Despite women's rights being partially enshrined in Iraq's
post-Saddam constitution, she is angry that Iraq's women have been
politically sidelined, that women are increasingly under-represented.
"In
2005, there were six women ministers. Now there is only one – the
minister for women! Women are being marginalised in civil society as
well. We spent two years drafting a law on domestic violence only to see
it get stuck in the Shura [state] council. We have also been working on
a strategy for the advancement of women's issues. Two years ago, the
prime minister said he supported it. But it's just talk. There's no
reality.
"There is still phenomenal violence against women as well
as sexual harassment. I've been hearing about cases of rape in prison
during interrogations. It's alarming. Terrible. And it is police
officers who are doing it. There's also the issue of the religious
culture we have here, which supports women being disciplined by their
husbands and only considers women in terms of marriage ."
[Hanaa] Edwar is worried about the future once again, having lived through the sectarian war and its excesses.
"I
think now we're reaching a critical moment again. A moment of great
danger. What we need is a new political movement. New blood. New
thinking. The current generation [which has dominated Iraqi politics in
recent years] has fixed religious ideas. They want to impose the past on
the future.["]
That's from Peter Beaumont's "Iraq war 10 years on: 'There is phenomenal violence against women. I hear of rape cases in priosn. Police officers are doing it'" (Guardian). Hanaa Edwar is with The Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq. The Guardian's doing a series right now with multiple articles. In the US, the Arizona Republic features Sheron Jones asking, "My son was killed for what, oil fields?" (Staff Sgt Darrel D. Kasson, killed in a Tikrit bombing attack March 7, 2007), Iraq War and Afghanistan War veteran Martin Sepulveda offers "All that I fought for remains unachieved," State Rep Ed Pastor offers "Iraq was a trumped-up war from the very day it began" and the editorial board of the paper offers "Fallout of war still evolving."
[Monday, March 18, 2012, corrected above to "Hanaa" and not "Yanar," my mistake and my apologies for it.]
For A Brief Flikering Moment we see A Bright Shining Lie get a little attention due to the anniversary. This flash of attention was going to be problematic if we tried to grab everything.
We weren't going to try.
This week, we've missed Howard Kurtz because he was over the weekend and I didn't have time to play catch up -- for example, we attended three Congressional hearings I wanted to report on but only managed time and space for two. Howard Kurtz deserved to be heard. A piece he wrote for the Washington Post was the biggest self-examination any outlet did on the way they reported in the lead up to the war on Iraq. With Howard Kurtz, I feel like he should have been included and in a better week, he would have been.
The Takeaway
? They certainly talked a big game at the start of the week -- did you see the follow up? If you're thinking you missed it, you're unaware that it just didn't take place. And that's totally predicatable for that show and why we didn't break our necks to offer their early in the week, very bad, very shoddy coverage of the Iraq War.
As the week drew to a close, The Nation finally decided to get into the momentary craze. Not interested. We linked to Jonathan Schell's piece noting counter-insurgency because it noted something of value and because I know Schell and take him seriously. These bad writers who can't get their facts straight but write for The Nation? Not interested in them. I will note that they at least pretended to care when they saw a trend happening. The Progressive and In These Times didn't care about Iraq and were also too stupid to note a trend. Not even the union-busing Harper's could be bothered.
At Pacifica, they continued to waste a small fortune on Mitch Jeserich's daily propaganda and distraction program. They changed the name after listeners loudly and repeatedly rejected Letters to Washington to Letters and Politics. Where was the Pacifica program on Iraq this week?
National newspapers who needed to hop on the craze but instead of using real resources farmed Iraq out to their blogs? Not interested in driving traffic to them.
We actually have more than enough to cover every week. The American press -- real journalism and the beggar media that steals your donated money to conspire with the Democratic Party while pretending to be independent -- lost in Iraq long ago. That didn't mean we had to close shop. We continue to cover Iraq. There's never been a day, since the US press withdrawal of January 2009, that we have been short for things to cover and there never will be.
So if there's something of value from the US play or it makes an honest effort, we'll try to include it but what has been offered in the last seven days? The bulk of it was embarrassing and juvenile. We didn't soil ourselves by bothering to include that nonsense.
Day after day, we cover Iraq here and I really don't have time to waste on the various idiots who wrote columns this week making clear that any information they had about Iraq was several years old. If you don't follow the subject -- and so few do, you really should resist the urge to 'weigh in' just because everyone else is. Translation, if you're writing a column about Iraq and don't know that there are ongoing protests, or that Amnesty International issued a report this week, or about the Guardian newspaper and the BBC Arabic's documentary from the week before, if you don't know anything that has to do with Iraq today, you really don't have anything to offer. Just because you 'turned off the lights' on Iraq doesn't mean events in the country ceased.
It's over, I'm done writing songs about love
There's a war going on
So I'm holding my gun with a strap and a glove
And I'm writing a song about war
And it goes
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Oh oh oh oh
-- "I Hate The War" (written by Greg Goldberg, on The Ballet's Mattachine!)
The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4488.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
iraq
i hate the war
the ballet
