Whether or not one agrees with Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s strategy of introducing thirty-five articles of impeachment (pdf) against President Bush on the floor of the House last night — I don’t know how anyone could deny that Kucinich’s list provides a devastating indictment of the Bush administration’s misuse and abuse of power over the past eight years:

See the second part of his floor speech here.

If what the Bush administration has done to our global credibility, our legal foundations, our promise to safeguard all of our citizens is not impeachable, what is? And, from all accounts (including now from inside Bush’s own inner circle), this recklessness and neglect was and is the extension of a premeditated, systematic agenda. A Reagan-like ignorance or faulty memory can never be an excuse here.

What’s most interesting about these articles of impeachment from a cultural standpoint is how they barely register in the mainstream media — the same media that failed to report on most of the offenses that they now begrudgingly admit are true.

Admitting the gravity of these offenses, of course, would make a mockery of all the vacuous pundit-driven shows that have come to dominate the media landscape. True investigative reporting has been replaced by off-the-top-of-the-head reactions to packaged political events.

This has all been said before, I know. But when Rep. Kucinich exposes the mechanisms of power so blatantly, I feel it’s independent media’s obligation to spread the word.

If you didn’t catch Keith Olbermann’s screed last night — inspired partially by President Bush’s commitment (which he didn’t really keep, apparently) to give up golf in honor of those servicemen killed in the Iraq War — it’s worth watching. Oh, and buckle yourself in — it’s a pretty wild ride:

As genuine as Olbermann intends it to be — and as right-on as he is about it all — his tone and self-righteousness bother me.  Olbermann condemns Bush at the end of the piece for thinking that the Iraq War is all about Bush himself.  Well, I’d like to say to Olbermann that criticism of the Bush administration and the war machine it perpetuates is not all about Olbermann.

And that’s the larger problem with a personality-driven pseudo news show.  It’s never really about the news.  Olbermann, even at his most poignant, feels more like an entertainer than a social critic — and I’m not sure that inspires much action or even critical thinking in his audience.

I could be wrong …. What’s your reaction?

The following is a new film review by Laura Fokkena posted at PopPolitics Magazine.

Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi in a scene from the documentary “Nice Bombs.”

In January of 2004, just as dawn was breaking, Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi bribed the guards on Iraq’s Jordanian border and drove back into the country he hadn’t seen in 24 years. He brought along his American-born wife, Kristie, and a video camera.

The resulting documentary, “Nice Bombs: My Journey Back to Iraq,” was the winner of the Chicago Underground Film Festival’s 2006 award for best documentary feature and the Tribeca All-Access Creative Promise Award for a documentary feature. It has since screened in New York City, Santa Fe and Milwaukee. It will premiere on the Sundance Channel Wednesday, March 19 at 6:30 p.m. EST. (Watch the trailer.)

Alshaibi was born in Baghdad in 1969. When he was 11 years old, his mother, fearing the escalating war with Iran, hid the family’s gold in his little brother’s diaper and slipped her four children over Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait, telling the guards they were taking a short trip out of the country for medical reasons. The ruse worked and, after a few years of bouncing around various Arab countries, the family finally landed in Iowa City.

In 1991, Alshaibi had just turned 21 and was studying art at The University of Iowa when the first Gulf War broke out. He received a letter from the INS informing him that his residency had expired and he was to be deported back to Iraq. He also got another letter, this one from Baghdad, drafting him into the Iraqi army. He applied, successfully, for political asylum in the United States, and eventually became a naturalized citizen.

With the horror of war finally behind him, why go back? His own mother, after all, said she’d never forgive him if he returned.

“For so long there was this part of my past that was invisible,” Alshaibi explains, “and I missed it.”

But he also blames Studs Terkel.

Continue reading “Back to Baghdad: ‘Nice Bombs’ Targets Life During Wartime”

If I were asked to discuss the inspirations for PopPolitics, I could talk about all the great cultural critics who teach us to take pop culture seriously. But the deepest inspirations, I believe, are the great artists, the producers of pop culture, who never allow us to see their writing, directing, etc as simply entertainment — who force us to recognize the human consequences — the political consequences — of their art.

