The military’s disingenuous talking points on women’s rights

Last month the NY Times reported that the Defense Department fed talking points to former generals who appeared on cable news. Now the DoD has released a lot of those talking points to the public. Alyssa Rosenberg went through the documents, and found that a number of them instruct the generals to trumpet all the awesome stuff the U.S. military is doing for women in Iraq and Afghanistan — painting people like Donald Rumsfeld as some sort of savior for downtrodden women all over the world, and conveniently downplaying things like sexual assault by U.S. soldiers.
The talking points actually included this awful story:

Except for this one, from September 23, 2004: “Sally’s children were taken away from her more than six months ago. Her husband beat her. Her brother threatened her life while holding a gun to her head. Her own father contracted her deal with a $5,000 reward. Sally, an Iraqi translator, lost everything by working to help Americans rebuild Iraq. Still, she feels her service with Americans is the right thing for her country. ‘I lost everything I have, but I have gained so much,’ Sally said. ‘If I had to do it over again I would. I help the Americans help my people.'”

Rosenberg writes,

The anecdote is meant to be an illustration of how much Iraqis love their American liberators; but given how Iraqi translators have been abandoned by the Americans they helped, it’s a grotesquely ironic PR ploy.
Almost five years after the Defense Department promoted Sally’s story, domestic violence in Iraq is skyrocketing, female illiteracy rates are 10 times higher than they were in the 1980s, and in the past few months more than 40 women–and in two cases their children–have been murdered for defying dress codes. I wonder if Sally still feels like working for Americans was worth it.

After it became clear there were no WMD in Iraq, the Bush administration began using things like women’s rights as a reason for its violent occupation of another country. And now that this war has dragged on for five years — and women’s rights in Iraq and Afghanistan have clearly deteriorated, not improved — it’s all the more infuriating to look back and see how military spokespeople (even though they weren’t identified as such) used women to justify the war.
For more on the state of women’s rights in Iraq — not filtered through DoD talking points — check out Women for Women’s 2008 Iraq report (PDF). (via)