Time for another link farm…

This topic has come up in P-A’s UNFPA thread: rather than derail that discussion further, I’ve put up a new post, and transfered comments about the Lancet study from that post to this one.

It’s been almost a year since the British medical journal The Lancet published a study (pdf version here) showing that deaths among ordinary Iraqis have increased as a result of the American invasion and occupation.

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For a change, this and several posts to follow (to be posted over the next few days) won’t directly discuss the situation of women in Iraq (although everything about Iraq relates to Iraqi women, of course). Instead, I wanted to recommend several articles and blog posts about the political and military situation in Iraq. Some of this will be very old hat to some readers, but for others it will hopefully be interesting.

First, David Corn very usefully posts an outline of the situation in Iraq, written by Larry Johnson, “a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State Department.” Johnson makes a convincing case that the US, as a matter of cold fact, lacks the political will or military ability to remake Iraq. Here’s a sample, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

We could potentially defeat the Sunni insurgents if we were willing and able to deploy sufficient troops to control the key infiltration routes that run along the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys. But we are neither willing nor able. It would require at least 380,000 troops devoted exclusively to that mission. Part of that mission would entail killing anyone who moved into controlled areas, such as roadways. In adopting those kinds of rules of engagement we would certainly increase the risk of killing innocent civilians. But, we would impose effective control over those routes. That is a prerequisite to gaining control over the insurgency.

We cannot meet the increased manpower requirements in Iraq without a draft. We do not currently have enough troops in the Army and the Marine Corps to supply and sustain that size of force in the field. But, even with a draft, we would be at least 15 months away from having the new batch of trained soldiers ready to deploy. More importantly, there is no political support for a draft. In other words, we’re unwilling to do what is required to even have a shot at winning.

While the insurgency is not likely to acquire sufficient strength to fight and defeat our forces directly in large set piece battles, they do have the wherewithal to destroy infrastructure and challenge our control of lines of communication. The ultimate test of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it can protect its citizens from threats foreign and domestic. Thus far the Iraqi Government has made scant progress on this front.

I have to resist the impulse to quote Johnson’s entire article; it’s short, but it describes concisely the realities in Iraq that hawks have simply refused to acknowledge, let alone provide a realistic response to.

Too many hawks discuss our options in Iraq as if we’re choosing between withdrawal and victory in Iraq. What is “victory in Iraq”? I’d suggest that, at a minimum, victory requires the establishment of a stable democracy in which (to quote Johnson) “the average Iraqi can move around the country without fear of being killed or kidnapped.” (And remember, the average Iraqi is a woman). That doesn’t seem too much to ask for - but it’s far more than the American military or executive branch is realistically capable of offering.

Bottom line: It doesn’t matter how morally correct an outcome is if it’s not something that we can feasibly bring about in the real world.

John McGowan, guest-posting at Michael Berube’s blog, is critiquing Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Judith Butler (part one and part two). I think readers who want to know a bit of what Judith Butler’s work is about, but have found Butler’s ultra-opaque prose unapproachable, might find McGowan’s discussion very helpful.

Amy of the 50 Minute Hour has an excellent post regarding the recent “doctor badgering fat women patients” controversy, and more broadly criticizing the entire weight-loss approach to health taken by too many doctors.

Dawn of The Dawn Patrol thinks that pro-choicers are uncaring meanies. I’ve been debating about various things with her and the other folks there in the comments. Amanda and Lauren have been posting there, too. Dawn enforces civility and on-topicness pretty strictly, so if you’re tempted to post there, be warned.

Dawn also has posted a list of guidelines for civil debate, written by a couple of high-school debaters, which I want to preserve the link to for future reference.

Kim Gandy (president of NOW) expresses horror at what’s happening to women’s rights in Iraq. Some stupid anti-feminist troll leaves a comment saying that she looks like Tom Hanks; I never noticed before, but (at least in this photo) (and without meaning it in the negative or insulting way the troll meant it) she actually kind of does.

Just to show that right-wingers aren’t always wrong, I should point out that this writer at World Net Daily is also outraged at the betrayal of Iraqi women.

Pro-lifers in Kansas are suing to prevent the government from paying for abortions in any circumstances at all - even when an abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life. Lovely. Lauren at Feministe has the story.

Res Ispa has two good posts criticizing the marriage movement’s indifference to the well-being of children growing up in non-traditional households, here and here. “There is a sense among the gay parenting opponents that if they just wish hard enough, gay parents are going to disappear. That just isn’t realistic and it’s appallingly bad public policy.”

