but now it is worse, they can get in and out without passports.” Others interviewed by Human Rights Watch argued that such trafficking in women had not occurred before the invasion.

The U.S. State Department’s June 2005 report on the trafficking of women suggested that the extent of the problem in Iraq is “difficult to appropriately gauge” under current chaotic circumstances, but cited an unknown number of Iraqi women and girls being sent to Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Persian Gulf countries for sexual exploitation.

[…]

Disappearing women

To avoid such dangers, countless Iraqi women have become shut-ins in their own homes. Historian Marjorie Lasky has described this situation in “Iraqi Women Under Siege,” a 2006 report for Codepink, an anti-war women’s organization. Before the war, she points out, many educated Iraqi women participated fully in the work force and in public life. Now, many of them rarely go out. They fear kidnap and rape; they are terrified of getting caught in the cross-fire between Americans and insurgents; they are frightened by sectarian reprisals; and they are scared of Islamic militants who intimidate or beat them if they are not “properly covered.”

“In the British-occupied south,” Terri Judd reported in the British Independent,”where Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi’s Army retains a stranglehold, women insist the situation is at its worst. Here they are forced to live behind closed doors only to emerge, concealed behind scarves, hidden behind husbands and fathers. Even wearing a pair of trousers is considered an act of defiance, punishable by death.”

Invisible women — for some Iraqi fundamentalist Islamic leaders, this is a dream come true. The Ministry of the Interior, for example, recently issued notices warning women not to go out on their own. “This is a Muslim country and any attack on a woman’s modesty is also an attack on our religious beliefs,” said Salah Ali, a senior ministry official. Religious leaders in both Sunni and Shiite mosques have used their sermons to persuade their largely male congregations to keep working women at home. “These incidents of abuse just prove what we have been saying for so long,” said Sheikh Salah Muzidin, an imam at a mosque in Baghdad. “That it is the Islamic duty of women to stay in their homes, looking after their children and husbands rather than searching for work—especially with the current lack of security in the country.”

In the early 1970s, American feminists redefined rape and argued that it was an act driven not by sexual lust, but by a desire to exercise power over another person. Rape, they argued, was an act of terrorism that kept all women from claiming their right to public space. That is precisely what has happened to Iraqi women since the American invasion of Iraq.

There’s a lot more, and many links to more resources on women’s lives in Iraq. Read the whole thing.

I’m sorry to do a quote-post; I’ve tried writing a post on this subject myself many times, but I just get too angry to continue. What the US government (mostly Republicans, but with the cooperation of a shamefully huge number of Democrats) has done in Iraq is evil. If not the evil of malice, then the evil of being so self-centered and egotistical and partisan-sighted that they’re simply incapable of seeing the women whose murder, kidnappings, rapes, and home imprisonments they’ve eagerly enabled. It’s abusive and sick and - at the risk of becoming repetitive - evil.

And the number of pro-war Americans who have written or blogged honestly about the catastrophic decline in women’s rights in Iraq can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Are they sociopaths? Are they so racist and misogynistic that they’re incapable of caring what happens to non-white women? Are they so loyal to Bush that they think that the harm of saying one critical word about Bush outweighs the harm Bush’s policies have done to countless Iraqi women? What’s wrong with them?

(I know, I know; I’m being “shrill.” Why does anyone with a working brain think “shrill” is a legitimate critique of anything? Frankly, if thinking that what’s happening to Iraqi women is a moral travesty makes me shrill, then I’ll be shrill, and furthermore you should be ashamed if you’re not shrill.)

Keep in mind that women are a majority in Iraq. It’s becoming clear that, for that majority (and for many of the male minority, as well) bad as life under Saddam was, life under the American occupation is much worse. It’s a staggering accomplishment, if you think of it, that we’ve managed to outdo Saddam in this regard. Either this war was not fought to free the people of Iraq, despite many claims to the contrary. Or if it was fought to free Iraqis, then the effort has been a dismal failure by people so brainwashed by partisanship and/or pro-war ideology that they’re no longer capable of recognizing failure, let alone taking any responsibility for the unbelievable damage they’ve caused.

How many Iraqi women have to be raped, kidnapped, and murdered before more than a handful of the folks who favored invading Iraq admit they’ve screwed up catastrophically? My guess is: all of them. And even that probably wouldn’t be enough.

