Veterans for Common Sense

When the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed last Tuesday that Iran had broken the seals on its nuclear research facility at Natanz, many people reacted as if the very next step was the testing of an Iranian nuclear weapon.

In the ensuing media panic, we were repeatedly reminded that Iran’s radical new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared just months ago that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” How could such a lethally dangerous regime be allowed to proceed with its nuclear plans?

But talk is cheap and not to be confused with actions or even intentions. Ahmadinejad was quoting directly from the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. But neither during Khomeini’s life nor in the 16 years since his death has Iran made any effort to wipe Israel off the map, because to do so could mean the virtual extermination of the Iranian people.

Israel has held a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East since shortly after Ahmadinejad was born and now possesses enough of them to strike every Iranian and every Arab city of more than 100,000 people simultaneously.

Ahmadinejad’s comment was as foolish, but also ultimately as meaningless, as Ronald Reagan’s famous remark into a microphone that he didn’t know was open: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I have signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Nobody doubted that Reagan wanted the “evil empire” to be wiped from the face of the earth, but nobody seriously believed he intended to attack it. Russia had nuclear weapons too, and the U.S. would have been destroyed by its retaliation.

Ahmadinejad was not joking about wanting Israel to vanish, but he was expressing a wish, not an intention, because Iran has been thoroughly deterred for all of his adult life by the knowledge of those hundreds of Israeli nuclear warheads.

And Iran would still be deterred if it had a few nuclear weapons of its own, just as Reagan was deterred from striking the Soviet Union even though the United States had thousands of the things.

So why would Iran want nuclear weapons at all? Mostly national pride, plus a desire to keep up with the neighbours.

For Iran, nuclear weapons fall into the class of “nice to have” rather than life-or-death necessity. Israel cannot invade it, and even the United States would be reluctant to do so: It is a very big, mountainous and nationalistic country.

So, the Iranians have chipped away at the task of building the scientific and technological basis for a nuclear-weapons program in a desultory way for several decades, without ever getting really serious about it.

That is still the pattern. When the IAEA demanded that Iran explain certain irregularities in its nuclear power research program three years ago, the regime did not respond like North Korea, which immediately abrogated its membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and went all out to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

Instead, Iran voluntarily allowed the IAEA to put seals on its nuclear research facilities.

Now it has removed those seals and plans to resume its research on nuclear power. This will also enhance its capacity to work on nuclear weapons eventually, but that can’t be helped.

The current American campaign to impose United Nations sanctions on Iran is doomed to fail, because it is not breaking the law.

As a signatory of the NPT, it is fully entitled to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes, including the technology for enriching uranium, even though that also takes it much of the way to a nuclear-weapons capability. In any case, it is practically unimaginable that all the veto-holding powers on the UN Security Council would agree to impose sanctions on a major oil-producer on the mere suspicion that it ultimately intends to break the law.

And there is no need for such a dramatic confrontation. Iran has never been in a great rush to get nuclear weapons.

Even if the CIA is unduly optimistic in assuming that Tehran is still 10 years away from a bomb, there is still plenty of time and room for patient negotiation. And no need for the current histrionics.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

When I turned 17 years old there was a war going on. Like many young men of that era, I didn’t wait to be drafted, I volunteered.

The year was 1951 and the war was called a “Police Action,” but more than 40,000 Americans gave up their lives while serving as this country’s policemen in Korea.

I never really thought about the politics of the war. I was told that the communist North Korea had invaded the free country of South Korea and it was our duty to stop them and drive them back across the 38th Parallel. Not once did I doubt the integrity of our nation’s leaders or question their reasons for going to war. Was this a just war? When can a war be called just?

I suppose Korea could be called a just war. After all, we were fighting to keep an invading army from taking away the freedom of another nation. We were young, we were fearless, and above all, we were patriotic. Without a shred of a doubt we trusted and respected our government. Would President Harry Truman lie to us? Never!

