Comments on: CNN’s Special on Women in Iraq: Painting Iraqi Women With the Victim Brush

By: Farheen

Farheen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:32:00 +0000

I personally don’t think a deep analysis of Iraq, whatever the particular issue may be, can be undertaken without placing blame on the US for the conditions. After all if the US had not first invaded Iraq in the first Gulf war (Bush senior), left poison in their soil and on their land as a result, placed embargos on Iraq (Bush sr and Clinton’s era – no wonder theyg et along so well), continued to bomb them randomly(Clinton’s era), and then ultimately climaxed with W’s war on terror then these women would not be in such crises states. After all, in the Middle East, Iraqi women were among the most liberated and educated. That is before America decided to change that. The US media needs desparately to tackle this issue head on. Why can they not place blame where blame is so painfully obvious?

By: nadia n

nadia n — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:56:00 +0000

I guess there’s a couple of ways you could read this piece, but I don’t think the positive spin they put on things was an attempt at making these women look “empowered” and not as victims, though I can see why you would read it that way. The situation for women is very bad in Iraq, I would call it a crisis, and seriously looking at why that is requires exmining political issues as well as challenging the narratives that say that the war is going better than it is. However that does not mean that Iraqi men and women are not empowered and are not acting on this crisis. Actually all last week they were demonstrating and speaking up about it, but the Western press almost totally ignored them.

By: nadia n

nadia n — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:48:00 +0000

The program does not focus on the overall condition of Iraqi women as the title might imply. This was a missed opportunity: the security of and increased violence against Iraqi women has made headlines, with male gynecologists in Iraq being targeted and increased attacks on women who attend school or don’t wear headscarves. Yes, I just wrote the exact same thing, it felt like a middle eastern Oprah show or something, the focus being on these women's personalities and their relationships with their families. And then like a third of the piece was just the journalist talking instead of letting the women do it.Though I don't know if the program portrayed things as too wretched, so much as I think that it really doesn't provide a clear idea of the bigger picture of what is happening to women in Iraq, actually I think the greater context of what is happening to them right now was barely really touched upon in focusing on what happened to these women as individuals, so in some ways I think it downplayed the seriousness of the problem.There were a lot of articles recently that have talked about how dire their situation is, but they have beenlargely in the European press. In the American press this narrative has been completely absent, and it really worries me.