Archive for the 'Middle east' Category

The Iraq war, five years on

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on March 20, 2008
in In the news, Inside Prospect and Middle east
. 0 Comments

To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the April issue of Prospect, out next week, features an in-depth look at the issue of WMDs, whose shadowy existence played such a large role in the build-up to war. Our own Tom Chatfield meets the die-hards who continue to insist that there is evidence that at the time of invasion, Saddam had a significant stockpile of WMD which was surreptitiously removed to Syria when the US-led coalition attacked.

In the meantime, why not revisit some of Prospect’s coverage of Iraq over the past five years? An exhaustive list of our Iraq articles can be found here. Pieces of particular interest—not all of which are available to non-subscribers—include:

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt—of Israel lobby fame—argue against war in March 2003 on the grounds that Saddam was “eminently deterrable.”

Alex Renton, in June 2003, looking ahead to the long-term social breakdown that he predicted many parts of the country would face as a result of the invasion and occupation.

Hassan M Fattah on the difficulties of setting up an independent newspaper in post-Saddam Iraq.

Jo Tatchell on Saddam the romantic novelist and the unjustly neglected topic of “dic[tator]-lit”.

Our foreign editor Bartle Bull’s dispatches from Iraq. In October 2003, he prophesised the coming of Shia Iraq. In June 2005, after several weeks embedded with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, he explained why this ragtag group of Shia militants were essential to the democratic future of Iraq. And last October, he argued that despite the continuing bloodshed in Iraq, the coalition’s pre-war aims had largely been accomplished and that Iraq was well on the way to becoming a stable middle eastern democracy.

Rory Stewart spent ten months in 2004 as deputy governor of two provinces in southern Iraq. In November 2005 he explained how his vision of a tolerant, modern society disintegrated amid increasing violence and pressure from Shia militants.

Gareth Stansfield, in May 2006, said that the only way to resolve the chaos into which Iraq had descended was to introduce radical three-way federalism.

Kim Sengupta, in September 2007, related the tragic tale of one middle-class Baghdad family caught up in Iraq’s descent into violent anomie.

Nibras Kazimi wrote a monthly Iraq column for Prospect throughout 2007. You can find them all here.

Disabled people—a new weapon of war?

Published
by
Katharine Quarmby
on March 6, 2008
in In the news and Middle east
. 2 Comments

On 1st February this year, two “suicide” bombers exploded material in two outdoor pet markets in Baghdad, Iraq, killing nearly 100 people.

A senior Iraqi military official claimed shortly afterwards that the two women had Down’s Syndrome and that their vests were detonated by remote control. Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of US forces in Baghdad, showed photographs of the alleged bombers to a small number of journalists and commented: “These two women were likely used because they didn’t understand what was happening and were less likely to be searched”. One journalist who was at the press conference, Larry Kaplow, of Newsweek, described the photographs thus: “They looked like they could have been sisters—young women, with the same brown tint to their straight hair, round, smooth cheeks. Both were decapitated just under the chin, but their faces were eerily intact, almost serene… And, according to Iraqi officials, both women had Down’s Syndrome. The theory is that they were tricked into carrying the explosives.” Condoleeza Rice, US secretary of state commented that such a use of disabled people demonstrated the “absolute bankruptcy and brutality of the enemy of the people of Iraq.”

But some sources are now concerned about the story. Indeed, Larry Kaplow, when I contacted him to ask whether he was sure that the alleged bombers were disabled, said: “Some characteristics were there but not conclusive proof.” And a spokeswoman for the Multi-national Forces press desk in Baghdad said only, when questioned further, that “initial medical reports indicate that the women appeared to be disabled.” Bob Lamburne, director for forensic services in Baghdad for the British Embassy, goes further. He says that suggesting that the two bombers had Down’s Syndrome from photographs was “dangerous” and that the “diagnosis would have to be more scientific than that.” Another journalist, Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, says that there are plenty of reasons to doubt the assertion and has noted that “Iraqi officials have made similar claims in the past.”

Continue reading ‘Disabled people—a new weapon of war?’