And we walked away from Korea with our heads held high. Despite the intervention of communist China, we had driven the enemy back to the 38th Parallel. Perhaps the war was a stalemate, but a stalemate is better than a loss.

But everything seemed to go awry in Vietnam. When we returned from Korea there were no protesters calling us baby killers and worse. But during the Vietnam War it seemed that the entire nation was against the war and in their anger and hate for the war they turned on the troops fighting the war.

A war is personal when one is actively involved, but it is also personal when a close friend or relative loses his life. This week the war in Iraq took a personal turn for me and for many Lakota people.

Cpl. Brett Lee Lundstrum, USMC, was just 22 years old when he was killed by enemy fire at Fallujah, Iraq. He was an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. His mother, Doyla Carol (Underbaggage) Lundstrum was the adopted daughter of Lynn Rapp, my ex-wife. During the years we were together Doyla and her two sons, Brett and Eddy, spent many holidays and many happy hours at our house. They even attended the Christmas parties we held for the staff of my newspaper.

At one Christmas party, my stepdaughter Susie, a very blond young lady, looked around the room at the mixture of children attending the party and asked the band to play “The Brady Bunch” theme song. It was her tribute to her Lakota brothers and sisters in the room.

We watched this awkward teenager grow into a strapping young man. But all of a sudden, his life is over before it has even begun. In his obituary it reads, “Brett was charismatic with a kind and generous soul; always humorous, with a smile, he lit up any room or place he entered.” That’s Brett. His laugh and smile were contagious. He loved the Marines and he loved serving his country. And just as I when I was 17 years old, he never questioned the reasons he was sent to Iraq. He considered it his duty as a United States Marine to follow the orders of his commanding officer.

When one serves in the military it seems we do not question the reasons we are at war. We only do our duty and try to serve as best we can. It is only when we are older and have witnessed the devastation of war and have seen firsthand the political implications, then war takes on a different light.

Far be it for me to ever question the integrity and courage of those men and women serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are in the military and they obey orders. They also take great pride in the job they are doing. But it seems that President Bush has intertwined honest criticism of the war with disrespect for those serving in combat. From my heart I can tell you that they are not the same.

We are in a war that began with a dark lie that has taken on different hues of dishonesty as the war has dragged on. We are in a war that can end in only one of two ways: either the new Iraqi government will stabilize as a theocracy or the nation of Iraq will dissolve into a civil war that will pit the Shiite and Kurds against the once-controlling Sunni forces.

In either case the end product will not be what the chicken hawks that led us into this war intended. If Iraq becomes another Iran with mullahs as leaders or deteriorates into a civil war costing thousands of lives, who is the winner? It will not be the people of Iraq and certainly not the brave, young men and women that are dying every day in pursuit of a victorious ending. And it will not be the politicians responsible for the war.

I feel the loss of Brett as do all of the people of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. He was one of us and he gave his life for a cause in which he truly believed. I honor and respect his courage, but that does not preclude me from questioning the wisdom of those elected leaders who sent him into this unjust war.

May Brett rest in peace and may his Journey to the Spirit World be filled with wonder.

Tim Giago is president of the Native American Journalists Foundation. E-mail him at najournalists@rushmore.com.

On Dec. 7, Rigoberto Alpizar died at the hands of federal sky marshals on a jetway in Miami. Remember? He had behaved oddly while exiting the airplane. He may have uttered the unutterable, saying he had a bomb. He paid with his life.

Only the grace of hindsight revealed that Alpizar was mentally ill, that lack of medication and the stress of travel had conspired to render him confused, eccentric, perhaps paranoid – a potentially lethal mix in a culture that reinforces the temptation to shoot first and ask questions later.

How quickly this all passed from public consciousness. I was reminded of the tragedy by a patient who is now doing well, but who had not long ago descended into his own psychosis, and in that confused and terrifying state had faced his own moment of truth with the law.

