Posted on by rjonakait

Iran and Oppressed Women

The news last week reported that Country Joe McDonald died. He, along with his group the Fish, sang a song of my youth. The refrain from the Fixin’ to Die Rag:

And it’s 1, 2, 3,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We’re all going to die.

Antiwar anthems recede. However, America’s hunger for conflict only temporarily diminishes, for we are country almost constantly at war. We can ask, as Country Joe might, “What are we fighting for this time?”

We have been given many answers. We need to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons, even though they have none, and even if they want them, they would not have them anytime soon.

We need to stop them from having ballistic missiles that could be fired to our homeland, even though they have no such missiles, and even if they want them, they would not have them anytime soon.

Perhaps we are in this war simply because Israel wants us to, although that has been denied, as could be expected, by our version of a supreme leader. He is, he maintains, no lapdog of Bibi.

Or maybe we are in this war because Trump was in a bad mood because his MacDonald potatoes were not fried in RFK-approved beef tallow.

Perhaps we are in this war because Trump wants attention diverted from Jeffrey Epstein.

Or perhaps it was because Hegseth needed a testosterone boost after he had completed his sets of pushups for the day.

And there were some brief comments, which have receded, that we were at war to increase the freedom of Iranians.

Some have bought into that last rationale. Women in particular are so poorly treated in Iran that it is appropriate, nay, downright noble, to bomb the country and then bomb it some more, people say.

Women, and others, have faced oppressive Iranian conditions. Made in 2007, Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous film of her graphic novel of the same title, Persepolis, takes on a new life. It illustrates how devastating it can be to live in a theocracy.

Nevertheless, Iran is not the only country that mistreats women. Should we bomb all of them? This got me poking around, and I quickly found that there are lists of which countries are the best and worst for women. A couple of these rankings are highly regarded. One of them is produced by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (https://giwps.georgetown.edu/the-index/). It ranks 178 countries. On their world map, you can easily see that many of the low-ranked countries are clustered in the Mideast and Africa.

 According to the list, Denmark is the best place for women followed by other Northern European nations. Afghanistan is the worst. A few other rankings caught my eye. Iran is 128th. In other words, there are many countries worse than Iran, according to this Institute. The United States is #31. Israel, our ally in this latest war, is ranked #84, worse than Saudi Arabia that comes in at #63. India is #131. Iraq is #158.

As I indicated, this list, while respected, is not the only one. This may come as a shock, but women are mistreated in many ways. Analysts do not always agree on how to rank different kinds of mistreatment, so there is a subjective component to each list. How should educational opportunities for girls be weighed against trafficking of girls; equality of women’s salaries against rates of intimate partner violence; clothing restrictions against genital mutilations; and so on. The various rankings have similarities but are not precisely the same.

There is another list of interest that ranks the ten worst counties (10 of the worst countries for women’s rights | Concern Worldwide). In honor of March 17, it comes from Concern Worldwide, the largest Irish humanitarian group. It bears striking similarities to other listings: Afghanistan is in the bottom ten, as is Iraq. This is noteworthy. They are both countries that the United States has bombed…the technical term… the bejesus out of. That ordinance has not produced better conditions for women. That is not surprising. When we destroy a country’s infrastructure, kill its citizens, ravage its economy, and create refugees and homelessness, it is unlikely to lead to better lives for women…or anyone, for that matter. Chaos rarely leads to hope-filled progress. It more often leads to oppression. Indeed, it was barely news here that two weeks ago Yanar Mohammed, an Iraqi women’s rights activists, was killed outside her Baghdad home.

But surely our actions will lessen the oppression of women in Iran. Our bombs that fell on a school killing perhaps 150 girls means that there will be 150 fewer women to be oppressed in the glorious Iranian future that our bombs are sure to create.

Posted on by rjonakait

Compare and Contrast Assignment

          Today’s post is different. It is a request or an assignment for thoughts, facts, and opinions that would help me with my thinking. Here is the assignment: Compare and contrast the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine with the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. Send me what you come up with, and perhaps I can turn the results into a meaningful essay.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

No New Wars

          The transition to a new administration has its rituals. As part of them we examine the incoming president’s agenda, and we comment on the outgoing politician’s accomplishments or lack thereof. I pay little attention to this. Our presidential campaigns are so long that nothing in an incoming president’s plans that should be a surprise. Let’s wait to see what is achieved and not depend on mere hopes or fears. The assessments of the outgoing president always have a partisan tinge, and since I have lived through the administration, I can make up my own mind about the merits of the outgoing president. I especially did not care to hear what Trump said. I assumed that his inevitable and often misleading or untrue boasts would make me angry. I was surprised, then, to hear him say something that was true and even significant: Trump said that he was proud that he was the first president in decades who had not started a new war.

          Many Americans may feel that this is a strange boast. We believe that ours is not a war-mongering nation. Oh, yes, occasionally we have to get involved in wars, but only for the great cause of peace, for we are a peace-loving people. Combat, battles, and killings in the name of the United Sates are the exception for us. Right?

          I then looked at a Wikipedia page titled “List of wars involving the United States.” The list begins with the Revolution and continues to the present. Since Trump had claimed that he was the first president without a new war in “decades,” I concentrated on our involvements over the past forty years. Take a guess how many there were. The list had twenty-seven wars in which the United States was involved during those four decades, but, as Trump pointed out, none started during his tenure in office.

          You might, like me, doubt our involvement in that many wars during those forty years. The last one listed is the American intervention in Libya (2015-present). I read further and learned that in August 2016 we announced that at the request of the Libyan government we would aid in recapturing the city of Sirte from the Islamic State in Libya. We bombed Sirte from August to December with up to 100 sorties and gave other military support to the Libyan government, which retook Sirte on December 6, 2016. Maybe you are different, but I certainly don’t remember this. However, if some country bombed an American city 100 times over a few months, we would definitely count that as a war. While this was not our biggest war effort, it surely counts as substantial military hostilities.

          While being oblivious to the Libyan bombings, however, I had not forgotten about all the conflicts we were involved with. I remembered that we “intervened” in Lebanon and invaded Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. There was the Gulf War of 1990-1991 and a few years later an “intervention” in Somalia. The U.S. was involved with the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 and the Kosovo War of 1998-1999. And, of course, we are all aware of the Afghan War, which started in 2001, and the Iraq War starting in 2003. We are still involved in the Afghan War two decades later, and Iraq is still not at peace. We may not want to recognize it, but our “peaceful” nation has regularly been involved in multiple wars during our lifetimes and throughout our history. It is unusual, apparently, for us to go more than a few years without getting involved in a new war. When Trump says that he is proud of not getting us into another war, it is not mere fanfaronade. (This is word that I have just learned, and I know that I will soon forget it, so I feel compelled to use it while I still retain it. And “fanfaronade” is apt.)

          Whatever you may think of Trump’s foreign policy moves, rejoice in the fact that he did not start the equivalent of another Iraq war, the greatest foreign policy blunder of the last generation. He did not have us invade another country under false pretenses that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, untold casualties, and striking numbers of refugees; cost us trillions of dollars; massively increased our national debt; helped cause more instability and terror in the Mideast; and made our country less safe. We still feel the harmful effects of the Iraq war. I find it hard to give any sort of praise to Donald Trump, but I am glad that in the last four years he did not involve us in yet another shooting war.