Letters to the Editor
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Sobbering?
Can someone fix that please? Spelling counts.
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The Horror ...
Sadly, I'm no longer surprised by the varied and new permutations of horror that we've managed to inflict on Iraq ... pain becomes numbing after a long while.
At least BushCo is doing its best to bankrupt the American empire, I suppose the rest of the world can't wait. The temper tantrum we throw when that happens will be pretty ugly.
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But of course
if you actually read Rosen's piece, it becomes obvious that neither she nor anyone else knows if there is increased rape or sexual violence in Iraq or not. Interspersed among terms like "wave of sexual terrorism" and claims that the "incidence of sexual terrorism has accelerated markedly" are admissions that "few Iraqi women report rape", that Amnesty International says that reporting the extent of the problem is "especially daunting" and the the US State Department says that the extent of sex trafficking is "difficult to appropriately gauge." And to her own question of "how would we know?" the extent of sex crimes in Iraq, Rosen admits that rape there is a taboo subject.
So, Rosen claims there is a wave of sexual violence and simultaneously admits no one knows whether this is true or not. Strange, don't you think?
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Not even a smidgeon of evidence for the headline
It goes without saying that rape is a horrible, horrible, crime.
And the article cited, by Ruth Rosen, gives a number of specific examples of rape in post-U.S.-invasion Iraq. Every such example is horrific. Most have been well-reported in the past.
But Ms. Rosen does not present a smidgeon of evidence of any kind indicating that this is an unusually widespread phenomenon. In fact, she acknowledges that we have no way of knowing the extent of this crime in Iraq.
(This lack of evidence is, of course, not evidence that the phenomenon of rape is *not* unusually widespread in Iraq. It just doesn't tell us anything.)
It's hard to see the point of writing a whole story about the unusually widespread phenomenon of rape in Iraq without a smidgeon of evidence that this is an unusually widespread phenomenon. Unless Ms. Rosen's goal is to lower her credibility.
And in light of that, it's hard to see the point of Broadsheet's citing this article.
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I'm Not Pinning This One on Bush
Undoubtedly, the chaos after the US invasion is contributing to lawlessness. But any culture where parents won't welcome their kidnapped daughters home with open arms because they may be sullied is a culture rotten with misogyny and that didn't start in 2003.