Taken from “Josh Reads”, who adds the essential commentary:

Actually, from everything I’ve heard, the replacement of a brutal but essentially secular dictatorship with an elected coalition of religious-based political parties has resulted in Western dress becoming less common, not more, in Iraq.

But I scratch my head and wonder “What world is the cartoonist behind Crankshaft living in”?  I suppose somewhere on the same neighborhood as The Family Circus.

Somewhere in the mind of this cartoonist is a view of the world’s path to freedom along the lines of The Soviet Union’s collapse and market forces bringing Blue Jeans, Pepsi Cola, and The Beatles into a thirsting public tired of taking whatever the Central Government handed out.

Our popular imagination of freedom in Afghanistan sort of trickles back and forth between allowances of Afghan custom and visions of burka-less mini-skirt regalia.  (Note: I linked to the first site google shows when doing a quick search for how we’re assimilating our visions of Afghanistan.)  Iraq is not Afghanistan — only in the 1990s under sanctions did it devolve into a third world economy, but the essential point of equating whatever the heck we’re wearing as the end all and representation of “Freedom” ™ holds forth nonetheless.

Oh well.  It is not as though anybody reads this comic strip.  I mean, really.  Crankshaft?

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