It takes all 31 days of March to celebrate national women’s history here in the United States. The rest of the world, however, tends to wrap up their annual, female-centered festivities in one day—International Women’s Day on March 8.

This leaves us in America with more, as usual, than the roughly 6.3 billion other people on the planet. We have 30 more days to contemplate past and present stations of women and to consider what the future will hold.

In the spirit of the philanthropic nature for which our country is known, I suggest taking some of the days we reserve for women of this nation and devoting them to women of other nations.

We might start by thinking back to March 8 and considering what it meant to observe International Women’s Day in Iraq.

To be female in Iraq today is to be a target for violence. Abduction, rape, maiming and murder are a continuous threat. Honor killings, perpetrated against women for offenses such as failure to wear a hejab or attending university or maintaining a professional career, are on the rise.

Even more vulnerable are the increasing numbers of women and children refugees driven out of their communities by militias who systematically murder civilians.

Details of the issues above come from reporting by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq. Released on Saturday, the 12th human rights report since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 called the situation for Iraqi women “urgent.”

But many in the Western world will not see it that way. The news will be greeted with a solemn shrug because repression is simply part of being born female in the Middle East. It has always been this way and the tendency toward religious extremism and civil dispute in the region renders the problem hopelessly intractable.

While this rationale makes it easier to disassociate ourselves from the suffering of these women, it is based on complete falsehood. It has not always been this way, and the actions of the U.S. government have helped create the current crisis.

Forty years ago, women’s rights in Iraq began experiencing an upswing. Under Ba’athist rule, equality for women was written into constitutional law. Women had property and voting rights. Elementary education was mandatory and higher education was openly encouraged.

Even under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, certain freedoms for women in Iraq were essential. Manpower necessary to wage war and terrorize neighboring countries allowed women to take the place of men and keep business and industry functioning.

The urgent situation that Iraqi women now face developed under the watch of American occupation of Iraq. This is what has become of the promises of freedom, democracy and improved safety made by the Bush administration.

But not even the realization of culpability will result in an outcry from Americans, and I believe this is because we accept repression and marginalization of women abroad just as we do at home.

The punitive U.S. justice system targets female sex workers much more frequently than the elusive and insulated individuals who buy and sell them. Reproductive rights are constantly in peril—usually in the name of religious imperative. And we are still nowhere close to proportional representation of women in government.

But rationalizing our ability to remain silent does not erase our complicity. So I would reframe the issue in terms that might be clearer.

The U.S. government turning its back on repression of women in Iraq would be akin to the United States helping to reinstate apartheid-based government in Africa.

There is little doubt that no matter the administration that takes office next, the United States will need to withdraw from Iraq in earnest. The other inevitability is that dissenting voices of women in Iraq will grow dimmer to us.

National Women’s History Month is not over. We can still spend some of our days pressuring our leaders to be answerable to the Iraqi women whose fortunes they have played a part in reversing.

We still have time to commit ourselves to never removing the spotlight from the faces of these women, no matter how heavy a veil their countrymen place them behind.