verging_on_random

Bringing god’s gift of freedom to Iraq

September 25, 2007 on 4:56 pm | In Uncategorized |

There are blogs written from within Iraq by people embedded in the US occupation forces, from whence they cheer on the inevitable eventual victory interspersed with occasional solemn stories of heroic soldiers giving their all for the sake of the American way of life. Oh, plus the odd heart-warming yarn involving Iraqi children or puppies.

‘Inside Iraq’ is not one of them. It’s one of many insightful blogs written by people who are actually living what passes for normal civilian life in Iraq. It’s decidedly non-flashy, just ordinary Iraqis writing about their day-to-day lives. Such blogs are an excellent corrective to the relentless propaganda we get served up by those who continue to talk of a ‘war’ and ‘victory’ and ‘not giving in to the terrorists’. They remind us that we have been accomplices in bringing death and destruction on an unimaginable scale to a country that never threatened us and which we had no legitimate reason to help invade and occupy.

These blogs give us some slight feel for what life is actually like in the nation we have so comprehensively helped to screw over. Not just in the big things, like people being shot and kidnapped and fleeing to other countries, though god knows there’s more than enough of that too, but in the everyday things like being stuck in stinking hot houses without electricity for hours on end, too afraid to go out because the streets are unsafe after dark. Things like not being employed, and having to take an hour long detour to get home because troops have blocked off your street.

Today there’s a post that describes how more than 40 years ago, women in Iraq gained a measure of equality that was highly unusual in the Middle East.

It gave the women of Iraq the most progressive of all Arab and Islamic women’s rights legislation until this very day. No discrimination in salaries, no discrimination in uniforms, the separated Mums get to keep the home until the children are of age, and so many other items that made the female community of Iraq one of the most progressive female communities within the Arab, Islamic and regional states – from that time … until we got “liberated”.

The new Iraqi government, however - the one supported by the USA and Australia because it is ‘democratic’, because it will introduce ‘freedom’ and other wonderful Western values - has applied a different approach to gender equality.

Now it’s not safe for a girl to step outside her home unless fully covered.

How much more liberated can you get??

Girls used to be free to drive their cars in safety all over the city to all appropriate hours. Now it has suddenly become shameful for them to do so.

Why??

Why have we lost our rights?

For what have we been pushed back into the dark ages?

Well as far as I can make out (it’s hard to keep up because the answer keeps changing), John Howard says it’s ‘because it would be terrible if the global prestige of the USA suffered any damage as a result of being defeated in Iraq’. Happy? So put your hijab on like a good girl and go do some housework. And stop whining about losing equal pay. There aren’t any jobs anyway.