The Maine State Police had subdued him with nonlethal means, but he recognized in the tragedy of Alpizar that his fate might have been horribly different.

Perhaps Alpizar disappeared so quickly from the public eye because his story too painfully highlights a national tragedy: We are frightened and divided – beset by fears of terrorists, of evil-doers, of people who do not share our beliefs and values, of people who look and act different.

We seek comfort, circle the wagons if you will, in the company of those who are like us, who do not set off the warning bells of oddness or deviance. At our worst, we find comfort in making scapegoats of those who frighten us with their difference. We find solace in the fiction that ours is the better country, the better God.

Much of our political discourse reinforces the drift toward fear and division. And while we can usually count on religion to lift us up and appeal to our better nature, much of the church has fallen into the broader cultural morass.

The Protestant Right has hardened its heart against those who fail to toe the doctrinal line. The Vatican has found its beté noire in homosexuality. The excesses committed in the names of Judaism and Islam in the Middle East and elsewhere are nothing less than horrific.

Tragically, the senseless death of Alpizar in the airport jetway becomes part of our cultural fabric of fear and loathing. In the story of his death there are no winners. His family’s pain will endure. The guilt of the marshals who took an innocent life is likely to haunt them forever. And our country slips yet farther away from the moral high ground.

As we look toward celebrating the birth of Martin Luther King this coming weekend, it seems good to remember that he dreamed of a very different America – one inspired, if not by love, then at least by justice.

He dreamed of politicians motivated more by doing good than by doing well. He dreamed of churches that fostered our better angels and promoted inclusion and tolerance. He dared dream of a world where difference might be embraced as a source of riches and where we no longer worship the golden calf of money and power.

Events on the jetway in Miami seem a universe away from King’s dream. Did it die with him? Against the odds, it seems that there are still people of conscience who have not succumbed to the drumroll of fear. Can they rise up to lead us, or in doing so do they risk the martyrdom of King and others who have challenged the forces of fear and division?

What about the appropriateness of fear? After all, the world can be a dangerous place, and fear may be seen as part of our adaptive hard-wiring, every bit as much as fear’s reciprocal emotions: compassion and trust.

In fact, fear may confer an advantage in the race for survival of the fittest. Had the Rev. King been more fearful and less compassionate, he might be among us still. And he might never have dared the Montgomery bus boycott or the March on Washington.

In choosing compassion over fear and hatred, King risked all. Do we and our leaders dare follow him?

In May 1775 the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, rowing across the Potomac, met George Washington rowing in the other direction on his way to the Continental Congress. The two conversed briefly on the fate of the colonies, and Boucher asked Washington if he supported independence. “Independence, sir?” Washington replied. “If you ever hear of my joining in any such measure you have my leave to set me down for everything wicked.” Even when he took command of the army in July, Washington later admitted, he “abhorred the idea of independence.” So what changed his mind? By his own admission, it was more than anything else the 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, written by a little-known Englishman named Thomas Paine and published January 10, 1776—230 years ago tomorrow.

Until that day most colonists, like Washington, hoped to regain the rights afforded to all other British subjects. But as Washington wrote, “the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning contained in the pamphlet Common Sense will not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the propriety of separation.” Paine convinced an America already at war with Britain that it was fighting not merely for lower tariffs or the right to elect representatives to Parliament but for its own inevitable independence.

Born into poverty in Thetford, England, in 1737, Paine failed at marriage and a string of jobs before he was 37. His lower-class status and debts shut him out of politics; this sharpened his sense of injustice and left him suspicious of government. He labored to educate himself, reading the leading political thinkers of the time. In London in the early fall of 1774 he met Benjamin Franklin, who persuaded him to emigrate to America. And so, Franklin’s letters in hand, Paine left to start over his life in the New World—little realizing he would help start over the New World’s life as well.

