So what's more harmful to women?

Calling somebody by an innocuous term of endearment you'd use for your wife or daughter or other beloved female relative, or voting for the authorization to use military force to invade Iraq, thereby creating chaos that led to undoing the progress made by Iraqi women in what was up to 2003 an increasingly secularized society?  (That's right, kiddies:  Iraqi women were much better off under Saddam than they are now.)

When people say "oh but we had no idea that things would be this bad", know that this is bull-loney.  As Brent Scowcroft pointed out back in 2002, Bush's dad knew enough not to topple Saddam in the first Gulf War -- not because he was a feminist, but because he didn't want to see a major buffer against the Iranians descend into bloody chaos.

From IPS News:

''Under the previous dictator regime, the basic rights for women were enshrined in the constitution,'' Houzan Mahmoud from the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq told IPS in an interview. The group is a sister organization of MADRE, an international women's rights group.

Under Saddam, she said, ''women could go out to work, university and get married or divorced in civil courts. But at the moment women have lost almost all their rights and are being pushed back into the corner of their house.''

The recent constitution which was written under the U.S. government's supervision is ''very backward and anti-women,'' Mahmoud said. ''They make Islam the source for law making, and the main official religion of the country. This in itself means Islamic Sharia law and according to this women will be considered second-class citizens and will have no power in deciding over their lives.''

The whole of Iraqi society has been subjected to ''chaos and brutalisation,'' she said. ''Security is absent, all basic services, and above all the protection for women's rights is in no way on the agenda of any of the political parties who have been hand-picked by the U.S. administration in the installed so-called parliament.''

MADRE is calling for the deployment of a United Nations-led peacekeeping force and an immediate end to the U.S. occupation. As the crisis in Iraq intensifies, the group says women and their families in Iraq face an urgent need for security, functional government, and the provision of basic services within a human rights framework.

Over three years of occupation, the situation is becoming more dangerous and bleak with the presence of the occupying forces, and ''the more violence and terrorism is in function in Iraq the more women will fall victims of such climate,'' she said.

Rights for oppressed groups generally improve when people aren't feeling economically or militarily stressed.  But when people are feeling the pinch, the drive towards liberalism often stalls out or reverses, as we're finding in the UK with the recent Tory triumphs.  The people in Iraq are dealing with stresses that make what the UK's going through truly look like a walk in the park -- is it any wonder that the statuses of Iraqi women, Christians, Jews, Kurds, and other groups have gone down since the 2003 invasion?