Surprisingly, a study has found that watching Fox News doesn’t change who people vote for. Nice to know. Thanks to “Alas” reader Sara for the tip.

I have a lot of open links about women’s rights in Iraq - or, more accurately, about the destruction of women’s rights in Iraq, brokered by the Bush administration. It’s amazing - they’ve actually managed to make Iraq, already a pit for human rights, even worse. It’s as if they rushed into a burning building screaming “mission of mercy! mission of mercy!” and then set an additional three floors on fire. And now that they’ve put misogynistic fascists into power in Iraq, they want a medal for a job well done.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, has a must-read article in the Independent, about women’s reality in Bush’s Iraq (link via Bitch PhD). Here’s a bit of Mahmoud’s essay:

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. [...] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq. This has been pursued under the name of liberation, but what we actually see is women increasingly losing their freedom, while political Islamists feel free to terrorise them. [...]

The constitution is set to add to a growing fearfulness among Iraqi women, as their rights are passed over or signed away to Islamists hostile to Iraq’s entire female population. Women in Iraq face being dragged back into the dark ages. We need to stop this tragedy before it’s too late. A constitution based on enslaving women, religious sectarianism, and tribalism must be rejected.

The USA has replaced a brutal, relatively secular tyrant with thousands of brutal religious fundamentalist tyrants. Without ignoring or soft-pedaling what a monster Hussain was, it’s clear that the US’s invasion has made things worse for women in Iraq. To call this state of affairs “freedom” is a sick Orwellian joke. Echidne writes:

Nobody really cares about women’s rights in Iraq, certainly not within the U.S. government. Bush wouldn’t have attacked the country if he had cared about the rights of women. Iraq used to have one of the most egalitarian legal systems for women, and look what we have wrought! Oh, I forgot, no more rape rooms. Though, they don’t matter much as many women don’t dare to go out in any case, fearing kidnapping and rape.

So who wins? Amanda sharply observes:

If you look at it from that angle–that fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians are just two flavors of the same patriarchal religion–then one thing becomes quite obvious. The winners of the Iraqi War are not the Americans and not the Iraqis, but the fundamentalists. On both sides of the conflict, fundamentalists have been able to use this war as leverage to make progress towards their ideal society–a strict hierarchy where the men on top of society have absolute power over other men and men have absolute power over women.

Click.

Like Amanda, I don’t believe this was a conspiracy. But I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that an administration headed by religious fundamentalists actively pushed for a “compromise” in which women’s rights are to be crushed by religious fundamentalists. The things you compromise on are the things that you consider disposable.

Too often, the question of leaving Iraq is framed as “abandoning” the Iraqis. I have sympathy for this view, I really do. Pam’s House Blend makes a strong, women-centered case for not “abandoning” Iraq.

But then I think, what activities would we be abandoning?

Should we abandon “helping” Iraqi women by using a fixed election to legitimize a government that is so consumed by women-hatred that if it were a person we’d have to put it in a rubber cell? Should we abandon putting into power people who see a woman’s face and their first thought is to splash acid into it?

Put another way, if we refuse to abandon our policy of destroying through horrible alliances and power-plays every part of Iraq we haven’t already destroyed with our boundless incompetence, are we really doing ordinary Iraqis a favor?

Digby writes:

I am now officially an isolationist. Not because I don’t think that Americans should spend its blood and treasure on foreigners. It’s because I don’t think the world can take much more of our “freedom and democracy.”

The “how can we abandon Iraqis” argument assumes that the US is capable of doing some good in Iraq. I don’t have faith in that anymore. It doesn’t matter if helping Iraqis is the right thing to do, because our government is either evil or incompetent. You can’t drain a thousand miles of acid-laced swamp when your only tool is a broken wacky straw.

Shakespeare’s Sister writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

No, it ought not happen. And yes, it’s happening. And somehow we’ll continue thinking of ourselves as “the good guys,” the rescuers, the heroes, the force for freedom, as Iraqi women in fundy-ruled zones drop out of jobs, university, walks to the store and basically the entire public sphere, the entire ball of wax we call participating in society, for fear of state-sanctioned acid and rape and kidnapping and murder. This is how we’ve freed the women of Iraq. The American capacity for self-delusion is awesome; I sit before it and gape, open-mouthed, except perhaps my mouth is really open because I’m screaming. It doesn’t matter, anyway; it’s over, no one is listening, we’ve ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women, and we can’t or won’t fix the damage we’ve done. Time for the victory party.

Just came across this passage on another blog and it cracked me up.