Hopeless in Gaza

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on March 5, 2008
in In the news and Middle east
. 8 Comments

Between 1996 and 2001, Prospect columnist Alex Renton reported on Israel and the Palestinian territories for the London Evening Standard. This February, he returned to Gaza for the first time to find a region that has in many ways moved backwards rather than forwards—the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation still more distant, and the political rhetoric on both sides more uncompromising than ever.

In a web-exclusive article for Prospect this week, Renton recounts his visit, which coincided with a bloody Israeli retaliation for the ongoing launching of Qassam rockets from Gaza City and a controversial announcement from Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai. The only glimmer of hope lies, he suggests, in the apparent gulf between public opinion (which favours talks with Hamas) and political orthodoxy (which favours “a dialogue of fire”). But the way ahead for Gaza, 80 per cent of whose citizens now depend on UN food aid for survival, is a dangerous and deeply uncertain one.

Let us know your own thoughts and views here.

Gaza image

Image, above: an elderly couple who have been waiting half an hour for the first of the gates in the Israel-controlled Erez crossing point to open

The colours of jihad

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on January 10, 2008
in Arts and culture, Middle east and Religion
. 1 Comment

images1.jpgThe Frontline Club in London serves as a place of repose for swashbuckling foreign correspondents as well as a venue for internationally themed film screenings and talks. The building is lovely, it has a pleasant restaurant attached, and its programme of events is consistently impressive.

But the cover story of the club’s January newsletter reads like something straight out of the Onion. Headlined “Drawing the Jihad,” the piece, by Canadian journalist Nancy Durham, describes the latest weapon deployed by Saudi Arabian authorities in the war against Islamic terrorism: art therapy. Durham got a sneak peek inside a secure art therapy centre, just north of Riyadh, in which convicted terrorists are “groomed for a return to society” by art therapist Awad Alyami.

Durham describes how one of the detainees, Mohammed, showed her his work: “an abstract paper canvas smeared with intense red and purple tones.” Clearly pleased with this expressionist masterpiece, Mohammed “smiled,” and explained that it represented his “negative energy.” But, warns Durham, not all the artwork is this easy to understand. She describes watching two detainees draw “lines, curves and dots in shades of pink and blue,” but doesn’t venture an interpretation. Perhaps the prohibition on visual depiction found in more fundamentalist interpretations of Sunni Islam inhibits the jihadis from giving their negative energies a more concrete visual expression.

Nancy Durham will apparently be speaking at the Frontline club in early February.

Mission accomplished?

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on September 26, 2007
in Inside Prospect and Middle east
. 99 Comments

essay_bull.jpgFor the last three years, Bartle Bull has contributed to Prospect a series of dispatches from Iraq that have taken a noticeably more optimistic view of the post-conflict society than most coverage in the western press. His first Prospect piece, in the November 2004 issue, looked forward to the democratic transfer of power to Iraq’s Shia majority. In mid-2005, after spending five weeks in Baghdad embedded with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, Bull described the increasing politicisation of a rebel group that less than a year earlier had been battling US troops in Najaf.

Now Bull has written what is likely to be his most controversial piece yet. In the current issue of Prospect, he argues that contrary to the bleak picture of Iraq painted almost universally, at least in the west, most of the big questions in Iraq have largely been settled, and mostly for the good. The country has not fallen apart. It has embraced the ballot box, in huge numbers. It has created a legitimate and fair constitution. It has avoided civil war. Power has been democratically transferred to the Shia majority, while minority rights have been safeguarded. The country has ceased to be a menace in the region. It has even emerged from the trauma of war, occupation and widespread bloodshed with a sense of national unity, as was clearly shown by the national celebrations following the country’s football victory in the Asian Cup in July.

