The Spectator

Women in Iraq

We who supported the war in Iraq have been obliged by events to jettison a series of justifications

For the dwindling band of us prepared to admit that we backed the war in Iraq, there appears to be yet more bad news from Baghdad. By next Monday the Iraqis are supposed to have agreed a new constitution, and early indications have been that it will not be an entirely progressive document.

Women’s groups in Iraq and the West are alarmed at concessions to the Shiite majority, which seem to destroy any advances made by women under the secular Baathist regime. One clause, inserted to please the mullahs, says that ‘the followers of any religion or sect are free to choose their civil status according to their religious or sectarian beliefs’. It is feared that this will permit the population to be governed by Sharia law, in which a woman’s economic and legal status is greatly inferior to a man’s. Another clause says that ‘The state shall ensure harmony between the duties of a woman towards her family and work in society and equality with men in the fields of political, social and economic life, without conflicting or disturbing the provisions of Islamic Sharia.’ When the legions of Labour women voted to invade Iraq in 2003, it seems doubtful that they hoped thereby to entrench the role of Sharia in the Iraqi legal system. It is all, on the face of it, very depressing.

We who supported the war in Iraq have been obliged by events to jettison a series of justifications. If the war was really all about securing Western oil supplies, then it does not, at the moment, appear to have been a howling success; not when petrol is heading for a pound a litre, and when British forces in the south of Iraq seem incapable of preventing the wholesale smuggling of Iraqi crude.

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