Turks Challenge Hughes On Iraq

WaPo reported A group of Turkish women's rights activists confronted Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes on Wednesday with emotional and heated complaints about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, turning a session designed to highlight the empowering of women into a raw display of the anger at U.S. policy in the region....

The complaints were coming from women, and it is good that women in Turkey have the freedom to speak their own minds. That is not true of most of the Islamic world.

In this case, the U.S. Embassy asked an umbrella group known as Ka-Der, which supports women running for office, to assemble the guest list. None of the activists currently receives U.S. funds or had any apparent desire to mince words. Six of the eight women who spoke at the session, held in Ankara, Turkey's capital, focused on the Iraq war....

None of the activists currently receives U.S. funds. Could this be what they were upset about?

"You're concerned about war, and no one likes war," Hughes said. But "to preserve the peace, sometimes my country believes war is necessary," she said. She also asserted that women are faring much better in Iraq than they had under the rule of deposed president Saddam Hussein.

"War is not necessary for peace," shot back Feray Salman, a human rights activist. She said countries should not try to impose democracy through war, adding that "we can never, ever export democracy and freedom from one country to another."

Does she think women were better off under Saddam, where they were tortured, raped and killed.

Tuksal said she was "feeling myself wounded, feeling myself insulted here" by Hughes's response. "In every photograph that comes from Iraq, there is that look of fear in the eyes of women and children. . . . This needs to be resolved as soon as possible."

I have seen no look of fear in the eyes of women and children interacting with American soldiers. I just saw a look of thanks. But they are fearful from being killed by the Islamic terrorists and the insurgents, both Muslim.