They reveal these consequences — not through didactic, overt rhetoric — but by telling authentic stories that just happen to intervene in the social or political moment

Music, in particular, has been fertile ground. The continuum from jazz to hip hop has brought us Billie Holliday singing about the “Strange Fruit” of the Jim Crow South or Public Enemy and KRS-One speaking from a forgotten urban America. These artists have done more to raise our racial and class consciousness than any collection of academic studies or lectures ever could.

The music that is capturing my imagination at the moment, though, comes from a folk tradition, one that has brought the hobo lullabies of Woody Guthrie and the gritty poetry of Bob Dylan. Specifically, I’m talking about Bruce Springsteen, whose new album “Magic” has just hit stores this week.

The album is getting rave reviews (not to mention causing more than a few fans, like A.O. Scott of the New York Times, to use the opportunity for some humorous reminiscence and reconnection).

Most of the songs, from my own initial listen, are political allegories under the veil of intensely personal stories of relationships struggling to survive. That’s what Bruce does best.

But don’t take my word for it. Trust Harry Browne, writing for the usually cynical Counterpunch:

There has been a murmur afoot, since the album leaked on the internet in early September, that Bruce has (in the words of New York magazine’s Vulture blog) “gotten the politics out of his system.”

Politics for Springsteen is not, however, some infection to be purged, but apparently a part of his intrinsic make-up. Despite only a song or two that can remotely be said to be ‘about’ particular issues, and despite the absence of the lovingly detailed wretched-of-the-earth who occupied “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and “Devils & Dust,” Magic is a devastatingly political record, if not always in the predictable ways.

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Does anyone believe that there is any mystery about what will be in the report of General David Petraeus on the troop surge in Iraq? This is the general who rose to his position as commander in Iraq through a combination of attrition and loyalty. While his predecessors in the Green Zone made the mistake of offering critical assessments of the military genius of the Bush administration, Petraeus pursued a policy of reassurance to Washington.

So why is the press constantly speculating on the general’s September report? Why does the press continue to see this as some critical and decisive decision for U.S. policy? I or you could have written this report within days of the beginning of the surge. It is a policy that can not and will not fail, even if it already has.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and General George Casey found that they had lost their connections in the White House and saw their career trajectories move south, or at best, sideways. When they disagreed with the assessments of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Vice President Dick Cheney, they obviously had to go. Wish-based assessments almost always trump reality based assessments, especially in politics.

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In what can only be seen as an act of desperation, President Bush has appealed to history to justify his misbegotten war. For a man who has never shown any interest in nor understanding of history, except that he once may have thought it would be fun to participate in it, his latest appeal came as a surprise.

What was not surprising was that most of his history is faulty, distorted or flat-out wrong.

The thing that caught my eye in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention was not so much the bad history but rather this line: “[...] one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’”

In this matter of adding to the American language legacy, the president might have expanded his list. Vietnam, in fact, left us with may more instructive phrases than the ones he mentioned.

Such grand phrases as “light at the end of the tunnel,” or, “We are turning the corner in Vietnam,” quickly entered the vocabulary. The light, as the old joke goes, was that of an oncoming train, while we turned so many corners that we were finally spinning in circles.

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Charlize Theron and Tommy Lee Jones star in “In the Valley of Elah”

Speaking of pop culture and politics, Michael Cieply in the New York Times analyzes “a new and perhaps risky willingness in the entertainment business to push even the touchiest debates about post-9/11 security, Iraq and the troops? status from the confines of documentaries into the realm of mainstream political drama.”

The list of films that touch upon such topical stuff — as well as the names behind them — is impressive: “In the Valley of Elah,” “Grace is Gone,” “Stop-Loss,” “Rendition,” “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” and “Redacted” — to name a few.

I couldn’t be more excited that the creators of “Battlestar Galactica” are not going to make us wait until next January to get our interstellar fix. Even though the final season won’t be airing until next year, they’ve just announced that a two-part TV movie will air in November (thanks, Fandom, for keeping us in the loop)

Rear Admiral Helena Cain (Michelle Forbes) in command of the Pegasus in “Battlestar Galactica”

If you are not familar with the show, you should be. We’ve certainly talked it up plenty at PopPolitics.