This is an unsettling argument. Iraq is clearly not a country at ease with itself—while sectarian violence may have dipped slightly since the beginning of General Petraeus’s military “surge” earlier this year, Iraqis are still dying violently at the staggering rate of 1,500 a month. But Bull’s argument is that this violence, while horrific, is no longer of strategic importance. Of the Sunni insurgent groups, the former Baathists are finally coming around to Shia majority rule and seeking a place for themselves in the political tent; the tribal groups in western Iraq have accepted the new dispensation and are doing their best to milk it for all its worth; and the violent Wahhabi fundamentalists, most of them foreign, are losing the battle to take Iraq back to the 7th century. As for the Shia anti-occupation violence, since al-Sadr’s uprisings in 2004, it has been non-existent. Scattered death squads and offshoots of the Mahdi army continue to shed blood, but al-Sadr is now more interested in politics than fighting.

Taken on its own, “realist” terms, Bull’s argument can be seductive. But, as David Goodhart points out in his editorial, it is hard to skate over the continuing violence, as well as the steady stream of refugees fleeing the country. Many people will be shocked by the article—indeed, it was the source of many arguments in the Prospect office. Let us know your thoughts below.

Can Iraq stay together?

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on September 14, 2007
in Middle east
. 0 Comments

To the Frontline Club in west London last night for a public discussion on the Iraq “surge.” Iraq’s man in London, the very personable Salah al-Shaikhly, and Ahmed Rikaby, founder of a Baghdad radio station, both claimed that the increase in US troops had significantly improved the security situation on the ground in Iraq, and al-Shaikhly in particular was, unsurprisingly, bullish about Iraq’s future stability. In the pessimistic corner was the disembodied voice—he was speaking over a telephone link—of former US diplomat Peter Galbraith, who made the case he argued in his 2006 book The End of Iraq that the country has no viable future as a single state, and should be split along Shia/Sunni/Kurdish lines (Gareth Stansfield argued similarly in the May 2006 issue of Prospect).

To a witness of the sectarian carnage in Iraq, Galbraith’s pessimism can be alluring. Although sectarian violence has fallen since the surge, monthly casualty figures are still well into four figures. An overwhelming majority of the Kurds in northern Iraq favour independence, while elsewhere in the country, signs of reconciliation between Iraq’s Shia and Sunni communities are scant, both at street level and among the politicians. Yet amid such gloom, it is easy to forget that Iraqi national feeling is not just a figment of the west’s imagination. Asked in March what constitutional structure they favoured, almost 60 per cent of Iraqis wanted a unified country, with just 15 per cent supporting separate independent states. Salah al-Shaikhly reminded last night’s sceptical audience that Shia Iraqis made up 65 per cent of Saddam’s supposedly pro-Sunni Baath party, and that half of all marriages in Iraq cross the sectarian divide. And in his article in this week’s New Yorker, George Packer states that a poll found that the percentage of Baghdad residents who identified themselves as Iraqis “above all” doubled between 2004 and 2006, despite the rise in sectarian violence. More difficult to quantify, but still telling, is the claim, made both by Rikaby last night and Nibras Kazimi in his most recent Prospect column, that the national celebrations that followed Iraq’s recent football victory in the Asian Cup ran far deeper than the brief coverage in the western media would have us believe. (Rikaby said that parts of Iraqi Kurdistan, where Iraqi flags are usually as hard to find as Iraqi WMD, were immediately decked out in the things after the victory).

Without any apparent appetite for partition, or even “radical federalism,” among either US or Iraqi leaders, it’s difficult to see any future for Iraq that involves the country breaking up—although as Packer’s article makes clear, it is very difficult to predict what effect the inevitable withdrawal of American troops will have on the country.

You can see a video recording of last night’s Frontline discussion here.

Leaving Baghdad

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on August 29, 2007
in Inside Prospect and Middle east
. 5 Comments

Yesterday in Karbala, the young Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr let it be known that he would be “freezing” all activities of his Mahdi Army militia for six months. It remains to be seen whether the move will have any impact on the sectarian carnage in Iraq; some analysts simply believe that this is an attempt by al-Sadr to reassert his control over the group, which has become increasingly fractious and divided over recent months.

The Mahdi Army is merely the best known of the many militias and criminal gangs roaming Iraq, making violence an everyday reality for millions of Iraqis. The stories of the individuals and families caught up in such violence are usually lost in the horrific statistics that spew forth from the country almost every day. This is why we chose to publish this article by the Independent’s Kim Sengupta in the new issue of Prospect. Sengupta tells the story of the al-Hayalis, a middle-class family who were preparing to flee Iraq for Dubai when tragedy struck. Let us know your thoughts below.

