Quote of the Day

[Content Note: War; misogyny; religious oppression.]

"Islamist parties started to control Iraq and that was the worst nightmare Iraqi women have ever faced. Religious parties and militia have stolen free life from Iraqi women."—Sana Majeed, a resident of Baghdad who once "was free to dress as she pleased" and "now wears a black abaya and head scarf," as a result of the increasing social control of women. "The reality of the new Iraq struck her in 2005, when she got out of a taxi and was accosted by a group of men in black who chastised her for wearing inappropriate clothing and told her to go home and cover her hair."

(Please note: I am not implying and do not believe that Islamic female garb is inherently misogynist. There are Muslim women, many of them feminists, who wear head scarves et. al. and embrace them. My issue is only with the lack of choice. I am pro-choice in all things.)

The lede of the article whence comes this quote is perfect and terrible:

One year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, then-President George W. Bush told a gathering at the White House: "Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed."

A decade on, that statement rings hollow for many Iraqi women.

This is something about which I've been writing for many years: Former President George W. Bush and his coterie of neocon reprobates (as well as then-First Lady Laura Bush) routinely justified the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the ostensible "liberation" of the women who lived there.

It was a condescending lie, which I won't even dignify by classifying as a colonialist savior complex, because that would imply that the architects of this destruction ever actually gave a shit about whether women in their war zones lived or died.

See also: Afghanistan.