On the Way Out, Washington Tramples on Iraqi Women

"The footprint of the United States occupation of Iraq is embedded in the country’s rocky political sojourn, and the status of women marks the nation’s arrested progress. After the invasion, Washington thought Iraqi women would find American-style freedom irresistible. Today, they’re left holding up half the sky in the midst of a ravaged political and economic landscape.

The Associated Press reports that many Iraqi women feel increasingly alienated from civil society and face traditional pressures to find a husband in a bombed-out marriage market.

Women’s advocates may on the one hand lament the inequality that makes women economically dependent on marriage. But there’s also justifiable frustration that women bear so much of the burden of their unraveling social fabric.

While Iraq’s struggles for gender justice go beyond just the U.S. presence there, will the White House at least redress some of the violence done by the occupation by helping resettle trafficking survivors as refugees? At this point, further abandonment by Washington would prove that despite the glossy public-relations schemes, the “liberation” of Iraqi women was from the start a doomed affair."