And you don’t have to be a big science fiction fan to enjoy it — because at its core it’s a great story that resonates deeply in our present-day world. As a piece of visual literature, it’s full of well-written, complex characters in continuously compromising situations. And as a gripping allegory, it holds up a cracked mirror to our contemporary political and social life — specifically, the post-9/11 culture of fear, the Bush doctrine and the Iraq War.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at this recent analysis of the resurgence of science fiction and fantasy by Gareth McClean in the Guardian. He argues that “Battlestar Galactica,” with the help of shows like “Firefly” and “Lost,” is responsible for making the genre more relevant than it’s been since, well, its Golden Age.

He begins the piece, in fact, by speaking in awe-inspiring terms of Battlestar’s allegorical power:

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Hey, Chloe, Upload the Schematics of This Post to My PDA: What is an action hero’s most important skill? Literacy. According to University of Louisville professor Bronwyn T. Williams, “the typically-male action hero is capable of reading and writing effortlessly, even under duress. His superior literacy practices give him an edge over supervisors, bureaucrats, and scientists, whose literacy skills may render them incorrect or narrow-minded, and allow him to outmaneuver the villain.” Unfortunately, literacy is simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically considered feminine and unnecessary at critical moments — and it’s left up to “literacy surrogates,” who can often be women, such as Chloe from 24.

The Little Red Empowering Machine: Speaking of male action heroes, they always seem to get the coolest cars. But Joanne Sasvari notes that for women in popular culture, cars are an escape and a symbol of freedom, even if “a woman’s car almost always means she’s fast — in more ways than one.”

Sex Surprises: Using a “high-tech eye-tracking gizmo,” an Emory University study reveals that men are more likely to look at a women’s face before moving to other body parts and that women (who were less interested in looking at faces) will look at pictures of heterosexual sex longer than men. The authors of the study offer a biological rationale: “Women can tell by looking at naked men whether the guys are in the mood [...] but women’s bodies don’t reveal much. Which is why men home in on their faces.”

“Style Your Hijab!”: So, the new teen magazine Muslim Girl is attempting to appeal to an underserved market but with more tack and taste than, say, Seventeen. While the magazine’s seriousness of purpose is certainly laudable, I wonder if simply toning down the sex and the sassiness makes the advice columns, celebrity profiles, and fashion dos-and-don’ts more palatable.

“I was drunk and bald way before Britney”: The obsession with celebrity and scandal in pop culture and politics has been — I guess it’s not such a surprise here — a big boon to the t-shirt industry.

Off the Mark: Iraqi performance artist Wafaa Bilal got a lot of press earlier this year for confining himself to a room with a paintball gun and allowing people around the world to shoot him by manipulating the gun through his website — all in protest of America’s approach to the war in Iraq: “To the Western media it?s a virtual war going on in Iraq — we?re far removed in the comfort zone. We?re allowed to disengage from the consequences of war. We don?t see mutilated bodies, we don?t see the toll on human beings.? Well, in the end, he got quite a reaction (over 40,000 shots were fired over 42 days), but it’s not clear whether the web visitors understood the political context or were just looking for a little shoot-’em-up fun. You might want to work your way back through Bilal’s unsettling video blog.

Twist and Shout: Last week marked the 21st anniversary of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Well, Erin Dionne was celebrating it — why weren’t you?

A Pundit Primer: In a possible lesson for the 21st Century, YouTube ended up giving James Kotecki a lot more than 15 minutes of fame. It got him a potential career. Kotecki, if you recall, was the Georgetown student who dispensed advice about presidential candidates’ online videos — from his dorm room, on YouTube. Two of those candidates, Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Mike Gravel, actually ended up visiting his dorm room — and most of the other candidates made it clear they were paying attention. Since he’s graduated, Democrat Dennis J. Kucinich and Republican Mike Huckabee have met him at more traditional locales around Washington — and CNN, NPR and others have come calling.

I Forgot About the Kids - D’oh!: A Marymount Manhattan College study reveals that, among the college students surveyed, fictional television fathers — think Homer, Raymond, etc — rated higher than the students’ real fathers. The reason, researchers and cultural critics agreed, was that the work demands on fathers are increasing — and they have much less quality family time.

Sidney Blumenthal — in his latest analysis of the semiotics of Bush administration culture for Salon — dissects Bush’s choice of artwork for the walls of the White House:

The notion that there might be an aesthetic that informs the Bush presidency would seem to be an unfair and artificial imposition on a man who prizes his intuition (”I’m a gut player”) and openly derides complication (”I don’t do nuance”) — that is, if Bush himself did not insist on the connection. Indeed, he appears on the official White House Web site, conducting a tour of the art and artifacts he has chosen to decorate the Oval Office, assuming the duty of docent himself. He holds forth on the large windows and the rug with rays of the sun emanating from the seal of the president and the provenance of his desk before getting to the artwork.