He caught typhus during the nine-week, 3,500-mile sea voyage and had to be carried ashore in Philadelphia, on November 30, 1774. During his month-long recuperation he began to seek out the city’s intelligentsia, aided by Franklin’s letters of introduction, and by January he had landed a job at Pennsylvania Magazine. Apart from the typhus, he flourished in his new home. No longer an outcast because of his income or his political views, he fit right in at the center of American political foment. While working at the magazine and attending meetings of many debating, literary, and scientific clubs, he began to develop new, radical opinions.

In America he saw a perfect reverse image of England. Where England was rotten and corrupt, America was pristine and egalitarian. His thinking expanded to fill the borders of his new country, and as he became convinced of the colonies’ virtue and destiny, the abstract theories of independence and representative government he had debated over pints crystallized into realities worth dying for.

But despite all the bloody events that had begun in April 1775, most colonists shied away from advocating complete separation from England. Shots had already been fired at Lexington and Concord, but the colonists continued to think of their fight as one for the rights accorded to all other Englishmen, not for independence. Some in the elite, alarmed at growing popular participation in politics, feared that a political revolution might lead to a social revolution as well, or perhaps even anarchy, opening the door for military dictatorship. Some could not break from the loyalty to the crown they had learned in the nursery—and furthermore enjoyed being protected by the king. Mightn’t throwing off British oversight make them vulnerable to invasion from a worse power, like the tyrannical Bourbons? Some simply feared charges of treason if they failed to defeat the most powerful military in the world. Independence, like sedition or unwed pregnancy, remained a topic discussed in hushed tones behind closed doors.

But after King George III issued a proclamation in August 1775 declaring that “the New England governments are in a state of rebellion, blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent,” some Philadelphians began to squirm behind their closed doors. As Paine and his friend the Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush discussed their mutual hope for independence, Rush confided that he wanted to write a treatise explaining why the colonies should rebel. However, Rush later remembered, “I shuddered at the prospect of the consequence of its not being well received. I suggested to [Paine] that he had nothing to fear from the popular odium to which such a publication might expose him, for he could live anywhere, but that my profession and connections, which tied me to Philadelphia, where a great majority of the citizens and some of my friends were hostile to a separation of our country from Great Britain, forbade me to come forward as a pioneer in that important controversy.” Paine responded to the idea “with avidity.” Rush’s most forceful counsel was that “there were two words which he should avoid by every means as necessary to his own safety and that of the public—independence and republicanism.”

So Paine immediately set to writing the tract he would end with the line “let none other be heard among us, than those of . . . the FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES OF AMERICA.” Writing was always torturous for him, and he toiled over the details now as much as ever. But by December he had a finished manuscript to show Franklin, Samuel Adams, and the prominent scientist David Rittenhouse, who each made a few, tiny edits (although one of Rush’s changes was destined for the history books: Paine had titled the manuscript Plain Truth, and Rush suggested Common Sense). Paine originally planned to serialize the work in a newspaper, but releasing it as a pamphlet would allow for larger distribution and protect its bolder sentiments from the blue pen of a nervous editor.

All that remained was to find a publisher brave enough to print it. Rush contacted the forward-thinking printer Robert Bell, who quickly agreed to do so for half the profits. Paine stipulated that his half should go to clothing the troops. So nine days into the momentous year of 1776, the two-shilling pamphlet “burst,” in Rush’s words, “from the press with an effect that has rarely been produced by type and paper in any age or country.”

The hundreds of thousands of members of the British empire who would read Common Sense in the coming months were in for a shock. Paine immediately tore into the monarchy, calling it not only rotten and despotic at bottom but also downright silly: “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of the hereditary right in kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” William the Conqueror, the founder of the English royal line, was “a French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives.”