PLEASE NOTE:
This thread is reserved for feminist and feminist-friendly posters only. Cross-posted at Creative Destruction .

From the New York Times:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 6 — The United States ambassador and the top American military commander here together issued an unusual apology on Thursday for the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman and the killing of her family, saying that the crime, in which at least four soldiers are suspects, had injured the “Iraqi people as a whole.”

I’ve seen many U.S. media stories make the same mistake the Times makes here. In virtually any context other than a crime committed by US soldiers, a 14 year old girl who was raped and murdered would be called a girl, not a “woman.”

“We understand this is painful, confusing and disturbing, not only to the family who lost a loved one, but to the Iraqi people as a whole,” the two senior officials said in a written statement. “The loss of a family member can never be undone. The alleged events of that day are absolutely inexcusable and unacceptable behavior.”

The statement is all the more unusual because no soldiers have been convicted yet or even formally charged.

What I find unusual about the statement, as quoted, is that whoever wrote the “apology” didn’t even read the news reports, or he’d know that four people — Abeer Qasim Hamza, who was raped before she was shot in the head; her parents Qasim Hamza Rasheed al-Janabi and Fakhriya Taha Muheisin al-Janabi, and her six-year-old sister Hadeel Qasim Hamza al-Janabi — had been murdered.

Not “a loved one.” Four loved ones. (Abeer’s two younger brothers were fortunately not home, which is presumably why they’re still alive.)

Does it need to be mentioned that all five soldiers arrested so far have been men?

Heart has been doing outstanding blogging about this appalling hate crime (here, here, here). In her first post about the rape/murders, she quotes the lyrics of a song written by an American soldier. A video that found its way on to the internet showed “The song… performed before thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq who could be heard wildly cheering and laughing in the background.” In the song, a seductive Iraqi woman tempts an American Marine into her home, where she and her insurgent family attempt to murder him.

They pulled out their AKs so I could see

And they said…
Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
(with humorous emphasis:)
So I grabbed her little sister, and pulled her in front of me.

As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally

Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little f*ckers to eternity.

The soldier had been planning to release a recording of his song, but in light of recent events he’s put off (or perhaps been ordered to put off) those plans. Not canceled them, mind you. Put them off.

A couple of right-wing bloggers (here here and here) find it ridiculous that Heart sees a connection between an ever-so-funny song about shooting an insurgent and her family to death, and the actual rape and murder that took place.

Seelhoff quotes the Hadji Girl song, and (with typical Feminist logic) segues from a discussion of a humorous skit of a Marine turning the tables on insurgents who attack him, to the case of several soldiers from the 101th Airborne Division of the US Army, not Marines, who have been accused by Iraqis of participating in an incident of rape and murder in the Iraqi city of Mahmoudiya.

(Note the author’s emphasis on the word “Iraqis” - the implication being that the story is not true. When this rape/murder was first reported in American media, the initial reaction of some in the rightosphere was to assume that it couldn’t possibly be true. See, for example, here and here: “…to take seriously the notion that FIVE soldiers gang-raped a girl, murdered her, burned her body, and then murdered her family to cover up the crime is simply beyond the pale. It would make a good movie script, but it’s just too far out there to even begin to take seriously.”)

I think Heart’s point is actually pretty simple: A culture in which a wacky novelty song about killing a seductive Iraqi insurgent and her family is popular and liked, is a culture that is encouraging misogyny and hate against women, and racist hate against all Iraqis. Did “Hadji Girl” cause these five soldiers to rape and murder? No, of course not. But the same cultural racism and misogyny that has (wrongly) convinced thousands of soldiers that “Hadji Girl” is acceptable as entertainment, also convinced these five (or possibly more than five?) men that it was acceptable to rape and murder an Iraqi family.

Oddly enough, right-wingers make this sort of connection all the time, when they (correctly) suggest that hateful anti-Israel propaganda stems is connected to murderous attacks on Israelis, even when there’s no evidence that any particular article was a direct cause of any particular attack. So why is the connection so hard to make when the hatred is directed at Iraqis and Iraqi women in particular?

