Unfortunately, anyone who thinks we entered the middle east in pursuit of sexual equality for women is sorely mistaken. This sort of sexist attitude is explicitly endorsed in the Koran, and the only way to rid the middle east of this sort of sexism would be to remove belief in the Koran; and we should be hypocritical to claim that they must give up their supposedly holy book without first giving up our own. For those who haven't been paying attention, the strongest most well written critiques of Islam have come not from the holy, but from the "new atheists," Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. Those who would defend Islam tend to be of the faithful, because they know that the same critiques that would undermine Islam would undermine their own beliefs as well.
And let me reemphasize one last time, that until you get rid of faith in the Koran, you can not get rid of this sort of thing, as well as honor killings (where raped women are killed by their own family members [generally with a large knife or sword] to allieviate the shame of having had a female relative who had sex outside of marriage), the burka, the many forms of genital mutilation that are persistant in the region (primarily the sewing up of the vagina at birth, leaving only a small hole for the excretion of urine and blood [often resulting in life long pain, infection, etc...], so that the woman's future husband can know for sure on their marriage night that she is still a virgin as he breaks the sewn together vagina with his own penis in the act of taking away her virginity).