THE GAP could not be greater between the war on the Islamic State as it is narrated, on one side, and how it is experienced by ordinary people trapped in the crossfire, on the other. In Iraq, the story pushed by the various anti-Daesh protagonists is a consensual and simple one: as progress is made…
Category: Iraq
Obama’s Iraq policy: That curious feeling of deja-vu
ONE OF THE GREATEST IRONIES of Barack Obama’s presidency is the extent to which he is repeating, rather than correcting, his predecessor’s mistakes in Iraq. Obama originally defined himself as the anti-Bush, chastising reckless foreign policy, vowing to bring the US’ military adventures overseas to a close. In general, he framed his international posture as…
Why Iraqis fear victory
IRAQ’S NATIONAL GRID is a metaphor for the country’s problems. Access to electricity, the starting point for all modern human activity, is the last problem you would expect in a country with plentiful hydrocarbon reserves, big rivers and as much sunshine as the Garden of Eden. (1) But the electricity supply illustrates the failings and…
Basra, dystopian city
BASRA, THE SECOND or third largest city in Iraq, should be a great metropolis, more dynamic than Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha or Kuwait City, and should dominate the Gulf. Its port, Umm Qasr, offers the rest of the world access to one of the biggest oil-producing countries, which is also a huge potential consumer market….
Erosion and resilience of the Iraqi-Syrian border
THE ONGOING WARS in Syria and Iraq have triggered a spate of commentary and counter-commentary debating “the end of Sykes-Picot,” shorthand for the collapse of the century-old state system imposed on the Middle East by European powers after World War I. (1) One class of commentators has warned of the erasure of the post-Ottoman order—in…
Taking Iraq apart
THE RECENT SURGE in power of a Sunni jihadist force in northwest Iraq has been spectacular. But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s protestations of shock and horror are both theatrical and disingenuous, for it was his own actions that paved the way for this surge. His friends, especially those in Iran, know this but are playing…
The new normal in Baghdad
AFTER VIOLENCE THAT SHATTERED hundreds of thousands of lives and left nearly everyone with a tragic story to tell, life in Iraq has settled into a strange normality — with no discernible direction or clear future. “How do you make sense of the last ten years?” said a novelist, who is trying to do just that….
Beyond political ruptures: Towards a historiography of social continuity in Iraq
ATTEMPTING TO UNDERSTAND present-day Iraqi tribal, religious, class, political, generational, geographical, and social fault lines makes little sense without taking the longer view. In the wake of the 2003 invasion and subsequent ill-conceived U.S. occupation policies, the collapse of the Iraqi state created a sociopolitical discontinuity — indeed an aberration — leaving a vacuum that…
A State of violence: A sociological reading of the battle for Baghdad
THE EXTREME LEVELS OF VIOLENCE that befell the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in 2006 and 2007 both exposed the city’s sociopolitical makeup and caused its deep transformation, a sea change that will have lasting consequences for the country. The dynamics of the conflict in Baghdad contain many clues for an accurate understanding of Iraq’s polity and…
The Sadrist trend: class struggle, millenarianism and fitna
LITTLE WAS KNOWN about the phenomenon which we now call “sadrism”, and which originated in the movement created by Ayatollah Muhammad al-Sadr[1] during the 1990s, until the emergence on the Iraqi political stage of the Ayatollah’s son Muqtadâ al-Sadr, shortly after the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The extreme polysemy of the phenomenon,…
Iraq’s diverse Shia
EVERY DAY IN IRAQ brings more sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia factions. Such attacks have become routine events, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds. They are now much more frequent than operations targeting the occupation forces. In Baghdad the river Tigris forms a dividing line between the largely Shia left bank, al-Rusafa, and the mainly Sunni right bank,…
The Falluja syndrome: Taking the fight to the enemy that wasn’t
THE IRAQI TOWN OF FALLUJA offers an excellent case study of how the US military in Iraq, by responding to threats in oblivion to a specific cultural and political context, exacerbated those very threats and thus created a much harder task for itself. Much has been said about the US military’s distaste for stabilization and…
Peter Harling archive 