I am in no way saying that this sort of thing is unique to Americans, or unique to soldiers. Gang-rape is always a weapon used against civilians — nearly always women and girls — in war, but it’s also used against civilians — nearly always women and girls — at home. Ms. Jared, in a comment left on Heart’s blog, linked to this recent story:

More arrests are likely in the rape of an 11-year-old girl by as many as 10 men, most of whom are football players at local community colleges, Fresno police said.

It’s not a coincidence that so many gang rapes are committed by young men in organizations - football, frat houses, the army, etc - which teach the young men that “being a man” is all-important. The sense of entitlement and manhood that convinced the young men in Fresno to rape is the same as the sense of entitlement and manhood that convinced the young men in Iraq to rape; the main difference, I would guess, is that the young men in Iraq had been subjected to a racist regime, devaluing Iraqi lives, which convinced them that it was all right to murder as well.

Please go read Heart’s posts. A lot of the info and links above came from Heart, and also from Feministing, Abyss2Hope, Feminist Law Profs, Footnotes From a Small Village, and Capitalism Bad Tree Pretty.

UPDATE: Ms. Jared, in comments, points me to this post from Riverbend, an Iraqi blogger:

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don’t report rapes here, they avenge them. We’ve been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can’t believe their ‘heroes’ are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

…Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes…

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE 2: Punk Ass Blog has more on the misreporting of her age.

***IMPORTANT NOTE***
Comments on this post are open only to feminists and feminist-friendly people. Cross-posted on Creative Destruction.

Interesting-sounding panel discussion of women’s rights in the Mid East. I thought this point - about the attraction of patriarchy in dictatorships - was well-made:

Darwish placed the blame on the patriarchy of the Middle East.

“In the Middle East, men struggle with little freedoms because they, too, are oppressed by the dictatorship,” she said. “Women are the one aspect of control in their life, so inside the home, the men rule.”

Narrowing the discussion to Muslim women, Darwish said, “A woman in the Middle East must answer to everyone, and her honor and purity is the business of her family, her neighbors, and sometimes, even the virtue police.”

At the same time, I’m not sure if I entirely agreed with this:

Darwish said the solution to human rights abuses toward women in the Middle East is democratization and that it will be impossible to improve women’s stations without proper democratic institutions.

Do “democratic institutions” include things like a civic commitment to equal treatment of the sexes, protections for minorities against dictatorship by the majority, and a safe civil society for dissent? It seems to me that these freedoms may be more essential than mere Democracy - and may be preconditions for a successful liberal democracy. Women in Iraq and Afghanistan have the vote (in theory), but in many areas can’t walk the streets with bare faces without fear of violent reprisal; freedom to vote doesn’t guarantee freedom in any substantive sense. Democracy is one element of freedom, but it’s not the only element, and maybe not even the most essential element.

The conflict between democracy and women’s fundamental human rights is a topic I’ve blogged on several times already, generally in the context of Iraq (1 2 3 4 5 ). Women’s liberty in Iraq, already in decline under Hussain, have sharply plummeted since the U.S. invasion. The ability to vote for religious fanatics who are determined to end women’s freedoms is not freedom in any meaningful sense, and ought not be celebrated as freedom.

Unusually for panels with this subject matter, Israel wasn’t ignored:

Panelist and NYU politics professor Hani Zubida discussed Israeli women’s rights from a socio-political perspective.

“The notion of equality [in Israel] is a double-edged sword … women can no longer say that they are being discriminated against, because they were given this equality with suffrage and ability to join the army,” Zubida said. “However, there is disenfranchisement of Israeli women through the mechanism of the army … the military as a social construct does not accept women as equal.”

I’m glad they didn’t ignore Israel, although there’s no doubt that Israeli women are far better situated than most (all?) of their counterparts in the Mid-East. Zubida’s point - that formal legal equality can be used to dismiss other legitimate concerns (”you’ve got the vote, so what are you complaining about?”) - is one that in theory I agree with. But I wish the article had given more detail about Zubida’s argument; the quote from her really isn’t enough to know what specific problems she’s talking about.

The question of liberty versus democracy is relevant to Palestine, as well. I favor independence for the occupied territories as an independent Palestine, but I do so without much enthusiasm, largely because I suspect that a Palestinian state, while democratic, would nonetheless be hugely oppressive to Palestinian women and Palestinian queers. From the BBC:

A number of gay Palestinian men are risking their lives to cross the border into Israel, claiming they feel safer among Israelis than their own people. […]

In practice, Palestinian gays end up being placed under virtual house arrest because of the fear that they may be potential suicide bombers. […] However, many Palestinian gays say they would still rather live under house arrest in Israel, where homosexuality is not considered a crime, than at home.

