Twenty years ago today, peace protests rocked the globe, held across the world, urging the United States to halt its imminent plans to invade Iraq. There were over 6,000 candlelight vigils held March 16, 2003, as part of a day of action called by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and others.
President Bush justified the invasion on the false claim that Iraq’s formerly U.S.-backed dictator Saddam Hussein was secretly amassing WMDs, weapons of mass destruction. Over the coming days on Democracy Now!, we’ll look back at how the U.S. invasion devastated Iraq, caused upheaval around the globe.
the invasion had a devastating impact on Iraqi society. I, myself, have been trying to document the gap between the rhetoric of liberation and bringing human rights, democracy, and particularly in relation to women’s rights, to Iraq and the reality of what happened in the aftermath, with putting it against the historical background of 13 years of the most comprehensive sanctions that a country ever experienced. I think that’s really important, that when we think about the devastation and destruction of Iraqi society, it actually doesn’t start in 2003. It started with the sanctions regime on the 2nd of August, 1990.
But, yeah, to my mind, really, the biggest losers in the post-invasion scenario have been women — I mean, the very same people that actually President Bush used them as a symbol of the midwives of the new Iraq, as he used to say. And while it is true that women have — initially, in the aftermath, there was some hope. There was quite a bit of mobilization, a mushrooming of women’s rights organizations.
— source democracynow.org | Mar 16, 2023