A ragtag bunch of ignorant losers who want to have sex with 72 virgins against a military increasingly de-balled by an effete media and seemingly intimidated president. No contest.

For some folks (not exclusively men - this blogger is a woman, I think), invading Iraq really is all about masculinity.

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From yesterday’s New York Times:

Iraqi leaders said they had also reached a tentative agreement to relegate marriage and family matters to adjudication by clerics, an arrangement opposed by secular leaders and women’s groups here, Iraqi leaders said.

The tentative agreements on Islam were brokered by the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, according to a Kurdish negotiator who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the delicacy of the talks. The Kurdish leader said that in both cases, Mr. Khalilzad had sided with Shiite leaders in backing a more expansive role for Islam. That, the Kurd said, angered many of the secular-minded Iraqis who have been fighting for a stricter separation between Islam and the state.

According to the Kurdish leader, the secular Iraqis had pushed for language that would have narrowed the circumstances under which legislation would be deemed to be in conflict with Islam. And, according to the Kurd, the secular Iraqis had wanted marriage and family disputes to be adjudicated by civil courts, not by clerics.

“Your American ambassador is giving an Islamic character to the state,” the Kurdish leader said. “You spent all this money and all this blood to bring an Islamic republic here.”

(So why did the oh-so-liberal Times bury this deep in a story about the assassination of 3 Sunni election workers, where almost no one will see it?)

Pam’s House Blend is on this story, as well (and probably many others).

What is there to say, really? We came, we conquered, we screwed over women’s rights, and soon we’ll declare the whole thing a victory and leave them to their religious fundimentalist tyranny.

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In the comments of Pseudo-Adrienne’s post yesterday, Asher of Dreams into Lightning posted some quotes from other blogs about the situation for women in Iraq, which I liked so much that I’m totally swiping it and posting here.

A couple of recent items:

Mohammed at Iraq the Model

In spite of the heat and the dust that’s covering Baghdad for the 2nd day, more than a hundred Iraqi women representing NGOs and active groups gathered to declare their demands in equality and a civil family and personal affairs law.

The women set a large tent in Al-Firdows square which witnessed the fall of Saddam in April 2003. Under this icon of freedom the women held their signs and demands high.

I met some of the activists who talked enthusiastically about plans for more protests and conventions to show their disapproval of the constitution’s draft because they’re afraid that religion might hijack the constitution and deprive them of their rights.

I’ve also noticed that signs that required two to hold were held by a male and a female in a sign of equality; I liked the idea! …

Full post, with pictures, at the link.

Kat at The Middle Ground:

The Iraq Constitution is in the process of being written. Several drafts have been sent to the public for input in preparation for the referendum on August 15, 2005. As the negotiations continue, questions about the base of law and the role of Islam and Shari’ah continue to be points of contention. Many women in Iraq will be affected if Shari’ah is adopted as the sole source of law or if it is adopted as a major source of law and its implementation is left up to the different regions of Iraq.

Some regions are effectively controlled by major religious parties, both Sunni and Shia, which advocate traditional and restricted roles for women. The laws that would be enacted under Shari’ah would impact women negatively including such issues as custody of children (usually given to the men regardless of the reason for divorce or separation), divorce (which gives women limited if no rights in divorce, regardless of the condition of their union and allow men free reign to divorce at will for little if any reason and can impact her and her children’s financial situation), inheritance (depending on whose version of Shari’ah, widows could be left with less than 50% of their husbands property and wealth, regardless of the number of children she has to support while the remaining inheritance would be given to his brothers, father, uncles and cousins; for women already living in poverty, this could be devastating), and voting rights and representation within the government.

These are but a few of the issues facing women in the new Iraq. Other issues include laws to protect women from abuse, honor killings and unfair and inhumane punishment for the crime of “adultery” which includes pre-marital sex and rape. …

Follow Kat’s links to the American Islamic Congress and Women’s Alliance for a Democratic Iraq.

Plus, this post on how people can help, from Dreams Into Lightning. I’ve changed it a little, though, so blame the content on me, not on DIL:

1) Write your senator and representative asking them to support these organizations with additional funds or statements of support for women’s rights. (If you are not in the United States, please feel free to write your parliament member or other government representatives to give support to these organizations.)

2) Donate funds directly to any of the women’s organization’s listed below.

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq
Women’s Alliance for a Democratic Iraq

3) If you work for a company or are a member of an organization, particularly any organizations for women within your country or region, ask them to provide assistance, either financially, materially (ie, donating time, media assistance, printing, supplies, etc) or politically.

