IRAQ TEN YEARS LATER
With few exceptions, the rush of reflections on the decennial marker of the US-led invasion of Iraq ignored the fact that the war happened mostly for Iraqis. Already devastated by 20 years of war, sanctions and dictatorship, Iraq suffered another decade of foreign occupation, civil strife and mass displacement. The spring 2013 issue of Middle East Report takes a hard look at “Iraq Ten Years Later,” including the question of why the Bush administration launched the war in the first place.
Joost Hiltermann surveys the political scene in the country under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. There are visible traces of the eight-year US occupation in the hand gestures of soldiers at checkpoints and new US-supplied weaponry. But the democracy that the US said it would leave behind is not so apparent. As Nada Shabout writes of the celebrations of Baghdad as Arab Cultural Capital for 2013, the Maliki government is deploying state patronage of the arts in a manner reminiscent of its predecessors.
The 2003 invasion, in many ways, had a multiplier effect on the damage done by the preceding 13 years of comprehensive UN sanctions. In his examination of Iraq’s economy, for instance, Bassam Yousif finds that lack of capacity -- brain drain and dilapidated infrastructure -- goes a long way toward explaining the sluggish pace of recovery. Nida Alahmad shows how sanctions-era deterioration, post-2003 violence and US mismanagement combined to keep round-the-clock electricity a distant dream.
For the Iraqi people, too, the ravages of the war compounded the hardships of sanctions and authoritarian rule. Some 3 million Iraqis remain refugees outside their country or internally displaced, in addition to those who had to flee earlier crises. Isis Nusair chronicles the gendered challenges facing Iraqi women refugees in Jordan. War and displacement have also exacerbated the problems for women working at Iraqi universities, as Nadje Al-Ali documents.
Also featured: Dan Connell files an update on the travails of Eritrean refugees; Zuzanna Olszewska explores the “global Hazara awakening” spurred by sectarian attacks in Pakistan; Roger Owen reviews Joseph Sassoon’s Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party; and more.
Subscribe to Middle East Report or order individual copies here.
For further information, contact Chris Toensing at ctoensing@merip.org.
Middle East Report is published by the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), a progressive, independent organization based in Washington, DC. Since 1971 MERIP has provided critical analysis of the Middle East, focusing on political economy, popular struggles, and the implications of US and international policy for the region.