Ep15 - Outcome of the Iraq War: Child Marriages, a Global Plague
In this episode, we'll talk about child marriages, a tragic phenomenon that unfortunately still involves some 600 million minors worldwide. We’ll begin by examining the situation in one specific country: Iraq.
Why Iraq? Because it’s a peculiar case that strongly highlights the link between two seemingly distinct phenomena: poverty and child marriage. Our thesis is clear: wars cause destruction, which leads to economic crises and poverty—two factors that form the foundation of the child marriage phenomenon.
For over a decade, the world debated the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraqi territory. We conducted inspections and searched for chemical labs and secret nuclear military bases. However, WMDs were never found by international observers. Yet, the presence of these phantom weapons was the pretext for unleashing the Second Gulf War. On March 20, 2003, Iraq was invaded by a multinational coalition led by the United States of America. The war finally ended on December 18, 2011, with the definitive transfer of all powers to Iraqi authorities installed by the United States military under a US governmental mandate.
The invasion's main goal was the deposition of Saddam Hussein, who had long been viewed with hostility by the United States for various reasons: fears (later proven unfounded) about his hypothetical attempt to acquire WMDs, his alleged support for Islamist terrorism, his desire to appropriate Kuwait's oil wealth, and the oppression of Iraqi citizens by a bloody dictatorship.
The first lie was about WMDs. The second lie was that the invasion would bring stable democracy. It is important to note this point because the so-called "exportation of democracy" represents one of the cornerstones of American foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet bloc. Many wars have been started by the US using this pretext. As we said in a previous episode, Barack Obama himself spoke of the US's autocracy during an interview.
Not only did the war fail to produce democracy, but it instead caused instability and created a humanitarian tragedy. A tragedy that can be measured in these terms: a girl married before her eighteenth birthday. Let's consider the Personal Status Law of 1959. That law, in effect even during Saddam’s regime, was a progressive benchmark. It had fixed the minimum age for marriage at 18 for women, allowing exceptions only down to 15, decided by a secular judge. This law was a secular barrier protecting children, but the war destroyed the rule of law. When the United States destroyed the state apparatus, that barrier became vulnerable.
Under Saddam Hussein, the law established the minimum age at 18, while today this safeguard is collapsing, opening the door for some religious authorities to push the minimum age down to nine years old. This is not just tradition; it is the concrete result of the 2003 invasion. We did not liberate Iraq. We accelerated a global plague. The current attempt to legalize marriage for girls as young as nine is not an Iraqi tradition resurfacing; it is a direct consequence of the political chaos that we created.
What happened in Iraq is proof—a case study—demonstrating that what wars truly bring is total destruction, both of physical and moral goods. Not only do they not bring democracy, but on the contrary, they bring instability and facilitate the establishment of dictatorial and repressive regimes. We can go further and state with certainty that the foreign policy of some countries has the explicit goal of establishing or facilitating dictatorial regimes for their own interests. For example, to install a puppet government, not democratically elected, that is compliant with the interests of a foreign country, perhaps by authorizing oil drilling...