The politics of self-contradiction

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on August 17, 2007
in Foreign affairs, Media and Middle east
. 1 Comment

I have a weakness for weak witticisms, and self-cancelling statements are a particular favourite. You can make them up pretty easily, but they never fail to make the corners of my mouth twitch. Here’s a brief selection:

All generalisation is suspect.

Hyperbole is the worst thing in the world!

Nobody has the right to criticize freedom of speech.

Sexism is just something a bunch of silly women made up.

The whole world wants to discredit my conspiracy theories.

Some may find these trite, but I rather like the way they dismantle the implicit self-justifications of a stance within a few words. “Everyone says I’m paranoid” is, for instance, a cliché, but it’s an amusing one that potentially makes us pause and wonder if the joke isn’t at least a little on us and our solemnly-held convictions, too. As the editorial staff at Prospect may occasionally be heard to scoff, “Pretentious? Nous?”

What to make, though, of those who don’t get the joke? One of most appallingly witty images to emerge from the whole “cartoons” furore was, as many commentators noted at the time, that of protesters marching under banners that proclaimed their willingness to kill anyone who dared call them violent/fanatical. And today, following up on our last month’s curio about Hamas’s hateful children’s TV programming, I found this report over at Harry’s Place describing their latest hi-jinks—which entail a man in a giant bee costume swinging cats by their tails and throwing rocks at caged lions “in order to demonstrate how wrong it is to torment cats and lions.”

Nothing like a slice of rancid hypocrisy to make you think a little harder.

A triumph for British bloggers

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on August 9, 2007
in British politics, In the news and Middle east
. 2 Comments

I may be missing something, but as far as I can see, the government’s agreement to “review” the asylum cases of 91 interpreters who have worked with British armed forces in Iraq marks the first successful, or at least partially successful, British political campaign begun in the blogosphere. I first came across the campaign via a Daniel Davies post at Crooked Timber, but as far as I can see it was kicked off by one Dan Hardie, on July 22nd. Both Davies and Hardie made reference to a Channel 4 News report produced in April, but it wasn’t until the campaign spread across the blogs, and eventually into the press, that the government began to pay attention.

The interpreter asylum case was a perfect campaign for the blogosphere—it had clear, well-defined aims, and it cut across partisan pro-war/antiwar lines to provide a cause behind which almost everyone could unite. Meanwhile, the government has much to lose by standing firm—it will appear bureaucratically mean-spirited and pedantic, not to mention ungrateful—and little to lose by giving in—the 91 interpreters would be a drop in the asylum ocean, and the slippery slope argument doesn’t really hold, as it’s easy to argue that this is a special case. Assuming that the review does result in the interpreters being granted asylum, it’ll be interesting to see where the campaigning energies of British blogs turn to next.

Whose envoy is he anyway?

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 31, 2007
in British politics, Foreign affairs and Middle east
. 0 Comments

As (sort of) predicted here at First Drafts over a month ago, it looks as if Michael Williams, currently UN envoy to the middle east, will soon be returning to British government service as the prime minister’s own middle east envoy (a post last filled, of course, by Lord Levy). The Guardian, which broke the story on Saturday, suggested that the appointment could lead to clashes with Tony Blair, who is of course himself plugging away in the middle east, on behalf of the international “quartet.” It’s not quite clear why such a clash would be any more likely now that Williams will be working on behalf of No 10 rather than the UN; in fact, as pointed out in Prospect a few months ago, a turf war with Blair was more likely when Williams was at the UN, given that the UN is one of the four members of the quartet on whose behalf Blair is working.

Personality politics aside, Williams’s appointment is good news for the region, says Benny Avni of the New York Sun—but bad news for the UN, which is losing one of its most able diplomats. Avni also suggests that the idea that Williams will act as a “counterpoint” to Blair’s “perceived pro-Israel bias” is overdone.