I don't neccessarily see this (women's rights are not guaranteed in the New Iraq) as a bad thing, certainly not as a failure. The lack of women's rights in Iraq was not something instituted by Saddam Hussein. A woman's position in Muslim society is deeply ingrained in their culture. This isn't going to change overnight. This is also different from what we saw in Afghanistan were the women were suddenly "liberated" when the Taliban fell. The extreme suppression of women under the rule of the Taliban was not somehting that existed for hundreds of years. The Taliban were only in power from 1996 until 2001 and when they fell womens rights simply returned to what they were in pre-Taliban days. Much like what they will probably be in Iraq as well as every other Muslim country.

I wonder what do the Iraqi women really want. I'm sure they want the right not to be picked up off the street by an evil dictator's son and raped repeatedly. But do they really want the right to wear daisy dukes and a halter top? Not likely. Americans tend to be extremely ethnocentric, thinking that everyone else in the world wants the exact thing we do. This isn't always the case. We can't think that just because Iraq doesn't turn into a carbon copy of America that their "democracy" is a failure.