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While we're on the subject of Iraq, here's something from today's WaPo:

Before leaving her house, she had covered her body in a billowing black abaya and wrapped a black head scarf around her thick brown hair. She had asked her brother to drive. She had done all the things that a woman living in Baghdad is supposed to do these days to avoid drawing attention to herself.

It was the first time she had left home in two months.

"For a woman, it's just like being in jail," she said. "I can't go anywhere."

Life has become more difficult for most Iraqis since the February bombing of a Shiite Muslim mosque in Samarra sparked a rise in sectarian killings and overall lawlessness. For many women, though, it has become unbearable.

As Islamic fundamentalism seeps into society and sectarian warfare escalates, more and more women live in fear of being kidnapped or raped. They receive death threats because of their religious sects and careers. They are harassed for not abiding by the strict dress code of long skirts and head scarves or for driving cars.

For much of the 20th century, and under various leaders, Iraq was one of the most progressive Middle Eastern countries in its treatment of women, who were encouraged to go to school and enter the workforce. Saddam Hussein's Baath Party espoused a secular Arab nationalism that advocated women's full participation in society. But years of war changed that.

In the days after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many women were hopeful that they would enjoy greater parity with men. President Bush said that increasing women's rights was essential to creating a new, democratic Iraq.

But interviews with 16 Iraqi women, ranging in age from 21 to 52, show that much of that postwar hope is gone. The younger women say they fear being snatched on their way to school and wonder whether their college degrees will mean anything in the new Iraq. The older women, proud of their education and careers, are watching their independence slip away.

"At the beginning, we were very happy with those achievements and gains, and we were looking for more," said Ina'am al-Sultani, 36, a leader of the Progressive Women's Movement, a nongovernmental organization. "Women are now restrained."

[...]Encouraged by Bush, women began to reassert themselves after 2003. But the collapse of security, the absence of the rule of law and the presence of extremist groups have weakened the budding movement, activists said. In the past year, its leaders have received death threats. Politicians have accused them of working in collusion with enemy countries, and police officers have harassed them, activists said.

On June 4, Abbas received an anonymous e-mail at her Baghdad office warning her to leave Iraq within 10 days. Three days later, another e-mail said she would be killed for not complying with the first threat.

She stayed home and canceled her scheduled appearances. A third threat came June 10 in a telephone text message. She recalled thinking that she did not want to be killed in front of her parents, who had already lost a daughter in a U.S. airstrike.

"I left with a feeling of humiliation and bitterness," she wrote in an e-mail from an undisclosed location. "Just imagine, I left my home, my family, my work and my city, for nowhere."

[...]Bushra Shimirya, 42, had considered herself an independent woman. That changed dramatically in just a few months, she said. She knew things were bad when she could no longer drive her car.

"Anyone who's in her 20s and drives a car for the first time, you feel very happy and very independent," she said. "Like you can do anything."

Since the Samarra bombings, she said, she has felt she can do almost nothing.

Relatives had seen fliers warning women not to drive. They pleaded with her to stop. She resisted.

Shimirya, who has a doctorate in psychological studies, had been driving since she was 20.

But the stares started to bother her. They came from men anytime they saw her behind the wheel of her 1984 Toyota Crown.

So she hired a car service to take her to her job at Baghdad University. She stopped going out unless it was necessary. No more dinners with her girlfriends. No more walking the streets of her affluent Mansour neighborhood.

"It's become so bad that a woman who drives a car will be slaughtered, and a woman who doesn't put a scarf on her hair will be slaughtered," she said.

This is what Americans are fighting and dying for? Tens of thousands of casualties... hundreds of billions of dollars... for this?