A group of Turkish female activists confronted Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes on Wednesday with heated complaints about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, turning a session designed to highlight the empowerment of women into a raw display of anger at U.S. policy in the region.

This war is really, really bringing your positive efforts to the level of zero.
Hidayet Sefkatli Tuksal, activist, Capital City Women’s Forum
“This war is really, really bringing your positive efforts to the level of zero,” said Hidayet Sefkatli Tuksal, an activist with the Capital City Women’s Forum. She said it was difficult to talk about cooperation between women in the United States and Turkey as long as Iraq was under occupation.

Hughes, a longtime confidante of President Bush with the job of burnishing the U.S. image overseas, has generally met with polite audiences — many of whom received U.S. funding or consisted of former exchange students — during a tour of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey this week.

In this case, the U.S. Embassy asked Kader, an umbrella group that supports female candidates, to assemble the guest list. None of the activists currently receive U.S. funds, and the guests apparently had little desire to mince words. Six of the eight women who spoke at the session, held in Ankara, the capital, focused on the Iraq war.

“War makes the rights of women completely erased, and poverty comes after war — and women pay the price,” said Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Kurdish women’s rights activist. Vargun denounced the arrest of Cindy Sheehan, the Vacaville activist mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, in front of the White House on Monday at an antiwar protest.

Hughes, looking increasingly pained, defended the decision to invade Iraq as a difficult and wrenching moment for President Bush, but necessary to protect America.

“You’re concerned about war, and no one likes war,” she said. But, she said, “to preserve the peace sometimes my country believes war is necessary.” Hughes also asserted that women are faring much better in Iraq than under the rule of deposed leader Saddam Hussein.

“War is not necessary for peace,” shot back Feray Salman, a human rights advocate. She said countries should not try to impose democracy through war, adding that “we can never, ever export democracy and freedom from one country to another.”

Tuksal said she was “feeling myself wounded, feeling myself insulted here” by Hughes’ response. “In every photograph that comes from Iraq, there is that look of fear in the eyes of women and children. … This needs to be resolved as soon as possible.”

Glenn Kessler | San Francisco Chronicle (read more. . .)

Hughes’ simple, sincere and unadorned language is pellucid in revealing the administration’s inner mind. Her ideas on terrorism and its solution are straightforward. “Terrorists,” she said in Egypt at the start of her trip, “their policies force young people, other people’s daughters and sons, to strap on bombs and blow themselves up.” Somehow, magically, these evildoers coerce the young to commit suicide. If only they would understand us, the tensions would dissolve. “Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans’ lives,” she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why President Bush mentions God in his speeches, she asked him “whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites ‘one nation under God.’ He said, ‘Well, never mind.’”

With these well-meaning arguments, Hughes has provided the exact proof for what Osama bin Laden has claimed about American motives. “It is stunning … the extent [to which] Hughes is helping bin Laden,” Robert Pape told me. Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has conducted the most extensive research into the backgrounds and motives of suicide terrorists, is the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” and recently briefed the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center. “If you set out to help bin Laden,” he said, “you could not have done it better than Hughes.”

Pape’s research debunks the view that suicide terrorism is the natural byproduct of Islamic fundamentalism or some “Islamo-fascist” ideological strain independent of certain highly specific circumstances. “Of the key conditions that lead to suicide terrorism in particular, there must be, first, the presence of foreign combat forces on the territory that the terrorists prize. The second condition is a religious difference between the combat forces and the local community. The religious difference matters in that it enables terrorist leaders to paint foreign forces as being driven by religious goals. If you read Osama’s speeches, they begin with descriptions of the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, driven by our religious goals, and that it is our religious purpose that must confronted. That argument is incredibly powerful not only to religious Muslims but secular Muslims. Everything Hughes says makes their case.”

Sidney Blumenthal | Salon (read more. . .)

Where do American religious leaders stand on torture? Their deafening silence evokes memories of the unconscionable behavior of German church leaders in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Despite the hate whipped up by administration propagandists against those it brands “terrorists,” most Americans agree that torture should not be permitted. Few seem aware, though, that although President George W. Bush says he is against torture, he has openly declared that our military and other interrogators may engage in torture “consistent with military necessity.”

