June 12, 2006
Last
May, Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith interviewed seven young
Iraqi men on the program.
CBS News summed up the interview: "Many Iraqis think
conditions have gotten so bad in their country, they’d like to see
Saddam Hussein back in power…" One stated, "A lot of people want, well,
'We just want Saddam come back. We don’t want to live this life. OK,
dictator? We don’t care; doesn’t matter anymore. We just want Saddam get
back. We just want our life to get back to before.’" Leaving aside the
daily "collateral damage" killings of Iraqi civilians, and the
occupiers’ failure to accomplish the most basic reconstruction goals,
the collapse of law and order and accompanying empowerment of fanatic
religious militias has made life hell for women, Christians and other
religious minorities, and intellectuals.
"Under the previous dictator regime, the
basic rights for women were enshrined in the constitution," the head of
an Iraqi women’s group told
Inter Press Service News Agency in March. Under Saddam,
"women could go out to work, university and get married or divorced in
civil courts. But at the moment women have lost almost all their rights
and are being pushed back into the corner of their house." "I think we
were better off under Saddam," 38-year-old Christian Amira Nisan told
Religious News Service in May 2003, after her family was
forcibly evicted from their Baghdad home. Her Muslim landlord had
decided that with the collapse of Saddam’s secular regime he would no
longer rent to non-Muslims. "I'm afraid for my people," said Bishop
Ishlemon Warduni, the leader of Iraq’s Chaldeans, 80% of Iraq’s
Christians. During the war, we were not afraid like we are now. All
Christians are in danger." That was before tens of thousands of
Christians fled to the welcoming embrace of neighboring,
secular Syria. Things are only getting worse for the Christians.
As for intellectuals, over a thousand
university professors had been killed by the end of 2005 by
thugs taking advantage of the invasion-induced chaos to lash out those
whose critical reasoning clashes with their religious prejudices. A
Baghdad University political science professor has stated, "To tell the
truth, in the time of Saddam Hussein, we used to speak to our students
freely.… But now, a lot of people are not willing to say these kinds of
things because of fear." Thousands of intellectuals are fleeing the
country.
Now, the U.S. military of course decries
all this. Last semester, a group of military officers who had been
stationed in Iraq spoke at a forum at my university. They were actually
divided on the issue of whether or not the war was justified, and when I
asked from the floor how anyone could possibly say that things were now
better in Iraq, one frankly said he didn’t know, and that he’s wrestling
with the issue. Another responded with some indignation that of
course things were better now, as though the query was itself
impertinent. This knee-jerk response to reality is widespread. When
Howard Dean says, "…as of today (August 2005) it looks like
women will be worse off in Iraq than they were when Saddam Hussein was
president of Iraq," or
Hillary Clinton says (Feb. 2004), "Women tell me they can’t
leave their homes, they can’t go about their daily business. And there
is a concerted effort to burn schools that are educating girls [and] to
intimidate aid workers who are women," the butthead American
counterparts of Iraq’s fundamentalists are all over them.
The traitors! How dare they say such
things!
But the fact is, things are worse. And for
none more than that group most vulnerable historically to attacks from
religious fanatics: homosexuals. Last month
Ali Hili, who used to run a gay nightclub in Baghdad, told
The Times of London he knows of more than 40 Iraqi gay men killed
this year. "We could never envisage this happening when Saddam (Hussein)
was overthrown," the 33-year-old now in exile declared. "I had no love
for the former president, but his regime never persecuted the gay
community." "There was no homophobic attitudes toward gay and lesbians,"
he told
Democracy Now!. "It’s a very dark age for gays and
lesbians and transsexuals and bisexuals in Iraq right now. And the fact
that Iraq has been shifted from a secular state into a religious state
was completely, completely horrific. We were very modern. We were very,
very Western culturalized -- Iraq -- comparing to the rest of the Middle
East. Why it’s been shifted to this Islamic dark ages country?"
In April 2005, Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani declared that homosexuals should be killed in the "worst,
most severe way." (This presumably in accordance with the hadith,
"Kill the one that is doing it and also kill the one that it is being
done to," closely comparable to the Biblical injunction in Leviticus
20:13 championed by some in the U.S.
Christian
religious right.) The Badr Corps, military wing of the of the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) in Iraq well
represented in the regime midwifed by the occupation, is among the
militia tracking down and
brutally murdering gay men and boys. Last month, following
the murder of a 14-year-old boy-prostitute by the Iraqi police,
al-Sistani removed the anti-gay male fatwa from his website (retaining
one against lesbians). Not that this will necessarily change the
militiamen’s behavior towards gays.
Al-Sistani is of course viewed by the
occupiers as an ally of sorts, since he has discouraged armed resistance
and commands the respect of the SCIRI and other Shiite politicians
dominating what President Bush wants to call an independent, democratic
new country. So while officially "troubled" by the bourgeoning misogyny,
religious intolerance, anti-intellectual and homophobic plagues
unleashed by the illegal overthrow of the former regime, U.S.
spokespersons can’t attack too squarely the Muslim fundamentalist
repression exercised by their sometimes allies.
"If someone is in danger of being
slaughtered or persecuted, we do all we can to stop it," says Army Maj.
Joseph Todd Breasseale, chief of the Media Relations Division of the
Multinational Corps in Iraq. In other words, the U.S. military, which
officially regards bans gays who are out unsuitable for military
service, does want to stop the slaughter of Iraqi gays. But he
adds:
"It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,
when we’re in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, 'Here’s
these issues that are going to repel 80 percent of the population and
this is what we want to inflict on you.’ We’re trying not to get into
too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing."
That’s what Breasseale told the
Washington Blade, the capital’s GLBT newspaper.
So let me get this straight. In this
"fledgling time," while the primordial chaos of the criminal invasion
still prevails, the occupiers -- bogged down in suppressing resistance
to their presence, slaughtering civilians in the process -- haven’t much
wherewithal to prevent other, indigenous Iraqi slaughter. The latter can
be attributed, with anthropological indifference, to age-old Muslim
culture. The occupiers have better things to do than to "get into" the
"values judgment issue" of shooting 14-year-old gay boys, especially if
80% of the population has no problem with that. That’d be "inflicting"
somebody else’s values (although not, apparently, the Major’s), and that
just wouldn’t make sense, would it?
So doing the "right thing" must mean doing
something else: publicly acknowledging that gay people shouldn’t be
murdered, probably, and it’s not the occupiers’ policy that they should
be. But, hey, this is the Iraqis’ business. At least they’re free
now.
Gary Leupp
is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative
Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese
history. He can be reached at:
gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.