Having argued that monarchy as a system was fundamentally tyrannical and led to constant bloodshed, he answered every common argument against American independence. To those who hesitated to break from the “mother country,” he wrote, “Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their own families.” To those who doubted that the colonies could best Britain at war, he wrote, “there is something very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” besides which, “’tis not in numbers but in unity that our great strength lies; yet our present numbers are sufficient to repel the force of all the world.” He pleaded with his readers to recognize their country’s destiny: “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

He then sketched in broad strokes a blueprint for an American utopia. He envisioned a strong but limited, unicameral, republican government. He counted this the most important section of Common Sense, although many modern historians deem it the weakest. He was at his best stirring up rebellious fervor, not spinning out the intricate compromises of constitution writing. He may have realized that. He left much of the government plan vague, recommending that a continental conference meet to hash over the details. Above all, he stressed the urgency that his readers act immediately.

The first edition sold out in two weeks, and at a time when the average pamphlet sold a few thousand copies, Common Sense sold 120,000 by April 1776. By then printers in nearly every colony were running their own editions; seven came out in Philadelphia alone. Colonists bought some 500,000 copies in all, in what Paine proudly called “the greatest sale that any performance has ever had since the use of letters.” By July everyone in America was familiar with the work’s content. One Connecticut clergyman even read the text verbatim from the pulpit on a Sunday in lieu of a sermon.

Many of those who read Common Sense never saw the world quite the same way again. As one Philadelphian wrote, “Common Sense . . . is read to all ranks, and as many as read, so many become converted, though perhaps the hour before were most violent against the idea of independence.” Paine’s words put the spark to the revolutionary fire latent in many colonists, defining as well as articulating their beliefs. As the idea of independence grew from heresy to political necessity, politicians sought to help their reputations by vociferously supporting the idea, and in the debates that followed, the shape of the future government began to evolve.

What made the little pamphlet so effective? It came exactly when the colonies were ready for it. Unlike previous pamphleteers who were excoriated for their support of independence, Paine was a few steps, not a few miles, ahead of popular opinion. In the words of a Philadelphia minister, Common Sense “struck a string which required but a touch to make it vibrate. The country was ripe for independence, and only needed somebody to tell the people so, with decision, boldness, and plausibility.”

Indeed, Paine’s direct, clear style was accessible but forceful. He, unlike his upper-class colleagues, came from the audience he was trying to reach, and he knew he must avoid the usual leaden prose and precious flourishes of political writing to appeal to that audience. His examples were taken directly from the common experience of a colonist, but the rage that underlay the work could belong only to someone who had experienced the injustices of British society firsthand. In short, he was the right man at the right time, in the right place, and with the right style to ignite a revolution.

Some, of course, disagreed with Paine’s ideas. He waged editorial-page battle with loyalists, while a mob of angry, independence-supporting New Yorkers burned 1,500 copies of an anti-Common Sense pamphlet. John Adams wrote heatedly and often against Paine’s unicameral government, arguing in favor of a system of checks and balances. But the majority of would-be Americans agreed with Paine, and that summer they took Common Sense’s advice to draft an independence “manifesto” listing “the miseries we have endured, and the peaceful methods which we have ineffectually used for redress,” and explaining that “not being able any longer to live happily or safely under the cruel disposition of the British court, we have been driven to the necessity of breaking off all connections with her.”

Paine’s reputation would suffer in the coming years, as his Deist work The Age of Reason, arguing against traditional Christianity, made him an outcast again on two continents. But today we rightly remember him as one of the fathers of the country. “It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward,” he once wrote. In his case, the reverse was equally true.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.

The provisional results of the December elections in Iraq are already in dispute, but that doesn’t stop Washington from pointing to the vote as a success in its quest to create a peaceful, stable and free Middle East.

But the mere fact of an election cannot change a fundamental truth about Iraq: Saddam Hussein governed as a brutal dictator not simply because he was cruel but also because of the treacherous political landscape that destabilized his relationship with his own military. Hussein was highly vulnerable to a military coup, and future Iraqi leaders will be just as susceptible. Regardless of the election’s outcome, a coup will probably follow a U.S. pullout, and Iraq will again be ruled by a dictator.