Some may be concerned that this assistance will come too late. It is never too late. Changes to the constitution are being made as you read this and will be made up to the last moment before the referendum. Even after the constitution is written and the referendum passed, women’s rights in Iraq will still be an issue and these women will need our support.

(The original post on DIL also suggested donating money to the Independent Women’s Forum, an anti-feminist, pro-Republican think tank with no special Iraq expertise, and some other organizations that weren’t as appalling as the IWF but also didn’t seem very focused on women in Iraq. I deleted those links and stuck in a link to OWFI instead.)

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Via Volsunga, an interview with Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:

The first priority is to survive. The moment you step onto the street, you are an immediate target just because you are female. If a woman goes out, she may be assaulted, she may be kidnapped. The gangsters are very organised. Ransom is becoming an everyday thing. A gang kidnaps a woman and they contact her family to ask for a fat ransom. Unfortunately, some families will ask whether anything sexual has happened to the woman. If it has, they won’t want her back.

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.

In many mosques they preach that a female should leave school in Grade 6, because otherwise she will be mixing with males and evil will happen.[...]

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.

In that culture women are just a tool for production of children and sexual entertainment of men. Young females are promised by their families to other males in the tribe, in a very inhumane way. On top of that, women are considered to be sources of evil, and that is why we need to be covered from top to toe.

The entire interview is worth reading.

She’s careful to point out that problems for women’s rights existed under Hussain’s rule as well; The invasion and occupation have made things much worse for Iraqi women, but what existed before wasn’t utopian.

I wish I knew of a solution. That the Republican idea that freedom can be created through invasion has been discredited doesn’t provide much comfort for women in Iraq who have had their rights taken away. We’ve squandered away any shred of moral credibility we had in the region, and we don’t have enough soldiers to remake entire cultures at gunpoint. Frankly, I doubt there is anything substantial the US can do to clean up the enourmous mess we’ve made.

At the very least, we should establish, as much as security concerns allow, an “open door” immigration policy for any Iraqi woman who wants to move to the US in order to avoid the tyranny of radical fundimentalist Islamic law. Since we can’t offer them freedom in their own land from tyrants we’ve empowered, we should at least offer an escape route.

So what happens when a soldier in Iraq - “an NCO with 20 years of service” - dares to criticize the war? Rivka, back from a brief posting hiatus, has the story.

Juan Cole has a must-read post….

That’s just a sample - you ought to read the whole. Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Atrios has posted a memo written by Republican pollster’and host of his own show on MSNBC’Frank Luntz detailing talking points for those wishing to convince Americans of the value of the War in Iraq. There are a few gems in there including, “No speech about homeland security or Iraq should begin without a reference to 9/11″ and:

But the following most caught my eye:

I may be misreading this, but it appears that Luntz is suggesting’and that Bush is actually saying’that the proof that the War in Iraq is connected to the “Wider War on Terror” lies in the fact that U.S. soldiers in Iraq are being attacked by persons using similar tactics to those deployed by terrorists.

Or, to put it another way: we’re being attacked by terrorists now that we’ve invaded Iraq, therefore the War in Iraq is part of the War on Terror.

This afternoon I finished reading Voltaire’s Candide, so when I read that little loop-de-loop of argumentation, I couldn’t help but be reminded of some of the things said by Voltaire’s rather optimistic hero.

After having killed a Jesuit priest’who happens to be the brother of his mistress, Cun’gonde’Candide flees into the forests of South America with his loyal companion, Cacambo. In order to facilitate their escape, Cacambo made Candide wear the robes of the slain Jesuit. In the forest, the pair are captured by a tribe of cannibals who want to kill and eat Candide because the believe him to be a Jesuit. Cacambo explains the true nature of the situation to the cannibals who see the light of reason and release Candide and Cacambo. After being freed and given gifts, “Candide could not weary of exclaiming over his preservation.”

Voltaire’s intent was to lampoon the more extreme applications of a school of thought known as philosophical optimism. This philosophy was proposed by Leibnitz and is, in brief, the idea that all things in the universe, being created by God, are ordered for the best, or that such things are ordered in such a way as to produce the best of all possible outcomes. Thus, this world is the best of all possible worlds, for how could it be otherwise?

At the end of Candide, after the eponymous hero has gone through a series of rather nasty events’events which were, almost invariably, avoidable had Candide not been a philosophical optimist’after which none of Candide’s goals or efforts at happiness are preserved, his philosopher companion, Pangloss, offers this bit of good cheer:

So you see, the War in Iraq is part of the War on Terror because we have encouraged terrorists to attack the U.S. in Iraq. This proves, quite conclusively I’d say, that the War in Iraq is the best of all possible wars.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

It’s disgusting how much some people hate free speech. How much some people hate, period.

