Around the globe, tens of thousands of women, men and children marched on International Women's Day, March 8, to protest against US President George Bush's proposed war on Iraq.
Women will be the hardest hit by war in a country that is already gutted by economic sanctions. Their families and homes will be destroyed, and their already limited access to social services may disappear altogether.
Women in countries that go to war against Iraq will be under increased pressure as spending on social services is siphoned away to pay for the war. Prime Minister John Howard is happier to pay for a war on Iraq than to provide paid maternity leave, adequately funded universities or affordable childcare centres.
Howard has accused anti-war protesters of "giving comfort" to Saddam Hussein. However, most of us argue that this war has little to do with Hussein. The main aim of the US is to obtain complete military and economic control of a strategic area of the Middle East. Few are under any illusions about the nature of Hussein's regime: it has an appalling human rights record. Women and men have experienced torture, imprisonment and execution for dissenting.
However, women in Iraq have more rights than in Saudi Arabia, whose ruling regime has an excellent relationship with the US. The US is well known for arming and supporting murderous and repressive regimes, including those that systematically discriminate against women. It is doubtful that US-induced "regime change" would significantly improve the lives of Iraqi women.
The situation in Afghanistan after the removal of the Taliban from power attests to this. As well as being a "war on terror" against the elusive Osama bin Laden, liberating the women of Afghanistan was supposedly one of the US war aims. In the lead up to the war, the corporate media suddenly started giving vast coverage to the appalling conditions of Afghan women. After the war, they showed scenes of women throwing off their burquas.
But under the rule of the former Northern Alliance, human rights abuses against women are still rife, including gang rape and forced gynaecological examinations to determine virginity. Discrimination against women, including forced separation of the sexes, is common. Health care for women is appalling. Women can attend school but many are too frightened to do so. The burqua remains mandatory.
One US plan for a post-Saddam Iraq is to replace him and his top military officials with US personnel, but leave the rest of the Baath Party's structures intact. US under-secretary for state Marc Grossman has commented that the US army, "would be relying on current technocrats in Baghdad to run crucial services such as health, education, water and electricity". General Tommy Franks, leader of the invasion force, is tipped to run a US occupation government for at least two years.
Iraq is deeply divided, with both the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south seeking autonomy or independence. On this question, Grossman has commented that "while we are listening to what the Iraqis are telling us, at the end of the day the United States will make its decisions based on what is in the national interest of the United States".
As in Afghanistan, women's rights are not likely to improve much if the US wages, and wins, its war. Kurdish and Shiite Arab women will still have no right of self-determination.
At the same time as trying to overturn the right to legal abortions at home, the US has tried to control access to abortion and contraception in other countries. Bush has reinstated the "global gag" rule barring any aid money going to services that give information about abortion. US delegates to the UN have opposed measures to help women raped in war, because they might be advised about abortions. The US has also refused to ratify a UN convention designed to end all practices that discriminate against women.
Washington Post journalist Ellen Goodman has commented that the Bush administration is "nostalgic for the days before women's rights." If this war is successful, this is the perspective the US will pursue in Iraq.
BY NATALIE ZIRNGAST
From Green Left Weekly, March 12, 2003.
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