Although the “tour” Blumenthal is referencing seems to be just these comments to Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun (UK), they justify Blumenthal’s contention that Bush is surprisingly involved the construction of the artistic atmosphere.

Blumenthal ultimately sees Bush’s choices as evidence of his blindness to the limits of his idealism. Bush chooses paintings that most critics would define as overly sentimental kitsch — such as the cowboy paintings of Texans W.H.D. Koerner and Julian Onderdonk — and takes them seriously.

What is most disturbing, though, is that Blumenthal can connect this lack of self-awareness with the administration’s distorted justification for torture (which involves, Blumenthal points out, the strange belief of many conservatives in the verisimilitude of the equally kitschy Fox TV series “24″):

The distance between the cowboy paintings Bush proudly displays in the Oval Office and the secret-agent torture porn that his administration officials not so secretly watch with envy reflects a yawning chasm in the sensibility of kitsch. Koerner’s Western pictures depict an idealized past, where never is heard a discouraging word. At the Saturday Evening Post, he joined with Norman Rockwell to create the brush strokes of a warming nostalgia.

These enduring images infused Reaganism with its emotional culture. Ronald Reagan, after all, had been raised at the turn of the century in small-town Illinois and became a contract player in Hollywood’s dream factory. Communicating kitsch was second nature to him. The perfect representation came in the TV commercial for his reelection campaign in 1984. As an American flag was raised in a small town, the voice-over intoned: “It’s morning again in America.” The past was present and all was right with the world.

Now, kitsch has been radically remade. No longer evoking nostalgic utopianism, kitsch releases the compulsions of fear. Under Bush, kitsch has been transformed from sentimentality into sadomasochism.

On first impression, this sounds like an extreme interpretation — until we remember that this is an extreme presidency, one in which the confines of propriety and restraint have been broken again and again.

I missed Jamie Stiehm’s analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s continuing — and apparently increasing — cultural significance when it appeared in the Baltimore Sun last month. But in PopPolitics efforts to be the main intersection where politics and pop culture meet, I thought it deserves a mention, however belated.

Inspired by the references from many of the presidential candidates — especially Obama when he officially announced his candidacy in Springfield, Ill. — Stiehm catalogs all the ways Lincoln still matters … and maintains an eerie influence:

“Problems seem intractable, like war, corruption, cynicism and the influence of money in politics,” [Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold] said.

But, Leopold said, such problems can be overcome by the sort of shrewd pragmatism Lincoln brought to his politics.

His military mettle remains so respected that Army Col. Kenneth O. McCreedy, installation commander at Fort Meade, keeps a 1864 Lincoln image as his screen saver.

“Lincoln resonates on so many levels, and in so many ways he’s our most human president,” said the colonel, who holds a doctorate in American history. “He had an uncanny ability to read people, with common sense and sophistication.”

[...]

[Harold Holzer, co-chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission] received so many questions about the war that he wrote an essay last year titled “What Lincoln would do in Iraq.”

He argued that Lincoln would advise the current president to spend more time at the front with troops, communicate more precisely about the war’s aims and fire appointed aides who fail in their missions — as Lincoln famously did with his battlefield commanders.

Well, I do recall George W. Bush making it onto an aircraft carrier at some point. Does that count?

We at PopPolitics have not spent much time on Anna Nicole Smith. I would like to think that’s because she represented the most obvious and uninteresting American cultural phenomenon: the self-constructed, superficial celebrity. I’m sure Jay Gatsby would have had plastic surgery and a reality show if that was available to him back in the day.

Gatsby, of course, was the fictional star of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But in many ways Smith was just as fictional — whether it be her made-up humble beginnings, her made-up body, the manipulative lens of her reality show or simply the train-wreck narrative into which she was trapped.

But the reaction over her death deserves comment — both as an undeniable display of the continuing power of individual and collective myth-making and as a sad comment on the state of American journalism.