Full story.

I wish I had time to make a post of each of these links, but alas… So here they are. Sorry if this post seems a bit abrupt; it’s not because I think the topics under discussion aren’t important.

• Excellent article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how badly news media covers class issues, and in particular, poor people.

• Daddy, Poppa and Me defends a webpage on “Nazi Anti-Jewish Speech vs. Religioius Right Anti-Gay Speech.” My favorite bit:
  But if the Nazis have become such a caricature of evil that nothing they did or said can ever be compared to anything anyone else does or says now or in the future, then the phrase

  “Never again!”

  becomes a useless and trite historical cliche having no force or power to stop hate before it becomes something violent. Do I believe that the FRC has the possibility to become a ‘regime’ that would slaughter my ‘kind’? No, I would be the last to make such a prediction.

  Do I believe the rhetoric of hate and demonization that the FRC uses has the possibility to increase violence and legislative attacks against my family? Yes, most defininitely.

• An article about “honour killings” in Istanbul, the practice of murdering girls and women for having sex, for being suspected of having sex, or even for being raped. The good news is, there is something of a backlash against the practice.
• In “Ideas which look sensible but aren’t,” Daniel Davies explains why it’s not a good idea to lend aid money only to countries with decent human rights records.
• Jon Stewart’s commencement address at William & Mary College.
• The Fifty Minute Hour has a sickening post about how rape-shield laws are not being enforced in one California case.

  UPDATEAnd Pinko Feminist Hellcat has another post on this case, aptly titled “Just when you think the OC rape defense couldn’t get any worse…”

• Death and Disease in Iraq. At least for now, war has made things even worse.
• Kuwaiti women react with caution to move on political rights.
• A useful Women’s Enews article describes and contrasts the Kerry and Bush health plans.
• In Pakistan, Those Who Cry Rape Face Jail.
  Up to 80 percent of the 2,000 women now in Pakistani jails are facing charges related to the Hudood Ordinances, according to Rizvi. Many of the cases involve women being charged with adultery after they have allegedly been raped. Another case involves a woman seeking a divorce who has then been accused of adultery. While few are ever tried and convicted, the stigma and the ordeal can color the rest of their lives.

  “These laws promote injustice and are un-Islamic, denying women the rights given to them in the Koran, and discriminating against the weakest sections of society; women and minorities,” Rizvi says. “It is a flawed legislation that can’t be fixed. Its drafting is flawed. Its motive is flawed.” [...]

  Under the Hudood, punishment of a man for rape must be preceded by his own confession or the testimony of four males of upstanding character who witnessed the act of penetration. Women and non-Muslim witnesses are considered worthless.

• A good article by rape researcher Mary Koss discusses what existing research has shown us, and suggests directions for future research.

I haven’t posted anything about Abu Ghraib, largely because I have nothing to say. I am appalled, but not surprised, by recent revelations, apart from being surprised that the American press is reporting them.

Nor am I very enthusiastic for this from a partisan point of view. I don’t find what has happened in Abu Ghraib to be more evil than the Iraqi sanctions. That the US tortures Iraqis isn’t even something new. Awful as the torture of prisoners is, it’s not worse torture than what a parent goes through watching their child slowly die of typhoid fever or cholera - let alone what the child goes through. Although the torture of sanctions was less direct, it was not less deliberate.

The truth is, in terms of our foreign policy, the US is evil. We’ve always been evil (although that’s not all we’ve been), and the only reason this is getting any attention in the States is because it’s an excuse for CNN and the newspapers to focus on lurid photos. (Thank God for lurid photos, I say). Body & Soul is disucssing the conflict between blaming the monsters at the top of the chain in command, versus blaming the soldiers who actually implimented the tortures. She correctly concludes, I think, that both deserve some share of blame. To that, I’d add, blame American voters, because we have been more than willing to let the top monsters and the soldiers off the hook.

Anyhow, I was meaning to introduce this amazing post at Body and Soul. Unlike me, Jeanne has things to say about Abu Ghraib which are worth reading. Here’s a quote that deserves to be repeated a thousand times:

…but that’s only a tiny part of what Jeanne has to say. Please go read it.

I generally avoid blogging about Iraq, both because it’s too depressing and because there are other bloggers who do it so much better than I could. But this quote about Paul Wolfowitz’s February 2003 testimony before congress is too stunning not to reproduce.

Oy, oy, oy, oy.

Via Political Animal.