« Open Thread | Main | Literary History »

December 16, 2006


You know, I can see how people think that women in Afghanistan are better off(in terms of their rights) after the invasion (and I would guess still are), how anyone could get that impression of women in Iraq is beyond me. IIRC six to eight months after the Iraq (if not sooner)invasion there were reports of women not having the freedom to do things that they could under Saddam.

Do people not tell this man anything that doesn't comport with his world view? Can someone place sit him down and explain to him exactly WTF is going on in the world today?

Jim Webb should have slugged him.

This proves that Saddam was a femi-Nazi.

Which rhymes with Obama.

I don't know why the ladies just can't be satisfied with shock and awe and get on with a couple of more centuries of second-class status.

You know, we took Saddam out because the 9/11 hijackers couldn't handle western corruption, especially the part where women learn to drive a stick. By restoring Sharia, would-be terrorists will stay home and find better things to do than bother us.

Add 12 more paragraphs that begin "Hilzoy, you seem to think.." or "Hilzoy, I suppose you want us to....".

There, I've saved a couple of people some hot air and shortened the thread. With that sort of efficiency, we should be able to fire 721,489 bloggers on Monday.

I think most of the Right has dropped that fig-leaf claim that Bush liberated the masses, in favor of proclaiming the virtues of destroying "lousy little Third World countries" for the randy-making hell of it.

Bush - who, to answer Ugh's question, does not know or care what goes on outside the fantasies in his head - will no doubt continue to think of himself as the man who's freed more people than anyone else in history. (And, yes, he did make exactly that claim.)

Freedom is messy.

Ugh, I think it's fair to say that the situation for women in Afghanistan is not better than it was in late 2002. I've never believed in the whole transformative domino effect thing -- I mean, what impact does Canadian politics have in the US, after all -- but if one ever wanted to have a "model," you'd think the country where the invasion was (and remains) relatively popular, where the moral highground was obvious, and where the downside risks (in terms of [a] oil's role in the global economy and [b] our rivalry with Iran, and [c] our relationship with the Saudis) were considerably less.

Nothing ventured nothing gained, I guess.

Charley - I would agree with that, I just meant that I think that women in Afghanistan are better off now than they were pre-invasion; there's no doubt there worse off now than they were in late 2002.

My prescription for Afghanistan after we invaded was to "kill them with kindness" and undertake a massive rebuilding campaign for that country. The MBF in the whitehouse had other plans, sadly.

This was eminently foreseeable. Getting rid of a secular tyrant and allowing a conservative religious populous the right to self-determination makes it fairly obvious that women won't fare as well.

If I remember correctly, in the 1980s Iraq was a relatively good country about Women's Rights. It was the 1990s, after his defeat in Gulf War I, that Saddam started swerving fundamentalist to appease his people.

Did his increasing capture by Sunni fundamentalists spur more Shia fundamentalism? Was the majority of the country far more religious, just too oppressed to inflict their view on others, or were they inflamed by Saddam's desperate attempt to paint his regime as religious?

The comments to this entry are closed.

Blog powered by Typepad