Women Under Saddam

The status of women is just one of many causes for concern in post-Saddam Iraq. However, the notion peddled by some war critics that Baathist Iraq was a beacon of women's rights defies credibility. In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, A. Yasmine Rassam ably debunks this notion:


Anti-war revisionist liberals and radical feminists alike are trying their best to come up with comparisons of the Saddamist and post-Saddamist eras in Iraq with the aim of discrediting the historic liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein in 2003. With Iraqi women they think they have found a seemingly incontrovertible argument since Saddam, according to his apologists, was a "secular" ruler who gave liberal rights to women.

In a complex society like Iraq's, with its labyrinthine political and social development over the past 40 years, it is foolhardy to make simplistic comparisons based on a mere three years of post-Saddam liberation. Still, it is worth setting the record straight on how women really fared under the rule of this allegedly "benign" dictatorship. Revisionist history-writing must not prevail.


Women's Lib