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US Trades Iraqi Women's Rights for Exit Strategy

August 24, 2005

The ongoing constitutional crisis in Baghdad demonstrates that the Bush Administration's drive to recreate the Middle East in its own image is producing theocracy, not democracy, in Iraq. Iraqi women are the first to pay the price. On August 22, Iraqi leaders released a draft of the country's new constitution that makes Islamic law, or shariah, the basis of national legislation, thereby opening the door for conservative clerics to overturn secular laws that can protect women's human rights.

The Bush Administration bears direct responsibility for this crisis. After inserting himself heavily into negotiations over the draft, US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad backed demands for constitutional provisions that would give clerics control over family status laws governing marriage, divorce, and women's inheritance and property rights. Iraq's current family status laws—among the most progressive in the Middle East—could be overturned by this move. Like religious fundamentalists in the United States and around the world, Iraq's Islamic parties use religion as a means of pursuing a reactionary political agenda that begins with the subjugation of women within the family. By deferring to the clerics on family status laws, the US has handed a key victory to the clerics who are pushing for Iraq to become an Islamic state.

The Administration has repeatedly linked the completion of Iraq's constitution to national elections in December and an eventual withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Increasingly desperate for an "exit strategy," the United States has chosen to trade women's rights for cooperation from reactionary leaders on the constitutional drafting committee. This treachery is being spun as "democratic process." But the decision to forfeit women's human rights in the name of democracy is a clear indication that the Bush Administration is committed to neither.