With University of Minnesota sociologist Evan Schofer, I developed a quantifiable way to assess a nation’s risk of a coup. Our measure is a bit like a blood pressure test in that high scores equal high risk — but it measures the risk of coups, not strokes.

The test cannot predict with certainty when or if any particular regime will experience a coup. But it has proved to be a powerful tool for establishing which regimes are vulnerable. Governments with the worst scores on the test are about 30 times more likely to be overthrown in a coup than those with the best scores. When we computed our results before the U.S. invasion, Iraq already had a bad score. Today, following years of violence, it is surely worse.

The test looks at three factors. First, the strength of a nation’s civil society, which is based on the number and robustness of civic organizations such as political parties, unions, social clubs and the like. Such groups, it turns out, have the capacity to disobey coup plotters’ orders. In Bolivia in 1979, for example, a labor union organized protest strikes that sent a rebellious army garrison back to its barracks after an attempted coup. By contrast, when civil society is weak, there is often little to stand in the way of a coup.

Second, a nation’s history of past coups. A recent coup increases the score; past coups are a good predictor of future coups, because the violent overthrow of a government undermines institutions, such as courts and legislatures, that check instability.

Legitimacy, the third dimension of our coup-risk test, refers to whether citizens accede to the state’s right to make society’s rules. When a political system enjoys legitimacy, the armed forces are unlikely to try to take control.

Before the U.S. invaded, Iraq performed well — that is, it showed a low risk for military takeover — in only one area: it hadn’t had a coup in more than 30 years. But that very fact meant that Iraq scored dismally on the other two factors. That’s because to prevent coups, Hussein ruthlessly cut off challenges to his power, executing or jailing high-ranking generals, for example. Such actions don’t nurture a civil society or create political legitimacy.

Hussein also imprisoned, tortured and executed would-be organizers of civil society: intellectuals, artists, clerics and politicians who demonstrated an independent streak. He may or may not have understood that civic groups act as a guard against coups, but he clearly realized that they also can be the source of popular revolutions. Had Hussein allowed Iraqi civil society to prosper, he might have ended up overthrown, like the shah next door in Iran.

Hussein did try to boost the legitimacy of his government. He appealed to Iraqi nationalism, sided with the Palestinians, condemned imperialism and picked fights with regional adversaries. But such tactics were never very effective given the illegitimate means — coups and conspiracies — by which he and his cronies had assumed power in the first place, and given the brutality with which he crushed civil society.

If all this sounds like a vicious cycle, it is. Yet some societies do manage to escape from authoritarianism, minimize coup risk and consolidate stable, democratic institutions. The U.S. cultivated democracy in Japan and West Germany after World War II, and in South Korea after the Korean War. The Bush administration has invested considerable effort into creating the conditions for democracy to emerge in Iraq. So why isn’t that tipping the balance?

As Niall Ferguson notes in his book “Colossus,” the formal American occupations of Japan and West Germany lasted seven and 10 years, respectively, and it took nearly 40 years of American military presence in South Korea to nurture a genuine stable democracy there. The commitment of treasure and troops was massive.

And critically, in each of those cases, democratization achieved traction only after the cessation of violence, of which there is no end in sight in Iraq. Under warlike conditions, the country’s social infrastructure can’t develop — insurgency and counterinsurgency aren’t the building blocks of civil society.

And what about the elections? It’s important to remember that about half of all coups are launched against democratic regimes. That means the December elections, however they turn out, will neither magically create a sense of legitimacy nor protect the Iraqi government from its own armed forces. Coup risk is a deep, underlying feature of Iraqi society at this time in history, and it will not disappear anytime soon.

Before the war, when foreign policy experts warned Bush that Iraq was ungovernable, they did not literally mean that the country could not be governed. Rather, they meant that ruling Iraq for any length of time, with any level of stability, requires an iron fist.

The experts were right. Washington still confronts the same dilemma that it has faced all along. It can install a dictator to rule Iraq after U.S. troops leave, or it can leave behind a situation — perhaps even a nascent democracy — that will ultimately yield chaos, coups and then a dictator.

