BELIEVE ME, YOU DON'T WANT TO BE A WOMAN IN IRAQ UNDER GEORGE BUSH'S RULE-- WORSE THAN UNDER SADDAM!

Saddam Hussein was a brutal, genocidal tyrant-- far more primitive in his butchery than more technologically-advanced tyrants. The degree of suffering, misery and despair he caused to so many, particularly the independence-minded Kurds, has no ameliorative. That said, Saddam's tyranny was pretty much one-size-fits-all, at least when it came to gender. He didn't discriminate against women. In fact, in certain ways, women faired better in Saddam's Iraq than they do in most Arab countries. In terms of rights and opportunities, Iraqi women had far more in common with women in Turkey, Israel and Europe than they did with women in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman or the other feudal uber-reactionary regimes Bush has tied U.S. Middle East policy to-- or than they do under the U.S. puppet regimes in Afghanistan or... Iraq.

In the summer of 2005 Pam's House Blend was already warning that the new Iraqi constitution was institutionalizing the disintegration of women's rights and putting Iraqi law in regard to gender back into the Middle Ages.

American reactionaries have never supported any rights except property rights and women have had to fight against vicious and concerted entrenched ideologues and bigots for whatever they have achieved-- from judicial rights to voting rights to all kinds of equality and, of course, for the once-again embattled right to choice. So only an imbecile wouldn't have found it just a tad ironic when Bush and Rumsfeld were running around bemoaning and then celebrating the plight of Iraqi women before and after the fall of Saddam. Of course is was all as much a charade as Bush's whole horrible time in office has been.

Today's SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER carried a piece by Bonnie Erbe called 'United States Is No Help To Iraqi Women".

It may be hard for normal Americans to grasp-- and it will certainly be galling for rabid right-wing loons to even read-- but "A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women's-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government."

The Integrated Regional Information Networks, a U.N. news agency covering sub-Saharan Africa, eight countries in central Asia, and Iraq, reported that "... women's basic rights under the Hussein regime were guaranteed in the constitution and more importantly respected, with women often occupying important government positions. Now, although their rights are still enshrined in the national constitution, activists complain that, in practice, they have lost almost all of their rights." Iraqi women are now under the power of superstitious, reactionary, women hating/fearing fasco-religionist maniacs-- just like their goal is for American women.