Pop culture commentators are having their say, but maybe Alan Stewart Carl put it best on Donklephant:

From a purely narrative point-of-view, Anna Nicole Smith has suffered the perfect end. A tabloid death to punctuate a tabloid life. Cue the music for True Hollywood Stories, we have a great American tale here …. For those who knew the real Anna Nicole Smith and certainly for her newborn child, her death is a tragic loss. But for the rest of us, there is something entirely unsurprising, something bizarrely preordained about this event. Our celebrity culture lives for these moments of sudden death just as it feeds on turbulent lives of the world’s Anna Nicoles — an endless parade of unremarkable humans become shallow distractions become paper icons.

And David Zurawik and Nick Madigan of the Baltimore Sun have done a nice job of summing up the ridiculously overblown, anti-journalistic and contradictory response from all forms of media. It’s no big relevation to say the news isn’t the news anymore, but we need to remember how easily the major news outlets fell into coverage of Smith’s death when we react exasperatingly to the manufactured coverage of a “real” event, such as the invasion of Iraq.

Of all the immediate consequences of last week’s election, the firing of Donald Rumsfeld seems to have been the most popular. I have seen little beyond FoxWorld that suggests that Rummy is being mourned, although he may be missed. Lightning rods often are.

As has been his style, Rumsfeld went out with the same arrogance that marked his every move as Secretary of Defense. At times it appeared he knew that even in the matter of breathing, he had it right, while all the rest of us didn’t quite know how to do it properly.

So it wasn’t all that surprising when at the press briefing to introduce his successor, Rumsfeld had one more set of lessons for his inferiors. Being cute, as he often tried unsuccessfully to be, Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: “It recalls to mind the statement by Winston Churchill, something to the effect that: I have benefited greatly from criticism, and at no time have I suffered a lack thereof.”

With his customary humility, Rumsfeld compared himself to Churchill. One suspects that Rummy would liken his own leadership to that of Sir Winston during World War II. The more appropriate historical comparison however is Gallipoli, when Churchill led his nation into one of the great military disasters in its history.

Then came the vintage Rumsfeld moment.

Referring to the Iraq debacle as “this little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century,” he said, “it was not well understood, it is complex for people to comprehend.” Yes, only Rummy and those wise insiders spawned by the Neo-Cons really have the brainpower, the knowledge and the wisdom to grasp the complexities. The poor simple-minded voters, the American people, just don’t have the intellectual necessities to deal with foreign policy.

Ah yes, Father Rummy knows best.

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Speaking of Islamic law, did you see yesterday’s front-page New York Times story, “Secular Iraqis Say New Charter May Curb Rights”?

Writer Dexter Filkins succinctly lays out what’s at stake for women:

The draft constitution, these secular Iraqis say, clears the way for religious authorities to adjudicate personal disputes like divorce and inheritance matters by allowing the establishment of religious courts, raising fears that a popularly elected Islamist-minded government could enact legislation and appoint judges who could turn the country into a theocracy.

The courts would rely on Shariah, which under most interpretations grants women substantially fewer rights than men.

Language reserving a quarter of the Assembly’s seats for women has been relegated to a section of the constitution labeled transitional, which is of uncertain legal force and duration. Another phrase declares that education is mandatory only through elementary school. Women’s rights groups, which expressed concern about lower levels of literacy among women here, wanted middle school to be declared mandatory as well, but were defeated.

All of which President Bush apparently finds acceptable:

President Bush, in an appearance in Idaho on Tuesday, asserted that the Iraqi document guaranteed women’s rights and the freedom of religion in a country that in recent decades had only known dictatorship.

Labeling the Iraqi constitution an “amazing event,” he said, “We had a little trouble with our own conventions writing a constitution.”

Clearly Bush has been briefed on constitutional history by the likes of Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist for the CIA who said on Meet the Press that “women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy.”

As of earlier today, a vote on the constitution had been put off, perhaps indefinitely, but there’s still a huge need to make women’s voices heard.

In response to a call from Iraqi women for international support, Equality Now is recommending that readers contact the following individuals. Ask them to use all of their influence to support Iraqi women’s call for a constitution that protects their equality and human rights:

President Jalal Talabani
Baghdad, Iraq
E-mail: presidentialprotocol.iraq@gmail.com
Address letters to: “Dear President Talabani,”

H.E. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad
United States Ambassador to Iraq
Embassy of the United States
APO AE 09316
Baghdad, Iraq
E-mail: usconsulbaghdad@state.gov
Address letters to: “Dear Ambassador Khalilzad,”

His Excellency Kofi Annan
United Nations Secretary-General
United Nations Headquarters, Room S-3800
New York, NY 10017
Fax: (212) 963-3511
Address letters to: “Your Excellency:”

*cross-posted from Ms. magazine’s “ms.musings” blog.