In a way, U.S. leftists regarding Palestine are in a similar position as U.S. right-wingers regarding Iraq; in both cases, the Americans are advocating the creation of a new government that will virtually certainly be brutally oppressive to both women and queers. And both groups tend to sweep this fact under the rug.

(Incidentally, gaymiddleeast.com seems to be a good source of news stories about queer rights throughout the middle east).

In my most recent link farm post, I posted a link to a story about Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani calling a fatwah against homosexuals. The blogger Zeyad apparently translated this from an page in Arabic on Sistani’s website:

Q: What is the judgement on sodomy and lesbianism?

A: “Forbidden. Those involved in the act should be punished. In fact, sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible.”

Juan Cole also believes the story is true. However, Ginmar, who has significant expertise in this area, is arguing that the story is false. From an email Ginmar sent me (reprinted with permission):

Here’s the evidence. Sistani has a long history of taking fatwas extremely seriously and always issuing them in the service of non-violence. The other part of the fatwa incited Shi’ites to violence against Sunnis. While homophobia may be old news, this not and all the major news organs would have reported that. It directly contradicted Sistani’s earlier fatwas, ordering Shia to stand down from acts of retaliation. After the bombing of the Al Askari mosque this year he ordered Shia not to protest violently.

The original tip reported he was the leader of the BADR Corps and SCIRI. This is manifestly not true. The tips have come from one source, the guy cited in the 365 gay article. I’ve never heard of him before. Amongst other things, the guy got just about everything wrong and appears to have no real knowledge of conditions in Iraq. Chat room murders? People don’t go out at night for fear of bombings and kidnappings. Furthermore, homoerotic friendships are common in Iraq to the point where you see men walking hand in hand down the street. Homosexuality is commonly but not openly practiced.

Finally, it appears that Sistani’s website has been hacked. It’s not like he has 24/7 internet access in An Najaf.

I spent a year studying the guy’s actions in Iraq. This fatwa contradicts a long-established pattern of behavior and public statements, not to mention earlier fatwas issued when the stakes were far lower. Sistani’s primary concern has always been the safety of the people of Iraq. He’s what’s known as a Quietist: he believes that religion should be an influence on people’s lives, and their lives will then influence their politics.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with his website, but this is the guy’s character: he’s the last person to incite violence when it’s this dangerous, so something’s going on. I was going to print out his website and have my NCO read it. That’s the only thing I’m not certain of.

You should know this, too: Sistani issued a fatwa early in the war that instructed Iraqis not to resist the invasion. That’s how concerned he is with loss of life. My biggest fear is Zarqawi’s oft-expressed urge for a religious war. Iraqis don’t fear each other nearly as much as they do the Iranians, and assassination of Sistani is the one thing that would guarantee a civil war. That country is like an abyss covered by tightropes supported by razor blades.

I don’t know what the truth is; hopefully things will be clarified soon. But I wanted “Alas” readers to be aware that the story has been called into doubt.

This weekend is the third anniversary of invasion of Iraq. So I hope you spent at least some of it at an anti-war protest (unless you support the occupation, in which case).

The Wellington demonstration was fantastic. The numbers were up on last year. While 250 people doesn’t sound like that much (particularly if you live somewhere big), our numbers are up on last year (which ruins a perfectly good theory of mine about the relationship between activists involved in organising a protest and people who turned up, oh well won’t stop me using it). There were even people there who I didn’t recognise, but what really excited me is that some of those people’s didn’t just turn up, they had organised to do stuff.

But that’s not the main point of this post, because towards the end of the protest someone got arrested and this lead to the usual chain reaction and four more people were arrested (even that isn’t the main point of the post, however frustrated I may be about protesters inability to count. If the police outnumber us then they can do whatever they want and the best idea is to get out of their way as soon as possible). What I want to write about is the gendered insults protesters were yelling at the police.

The police were all men, and both male and female protesters were playing up the way they were acting was a sign of failure of their masculinity, some of the comments were actually about the size of pe