In every authoritarian system, women tend to be at the bottom of any chain of authority. In Iraq, the shift from a dictatorship to a democracy should entail a shift from authoritarian to free relationships, but exactly the opposite is happening: women's lives are being marked more and more by tyranny from male friends, families, and even strangers.

Women ultimately have less liberty and autonomy in their lives now than they did before, which suggests strongly that the direction which Iraqi society is taking is only for the worse. There is just one source for this development: Islam, the "religion of peace." Women are being tyrannized, murdered, and forced to commit suicide because Muslim men in Iraq are learning from their religion that a good, godly, religious, and Islamic society requires oppressing women.

In Basra alone, police acknowledge that 15 women a month are murdered for breaching Islamic dress codes. Campaigners insist it is a conservative figure. Violence against women is rampant, rising every day with the power of the militias. Beheadings, rapes, beatings, suicides through self-immolation, genital mutilation, trafficking and child abuse masquerading as marriage of girls as young as nine are all on the increase. ...

Despite the outrage, recent calls by the Kurdish MP Narmin Osman to outlaw honour killings have been blocked by fundamentalists. "Honour killings are not actually a crime in the eyes of the government," said Houzan Mahmoud, who has had a fatwa on her head since raising a petition against the introduction of sharia law in Kurdistan. "If before there was one dictator persecuting people, now almost everyone is persecuting women.

"In the past five years it is has got [much] worse. It is difficult to described how terrible it is, how badly we have been pushed back to the dark ages. Women are being beheaded for taking their veil off. Self immolation is rising – women are left with no choice. There is no government body or institution to provide any sort of support. Sharia law is being used to underpin government rule, denying women their most basic human rights."

Source: The Independent

Every authoritarian society or government requires as a foundation an entire system of authoritarian relationships in which certain classes of people are tyrannized by others who are, in turn, often tyrannized by still others. People must be accustomed to authoritarian relationships in every aspect of their lives, and generally throughout their lives. The less they know of equality, liberty, and autonomy, the less likely they are to demand it from those who want to be in control of others.

This is why we should pay close attention to how a society treats those who are traditionally at the bottom of repressive systems: women, gays, Jews, atheists, etc. However free a society tries to portray itself, it isn't free so long a class of people like women live in fear and under oppression. Even worse, such a situation suggests very strongly that this is where the rest of society is ultimately going. When has oppression or tyranny ever just stopped at one vulnerable group? Women and gays are often the first, but they surely won't be the last.

What this indicates is that, in the long term, Iraq may end up worse off after America's invasion than it was under Saddam Hussein. However bad he was — and it would be hard to underestimate how bad he was — he still ruled over a secular society in which women could lead relatively free and autonomous lives. Now they can't, and their lives are getting worse. The responsibility for this lies squarely at the feet of the American invaders and George W. Bush in particular. What can Bush possibly do to make up for the damage he's done to so many women's lives?