As debate over Iraq’s draft constitution continues, the situtation is looking bleaker for women’s rights. In a story published in today’s New York Times, Dexter Filkins writes:

Two critical questions have not yet been resolved: whether to allow clerics to sit on the Supreme Court, and how much authority clerics will have in resolving family disputes like divorce and inheritance. Maintaining secular authority over family matters is especially important to secular Iraqi women, who fear that Islamic judges will take away the rights they now enjoy under Iraqi law.

Meanwhile, an e-mail from the Feminist Peace Network points to this Meet The Press transcript, which reveals the extent to which women’s rights are a priority for the Bush administration. Reporter David Gregory asks his two guests — Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist for the CIA and author of The Islamic Paradox, and Larry Diamond, former adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq — about the role of Islamic law in the constitution:

MR. GREGORY: The role of Islam, of course, is a critical issue. And Tim Russert, during an interview with President Bush, asked him about this in February of last year. Let’s watch that.

(Videotape, February 8, 2004):

MR. TIM RUSSERT: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?

PRES. BUSH: They’re not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I am very aware of this basic law they’re writing. They’re not going to develop that, because right here in the Oval Office, I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY: Fast forward to this morning. Gentlemen, we put this on the screen from The New York Times. “[American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay] Khalilzad had backed language [in the constitution] that would have given clerics sole authority in settling marriage and family disputes. That gave rise to concerns that women’s rights, as they are annunciated in Iraq’s existing laws, could be curtailed. … [The] arrangement, coupled with the expansive language for Islam, prompted accusations from [a Kurdish leader] that the Americans were helping in the formation of an Islamic state.”

Mr. Diamond, is that a change of position?

MR. DIAMOND: It would be, I think, a substantial change if it’s true. We need to wait and see what exactly is true. All of these are just reports. Let me say, I don’t think we have — and I think Reuel would agree with this — we don’t have the power anymore to foreclose this, to veto this. We’re not a veto player there anymore. But neither do I think the United States should be endorsing it. And I think our clear stand should be in favor of individual rights and freedoms, including religious freedom, as vigorously as possible. So I hope the ambassador on the ground is standing up for that principle.

MR. GREGORY: Mr. Gerecht, the consequences of this?

MR. GERECHT: Actually, I’m not terribly worried about this. I mean, one hopes that the Iraqis protect women’s social rights as much as possible. It certainly seems clear that in protecting the political rights, there’s no discussion of women not having the right to vote. I think it’s important to remember that in the year 1900, for example, in the United States, it was a democracy then. In 1900, women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we’d all be thrilled. I mean, women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy. We hope they’re there. I think they will be there. But I think we need to put this into perspective.

Thanks for clearing that up! I suppose Laura Bush will be briefed to smooth things over during her next pro-women tour.

Update: For thoughtful commentary on this issue, read Echidne’s post on Women and the Iraq Constitution. An excerpt:

The usually unspoken argument of those who find women’s social rights unimportant for democracy is that democracy in places like Iraq can take a different form: one limited to men only, because democracy elsewhere, including in the United States, once assigned equal rights to only some people, such as white men. Yet over time these rights were extended to others, including women. In other words, Iraq and other countries such as Afghanistan are viewed as outdated forms of our own country. Medieval, perhaps. But with the passage of time surely these countries will emulate what took place in the West? And if not, well, the men who are making the U.S. decisions right now are unlikely to suffer. And maybe the people “over there” are really different. Maybe they don’t want democracy, after all. At least for the women. After all, we let the women vote, too, and look how they voted! Mostly they voted for their religion so they must want to be oppressed.

There it is, all neatly typed up in one paragraph, the true nasty subtext of what is going on with respect to some Americans’ thinking about women and the Iraqi constitution. It’s pragmatism at its most disgusting, because women and their rights were used as a smokescreen when it suited the Bushboys. But only as long as it suited them.

*cross-posted from Ms. magazine’s “ms.musings” blog.