See this documentary on Henry Kissinger and the book from Christopher Hitchens. Also, see these YouTube videos. Henry Kissinger was also an important player in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with Kissinger Associates. As for Madeleine Albright, she was instrumental in imposing the crushing sanctions on the Iraqi people in the 90's that were unbelievably unethical. These policies were the continuation of a strategy to bring Iraq from a secular first world country to a third world country where a sectarian government is now in power.
Seriously! How many of you know that Iraq used to be a first world country and one of the most powerful countries in the middle east? Though Sadam Hussien was not perfect, he kept the sectarian and religious fanatics at bay, while allowing women to become educated. Contrary to popular imagination, Iraqi women enjoyed far more freedom under Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist government than women in other Middle Eastern countries. In fact, equal rights for women were enshrined in Iraq’s Constitution in 1970, including the right to vote, run for political office, access education and own property. Today, these rights are all but absent. There were even gay bars in Iraq under Sadam Hussien! Plus, men could own guns and buy Playboy magazines.
Prior to the devastating economic sanctions of the 1990s, Iraq’s education system was top notch and female literacy rates were the highest in the region, reaching 87 percent in 1985. Education was a major priority for Saddam Hussein’s regime, so much so that in 1982 Iraq received the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) award for eradicating illiteracy. But the education system crumbled from financial decay under the weight of the sanctions pushing over 20 percent of Iraqi children out of school by 2000 and reversing decades of literacy gains. Today, a quarter of Iraqi women are illiterate, more than double the rate for Iraqi men (11 percent). Female illiteracy in rural areas alone is as high as 50 percent.
Women were integral to Iraq’s economy and held high positions in both the private and public sectors, thanks in large part to labor and employment laws that guaranteed equal pay, six months fully paid maternity leave and protection from sexual harassment. In fact, it can be argued that some of the conditions enjoyed by working women in Iraq before the war rivaled those of working women in the United States.
It wasn’t until the 1991 Gulf War and U.S.-led economic sanctions against the regime that women’s rights in Iraq began to deteriorate. The sanctions, in particular, had devastating consequences for the one million Iraqi civilians who slowly starved to death, over half of them children.
Women and girls were disproportionately affected by the economic consequences of the U.N. sanctions and lacked access to food, health care, and education. These effects were compounded by changes in the law that restricted women’s mobility and access to the formal sector in an effort to ensure jobs to men and appease conservative religious and tribal groups.”
Then came the invasion.
What “Liberation” Looks Like
The U.S.-led invasion in 2003 exacerbated the desperation of Iraqi women and girls to unprecedented levels. It left them vulnerable to an underground sex industry and subject to severe methods of punishment by an increasingly religious post-invasion government.
A comprehensive examination into sex trafficking by the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) explains, “Ousting the government and all systems of security left Iraqi cities vulnerable in the following months to gangs of men who kidnapped women and girls and assaulted them sexually.”
Many of the kidnapped were sold to nearby countries, as demonstrated in 2004 when houses used to “store” girls before they were purchased were uncovered. Though it is difficult to determine exactly how many women have been victims of sex trafficking, OWFI estimates that in the first seven years after the invasion, 4,000 Iraqi women and girls went missing, twenty percent of whom were under the age of 18.
As the country’s leadership took a turn toward religious fundamentalism – several mass killings of prostitutes and suspected sex workers followed. As the occupying power at the time, the United States was legally responsible for protecting and upholding the human rights of Iraqi civilians. It failed miserably.
Widows and Orphans
The loss of husbands and fathers over the last decade has left 2 million Iraqi women widowed. Furthermore, estimates put the number of orphaned Iraqi children at 5 million, most of whom are growing up without an education. As a result, says OWFI, there are now “more than 3 million women and girls with no source of income or protection, thereby turning them into a helpless population” and making them vulnerable to “trafficking, sexual exploitation, polygamy, and religious pleasure marriages.” (These numbers are from 2013.)
OWFI’s President Yanar Mohammed said the greatest tragedy has been the impact on the youngest generation. “We’ve lived through two decades of war,” she said. “Eventually we reached a point where the young ones have no good memory of life in Iraq.”
Women’s Rights Set Back 70 Years
Unsurprisingly, most U.S. media outlets have failed to accurately cover the deterioration of women’s rights in Iraq. More often than not, they point to a post-invasion constitutional quota, which reserves 25 percent of Parliament seats for women, as proof that Iraq is on the path to gender equality. But, as Haifa Zangana put it in the Guardian, “this token statistic has repeatedly been trotted out to cover up the regime’s crimes against women.”
Nadje Al-Ali, author of the book “What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq” is also critical of the quota. She argues that the women who benefit from it are “the sisters, daughters, and wives of the male conservative leaders” who vote just like them and do not represent ordinary Iraqi women. Al-Ali argues that the Iraq War set women’s rights back 70 years.
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