I have been absolutely disgusted by the abandoment of the translators. It is like so much else, Alyssa. This administration gives lip service to A,B and C but there is no implementation.

BTW, Alyssa, that was a very nice piece and extremely important.  I hope it helps ignite new action on behalf of all victims involved.

"female illiteracy rates are 10 times higher than they were in the 1980s,"

This is so extraordinarily unlikely as to cast doubt on the whole of the reporting here.  For this to even nominally possible, the female illiteracy rate in the 1980s would have to be under 10% (anything more than that, and making it 10 times as high would require more than 100% of adult females to be illiterate).     I can't find any reference that suggests more than 90% female literacy in Iraq 25 years ago.

But it's actually worse than that.  Suppose that Iraq had 95% female literacy 25 years ago.  Making it ten times worse would make 50% illiteracy today.  But given the life expectancies in Iraq (nearly 60 in 1985) and demographic curves, 1/3 to 1/2 of the literate Iraqi women alive 25 years ago are still alive (and probably still literate), again making it almost impossible to reach the 10x reduction to 50% illiteracy.  Realistically, without extremely high literacy rates in the 1980s, it is numerically impossible to get a 10x increase in overall illiteracy in 20 years.

What might be possible, is a 10x increase in the number of newly adult females who leave adolescence illiterate.  But this is a different thing than claimed in the post.

I don't so much care about the analysis here, other than, as I say, claims that are absurd in one part of an argument make me doubt the whole line of reasoning.

sdemuth, although this wouldn't take into account all of the discrepancy, many of the literate Iraqis before the war were probably more likely to be middle-to-upper class than illiterate Iraqis.  You're not taking into account all of those who have fled Iraq.  I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of Iraqis who had the means to flee to other countries were literate.  Plus, Saddam misled the world (and we fell for it) into thinking his WMD capability was...well...existent; why wouldn't he inflate his female literacy figures?

Great post, Alyssa. The administration's cynical use of "women's rights" as a rationale for the Iraq war is pretty galling and has not been reported on much . In the immediate wake of the invasion, women's security in Baghdad deteriorated significantly, even relative to men's. Kidnappings and rape of women, who were often subsequently shunned by their families in the name of family honor, became more frequent and American troops generally did nothing to help the victims of such crimes (since there weren't enough of them there to do more than the basics, striving to hold off chaos.) Often the local authorities (male) would also refuse to "interfere in family matters" by investigating or prosecuting the perpetrators of these crimes. The administration's concern with women's rights and interests went only so far as its usefulness in marketing the war to the American public. Beyond that, Iraqi women were pretty much on their own.

I had a colleague, a middle east expert of Iraqi descent, who supported the war before it started by using the argument that Iraq was especially well positioned in the middle east to become a successful democracy. Among his main reasons for thinking this was the relatively good record Iraq had, under Saddam, on gender equality. (Women voted, participated in public life and in the workplace, could appear in public without a chaperone, etc.) I was opposed to the war and was very skeptical about this argument (linking Saddam's relative support for women's participation in society to the prospects of establishing a stable democracy there) but wasn't in much of a position to rebut his claim, having no expertise on the middle east. So it was pretty distressing to follow what happened to women's rights and opportunities and basic security after the invasion. I'm sure things have improved since then... but I'm now always struck by the glaring absence of women from public places in television footage of Iraq.

I would be interested in a response/clarification concerning sdemuth's point above.

sdemuth, in your impeccable meta-analysis, you seem to have forgotten the little matter of the mass exodus of educated Iraqis in the face of US-instigated chaos, not to mention the effect of the ensuing murder and mayhem on middle class population.

Iraq's population certainly hasn't been static over the past 20 years, a fact you pass over in your pious citation of literacy percentages.

It's obviously possible to reach sub-10% female literacy rates now, what with middle-class depletion and rampant misogyny.  Certainly conceivable enough to preclude a thoughtful person from dismissing the claim out-of-hand.

Oops-- I'm not sure why I wrote "voting" since women's "voting" under Saddam couldn't have been that prevalent or significant (for obvious reasons); but my colleague's point was that women had many of the opportunities for participation in public life that men had.

Enlightening and touching. Thank you, Alyssa.

I know this is a slight segue, but the stalling of the Ledbetter act in the Senate has enraged me.  How are the Democrats not hammering this home?  Where is it in the mainstream media?  I've read one or two op-eds on it (plus an article in TNR), but that would appear to be it.

Thanks, Alyssa. I should have scoured that article more closely after reading sdemuth's post.

All in all, pretty depressing stuff. Thanks again for the great post on this under-reported aspect of the situation in Iraq.

thetraytiger and bigfish: You are right that I did not include the exodus of middle class Iraqis.  It can matter in some meta-scanarios, but nothing invalidates the first claim I make - to increase the illiiteracy rate by 10x, you have to start with bet than 90% female literacy.  You simple cannot have more than 100% of women illiterate, under and scenario.

Moreover, the exodus of which you speak has been in the low millions.  If everyone who left was a literate female (unlikely), and that managed to be 1/3 of the originally literate populate, and another 1/3 of the women alive 25 years ago died and they were all literate, and you started with 95% literacy, and every woman added to the population since 2000 was iliiterate, you still would not get a 10x increase.

It doesn't matter, of course, to the main message - that both Saddam Hussein and the US occupation of Iraq were disaasters, in different ways, for women, but as I say, it does no argument any good to make a claim that can't be substantiated.

sdemuth, how's this for a meta-scenario:

READ ALYSSA'S RESPONSE! (1:21pm)

Traytiger: It's great.  It perfectly illustrates that people tend to believe and repeat numerical "facts" that agree with what they want to think, without thinking critically about them.

Illiteracy statistics usually refer to adult literacy.  So a claim of 98% literacy at the end of Saddam Hussein's regime means that 98% of women 18 or older could read and write well enough to function with basic written language tasks.  Then we are to believe that this fell to 73% in the last 5 years.

So imagine that you started with a sample of families distributed around Iraq in which there were a total of 100,000 adult women before the invasion.  I can't find precise statistics for outmigration, but I can't find any that suggest the number is greater than 20% of the population.  Since 98% of the population at the start of this period were literate, we'll assume that all of that 20% were literate.  So, we lost 20% of those adult women.  Some other literate women died.  So maybe total, 25-30% of the pre-invasion literate women have disappeared.  All those that remain only 2,000 of 70,000 (3%) are illiterate  - unless they are forgetting basic literacy.

The families that remain, will have some females matriculate into the adult class.  Even if every one of them were illiterate, you'd have to have this cohort be nearly 24,000 strong in order to reach 27% illiteracy.

In reality, of course, no where near as many illiterate females matriculated into adulthood as that.    First, it's very unlikely that  there were that many 12-17 year old women to become  adults in that period (it would take quite a skewed population distribution to get to that point), and secondly, they wouldn't all have been illiterate.

You can't make these numbers work if you try.  The most likely reason is that the two statistics being compared are not meaningfully comparable.  They measured different things, or weren't about overall female literacy in the first place.

Remember that Pentagon program , revealed last month, that fed talking points to supposedly objective

Remember that Pentagon program , revealed last month, that fed talking points to supposedly objective

Remember that Pentagon program , revealed last month, that fed talking points to supposedly objective