For far too long we have been acting like “obedient Germans.” Shall we continue to avert our eyes - even as our mainstream media begin to expose the “routine” torture conducted by US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo?

Ray McGovern | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

Being arrested is not a big deal. Even though we were arrested for “demonstrating without a permit” we were protesting something that is much more serious than sitting on a sidewalk: the tragic and needless deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Americans (both in Iraq and here in America) who would be alive if it weren’t for the criminals who reside in and work in the White House.

Karl Rove (besides just being a very creepy man) outed a CIA agent and was responsible for endangering many of our covert agents worldwide. Dick Cheney’s old company is reaping profits beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations in their no-bid contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans. John Negroponte’s activities in South America are very shady and murderous. Rumsfeld and Gonzales are responsible for illegal and immoral authorization, encouragement and approval of torture. Not to mention, violating Geneva Conventions, torture endangers the lives of our service men and women in Iraq. Along with the above mentioned traitors, Condi lied through her teeth in the insane run-up to the invasion. The list of crimes this administration has commited is extensive, abhorrent, and unbelievable. What is so unbelievable is that WE were arrested for exercising our first amendment rights and these people are running free to enjoy their lives of crime and to wreak havoc on the world.

Cindy Sheehan | Huffington Post (read more. . .)

Just when it didn’t seem like Iraq could get any worse—it gets worse.

This time, it’s the simmering battle between two Shiite paramilitary armies: the forces of the Badr Brigade, the 20,000-strong force controlled by the Iranian-supported Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and the Mahdi Army, the thousands-strong force that worships the fanatical Muqtada Al Sadr. The battle, which might flare into a Shiite-Shiite civil war in advance of the October 15 referendum on Iraq’s divisive, rigged constitution, could put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

Robert Dreyfuss | TomPaine.com (read more. . .)

But yesterday’s protesters beat the odds and pulled off what was certainly D.C.’s biggest antiwar demonstration since the Iraq occupation began. Organizers claimed as many as 250,000 demonstrators attended; though D.C. police estimates were more conservative, none pegged the crowd at below 100,000. By the time the rally convened at 11:30 a.m., scores of demonstrators filled the Ellipse, spilling onto the Mall, the streets around the White House, and the Washington Monument — a hopeful sign that the effectiveness of the peace movement may have reached a turning point.

While the half-dozen UFPJ and ANSWER speakers held forth on incongruous topics ranging from discrimination against American Muslims to the illegitimacy of Bush’s 2000 Florida victory, their two principal demands were an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and a new federal focus on the devastated Gulf Coast. “National security begins in New Orleans, homeland security begins at home,” Jesse Jackson told the crowd. “Bring the troops home now.”

Other speakers made the same Baghdad-New Orleans link, reminding the crowd that many Louisiana National Guardsmen were fighting abroad when the hurricane struck. Demonstrators waved signs bearing the phrase “Make levees, not war” in response. “I think that it’s broadening the focus,” Baptist Peace Fellowship demonstrator Tom Burkett said of the combined antiwar and disaster relief message. “Are we going to be a better country by spending another 200 billion [in Iraq] or spending it on the Gulf Coast?”

It would have been a stretch to call the speech given by bereaved military mother turned peace activist Cindy Sheehan memorable, but those gathered loved it anyway. In a strained voice, she copiously congratulated the audience for coming and condemned the moral abominations of torture and preemptive war before demanding that American troops be immediately brought home. “We’re going to say not one person should have died, not one more should die,” she said with the White House lawn at her back. “Can you scream that to the White House?” The audience could.

Jeff Horwitz | Salon (read more. . .)

The US military has had no political successes in the Sunni Arab areas. Mosul and some parts of Baghdad could have been pointed to in summer of 2004. In summer of 2005, these earlier successes have evaporated like a desert mirage toward which thirsty soldiers race.

The situation in the Sunni Arab areas was worse in summer of 2004 than it had been in summer of 2003. It is worse in the summer of 2005 than it had been in 2004. Even the Iraqi political groupings that had earlier been willing to cooperate with the US boycotted the Jan. 30 elections and are now assiduously working to defeat the new constitution.

Things in the Sunni Arab areas are getting worse, not better.

I conclude that the presence of the US ground troops is making things worse, not better.

Let’s get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.

The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.

Juan Cole | Informed Comment (read more. . .)