Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy:
Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq
Conclusion: Standing with Iraqi Women in a Time of War
Since the US bombing of Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush Administration has resurrected the hackneyed colonial notion that its military intervention is intended to save Muslim women from their oppressive societies. As Laura Bush has said, "The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."123 Few Middle Eastern women believe this. (The line is really intended for people in the US.) In Iraq, women know that their work for equal rights has been undermined by British colonialism and, more recently, by US intervention. Throughout the Middle East—and indeed, around the world—the US has preferred to support authoritarian leaders who systematically violate women's rights.
Despite all of Bush's talk of bringing women's rights and democracy to Iraq, the US may ultimately prefer a theocratic dictatorship in Iraq over a true democracy in which the government respects human rights and popular will. After all, if it were up to the majority of Iraqis, how many would have endorsed the country's new, US–brokered oil law, which effectively puts Iraq's most valuable resource at the disposal of US–based corporations?124 How many Iraqis would have opted for huge, permanent US military bases in their country (whose sole purpose is to enable more US military intervention in the region)? Ultimately, the US–supported attack on women's rights in Iraq is instrumental to US policy in the Middle East because women's rights are an integral part of democratic rights and democratic rights threaten US control of the region.
Today, many progressives in the US argue that Iraqis should be free to determine their own political destiny. They look at Iraq, see widespread support for Islamism, and conclude that these are the politics that Iraqis have chosen. What many in the US don't know is that they are looking at a political landscape shaped in part by US intervention. During the Cold War, while the US propped up Islamist movements throughout the Middle East, it also worked to crush the Left, helping to create an environment largely devoid of strong progressive forces. In Iraq, the US welcomed the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 by supplying it with lists of Iraqi communists to assassinate.125 Thus, the US helped ensure that the Islamists whom they covertly supported were the only viable alternative to the status quo. In 2004, when the status quo was US occupation, support for an Islamist state in Iraq rose from 20 to 70 percent.126 The spike shows how quickly a political trend can take hold in a crisis. Interpreting that trend as inevitable and singularly authentic shows the hazards of trying to understand the world without knowledge of history.
"Women's rights are an integral part
of democratic rights and democratic rights
threaten US control of the region."
The fact that the US has used women's rights as a rallying point for its wars in the Middle East is sometimes used to fuel the claim that women's rights is "foreign" to the region and a tool of "Western domination." We hear that claim from conservatives in Muslim countries who oppose women's rights. We also hear it from some on the Left who seem to believe that condemning US intervention in Iraq requires defending any group that opposes the US, regardless of that group's own human rights record. These people glorify the Islamist forces within the Iraqi insurgency (though they themselves would hate to live in a theocracy). They refuse to condemn violations of Iraqi women's rights simply because those committing the violations are under attack by the US.
Indeed, within the United States, any discussion of gender–based violence in Iraq occurs in a climate of heightened hostility towards Islam and Muslim countries. Right–wing talk–radio is full of platitudes about the plight of Muslim women that are little more than racist diatribes used to justify US intervention. Prominent US military and religious leaders have explicitly cast Bush's invasion of Iraq as a Christian holy war against Islam—with no censure from the White House.127 Clearly, strategies against gender–based violence in the Middle East need to also combat the violence of US foreign policy, confront "Islamaphobia" in the US, and recognize the ways that sexism and racism have been conscripted into Bush's "war on terror."
Understanding the links between opposing violence against Iraqi women and opposing violence by the US can help address the concern of people who worry that advocating Middle Eastern women's rights imposes "Western values" on Muslim countries. Here, a fear of condoning "cultural imperialism" leads people to be silent about violence against women. But silence is not a defensible response to grave human rights abuses. Nor is silence necessary to avoid charges of cultural imperialism, for there is nothing inherently "Western" about women's rights. Women in the Middle East have a century–long history of political struggle, popular organizing, jurisprudence, and scholarship aimed at securing rights within their societies. As Haifa Zangana says, "The main misconception is to perceive Iraqi women as silent, powerless victims in a male–controlled society in urgent need of 'liberation.' This image fits conveniently into the big picture of the Iraqi people being passive victims who would welcome the occupation of their country. The reality is different."128
"Strategies against gender–based violence
in the Middle East need to also combat the
violence of US foreign policy."
The assumption that women's rights are a "Western" concern is not only historically inaccurate, but also overblown. After all, the intellectual foundations of civilization—writing, mathematics, and science—are "Eastern." Are these pursuits therefore "foreign" and inappropriate in "the West?" Human rights, feminism, literature, and science are all aspects of our common human heritage. We should be suspicious whenever one is said to belong—or not belong—to a given people, especially when that designation is used to deny people their rights. The imagined community of "the West" has no monopoly on democracy, women's rights or any other "values" that the Bush Administration purports to be "bringing" to Iraq.
In the US, right–wing intellectuals like to talk about a "clash of civilizations" dividing the United States from the Middle East. But the real clash is not between "Western" democracies and "Eastern" theocracies; it is between those who uphold the full range of human rights—including women's right to a life free of violence—and those who pursue economic and political power for a privileged few at the expense of the world's majority. In this clash, no one is predestined to be on one side or the other by virtue of her culture, religion, or nationality. We choose our position based on our principles and our actions. Those of us who choose to stand in defense of human rights in Iraq must support the efforts of Iraqi women who are struggling for women's rights within their country and for their country's right to freedom from US domination and Islamist repression.
123Radio address, Nov. 17, 2001.
124Antonia Juhasz, "It's Still About The Oil," TomPaine.com, http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/01/19/its_still_about_the_oil.php (accessed Jan. 19, 2007).
125Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
126Naomi Klein, "You Can't Bomb Beliefs," The Nation, Sep. 30, 2006, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041018/klein (accessed Jan. 31, 2007).
127Giles Fraser, "The evangelicals who like to gift–wrap Islamophobia: The world's largest children's Christmas project has a toxic agenda," The Guardian, Nov. 10, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1081349,00.html (accessed Jan. 29, 2007). In Oct. 2003, General William Boykin, US deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence, described the US as waging a holy war against "the idol" of Islam's false god and "a guy called Satan" who "wants to destroy us as a Christian army. "
128As quoted in: Huibin Amee Chew, "Occupation is Not (Women's) Liberation Part I," ZNet, March 24, 2005, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7518 (accessed Dec. 13, 2006).