It is true that whoever finally emerges as the last leader standing in Baghdad will not be named Saddam Hussein. However, only a cynic — or a con artist — would depict Iraq’s likely authoritarian future as a victory.

Aaron Belkin is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author, with Evan Schofer, of “Toward a Structural Understanding of Coup Risk,” published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 2003.

Three sewing machines in a dingy apartment were all Munna Abdul Adeem Ahmed could scrape together when she set up a tailoring co-op for poor widows. She soon realised it was not enough.

More than 1,000 women from the northern city of Mosul turned up looking for work on the first day. Ahmed finally stopped registering new names after the 1,200th widow signed up.

The women were mostly young, poor and desperate for work. Many lost their spouses during the wars, uprisings and civil conflict that have bedevilled Iraq over the past 25 years.

Now, a raging insurgency is adding to their numbers.

Behind the daily bloodshed and attacks that make headlines across the world, there is a growing population of widows.

Traditionally, Iraqi widows have been supported by their late husband’s family or other relatives, but in a country brought to its knees by violence and war, there is now little to spare for the most vulnerable members of society.

“We don’t have enough money to clothe our children,” said Nawal Ayob, who lost her husband during the bombings in the first Gulf War in 1991 and has since joined Ahmed’s co-op. “We have no salaries, no support. How can we survive?”

There are few reliable statistics on the number of widows, but the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has recorded at least 206,000 in Iraq, outside of Kurdish provinces. There are just over half as many widowed men.

Women’s groups, however, say anecdotal evidence suggests the number of widows is far higher, with some estimates putting the number in Baghdad alone at 250,000 out of a population of about 7 million.

“In every house in Iraq, you will find at least one widow,” said Azhaar al-Hakim, member of the Women’s Alliance for a Democratic Iraq, an activist group. “In some houses, there may be two or three.”

JUST A JOB

For many widows, life is blighted by grinding poverty. Finding a job in post-war Iraq is hard enough for the average male — securing one as a widow in an increasingly Islamic society is almost always an uphill climb.

The insurgency and almost daily bombings in and around Baghdad have hindered economic rebuilding since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Some widows take up menial jobs they once would not have even considered, Hakim said, recalling one widow she met in the holy city of Kerbala who worked as a maid despite holding a college degree. Others have been forced to sell off possessions or live off handouts from relatives, say womens’ groups.

“The main problem widows face is poverty,” said Buthaina al-Suheil, head of the Iraqi Family Organisation which helps support 200 widows in Baghdad. “We have women whose children left school to earn a living to support their mother.”

When Suad Hussein Musshada’s only source of income dried up with the death of her husband, she moved out of her house to live with her father and sent her son to an uncle.

Six years later, the 40-year-old widow, who also signed up for Ahmed’s co-op, is still looking for employment.

“I’m suffering,” she said. “I just want to find a job.”

‘BE SELF-SUFFICIENT’

Widows and aid groups say their plight is made worse by the government’s indifference.

During Saddam Hussein’s rule, widows of men killed in battle — particularly during the 8-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s — were often compensated by the government, sometimes given land and free education for their children.

But this compensation began to dry up after foreign sanctions in the 1990s left Iraq financially strapped.

Now, rampant corruption and Iraq’s general chaos have pushed widows’ concerns to the back burner, women’s groups say.

Ahmed, the co-op organiser, said she and others had travelled to the Mosul governor’s office seeking money for cloth and a building to replace the tiny apartment her seamstresses toil in. But their requests were not granted.

Ahmed, whose husband was disabled during Iraq’s conflict with Kurdish rebels in the 1970s, also complained about the lack of governmental support at a meeting of local women ahead of December elections.

The influential head of the local women’s centre sympathised but could only offer some blunt advice: “You just have to learn to become self-sufficient.”

(Additional reporting by Hiba Moussa in Baghdad)