Politics in the New Era, 2003–

Author(s):  
Adeed Dawisha

This chapter discusses political developments in Iraq following the US and UK's military campaign in 2003. The publicly stated reason for the invasion of Iraq was Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction and his links with international Islamist terrorists. However, is probably more likely that from the very beginning the Bush Administration, or more precisely influential elements within it, made the removal of Saddam Husayn a central plank of the administration's policy. Whatever the reasons for the invasion, the United States found itself on April 9, 2003 the hegemonic power in Iraq, faced with the responsibilities of governance. And indeed until June 28, 2004, when sovereignty was transferred to the Iraqis, the United States (with some input by the British) ruled Iraq directly through a mostly American administration in Baghdad called the Coalition Provisional Authority.

2003 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Sapiro

The United States articulated a new concept of preventive self-defense last fall that is designed to preclude emerging threats from endangering the country. Rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the preventive approach to national security is intended to respond to new threats posed by “shadowy networks of individuals [who] can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank.” The Bush administration wisely concluded that it could not rely solely upon a reactive security posture, due to the difficulty in deterring potential attacks by those determined to challenge the United States and the magnitude of harm that could occur from weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands. Although the administration has characterized its new approach as “preemptive,” it is more accurate to describe it as “preventive” self-defense. Rather than trying to preempt specific, imminent tiireats, the goal is to prevent more generalized threats from materializing.


Author(s):  
Elaff Ganim Salih ◽  
Hardev Kaur ◽  
Mohamad Fleih Hassan

The war launched by America and its allies against the country of Iraq on 2003 was a debatable and notorious war for the public opinion was shocked with the realization that the reasons for launching the war under the title ‘Iraq’s Mass Destruction Weapons’ were false. The tragic consequences of this war led many writers around the world to question the policy of the United States and its manipulation of facts to justify their narratives. The present study examines the American policy of invading Iraq in David Hare’s Stuff Happens. It investigates Hare’s technique of combining documentary realism with imaginative reconstruction of the arguments to dramatize the American Invasion of Iraq. Stuff Happens is a historical and political play written as a verbatim theatre. It depicts the backroom deals and political maneuvers of the Bush administration in justifying their campaign against the ‘Axis of Evil’ culminated by the war against Iraq. The verbatim theatre is the best way of showing the gap between ‘what is said and what is seen to be done’. Scenes of direct speeches by real characters are part of this theatre dramatized to present a new reading of a historical event. In addition, characterization is used by Hare’s to chronicle the American war on Iraq. The study follows a postcolonial framework. The study concludes that Hare’s Stuff Happens succeeded in shaking the public opinion with the truth that Bush’s administration has manipulated facts in order to achieve their colonial and imperial interests in Iraq, which led to more destruction and violence in this country.


2020 ◽  
pp. 87-118
Author(s):  
Wallace J. Thies

This chapter looks at Iraq's Saddam Hussein as a very useful case study of whether, when, and why containment works, and when it does not. This is particularly true for the interval between the first and second Persian Gulf wars (1991–2003). During that interval, Saddam refused repeated demands by the United States and other states that he should abandon his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and his aspirations for regional hegemony. US officials realized that the effort that the United States had expended during the run-up to the start of the first Gulf War likely would not be enough to impress a brute like Saddam, and they resolved to do better the second time around. The US effort to contain Saddam Hussein faltered in 1990–91, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait. From 1991 until the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, the United States was able to use the vast range of capabilities at its disposal to thwart Saddam's schemes.


1955 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-159

The Sub-Committee of the Disarmament Commission (France, Soviet Union, Canada, United Kingdom, United States) met in London, May 13–June 22. Following discussion of possible approaches for the Sub-Committee, the Soviet representative presented a draft resolution11 prohibiting unconditionally weapons of mass destruction and asking the Security Council to effect an international agreement to guarantee enforcement of that prohibition. Permanent members of the Security Council would reduce by one-third conventional military equipment and personnel within a year. The draft recommended the convening by the Security Council of a conference to effect reduction of armaments by all states and to abolish military installations on foreign territories. The Soviet representative attacked parts of the United Nations Majority Plan for Control of Atomic Energy, stating that the United States desired to monopolize nuclear secrets and to secure information on Soviet armaments without prohibiting nuclear weapons.


2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce P. Montgomery

AbstractShortly following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an American mobile exploitation team was diverted from its mission in hunting for weapons for mass destruction to search for an ancient Talmud in the basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police (Mukhabarat) headquarters in Baghdad. Instead of finding the ancient holy book, the soldiers rescued from the basement flooded with several feet of fetid water an invaluable archive of disparate individual and communal documents and books relating to one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world. The seizure of Jewish cultural materials by the Mukhabarat recalled similar looting by the Nazis during World War II. The materials were spirited out of Iraq to the United States with a vague assurance of their return after being restored. Several years after their arrival in the United States for conservation, the Iraqi Jewish archive has become contested cultural property between Jewish groups and the Iraqi Jewish diaspora on the one hand and Iraqi cultural officials on the other. This article argues that the archive comprises the cultural property and heritage of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora.


Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent

This chapter focuses on the Iraq war of 2003–11 and the troubles in the Middle East. George W. Bush’s advisers, led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, had been considering an attack on Iraq well before 9/11. At the same time, many experts within the government pointed to the lack of any evidence for Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed against the United States. The threats to US national security were outlined to Bush in a briefing just prior to his inauguration; these threats came primarily from al-Qaeda’s terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The chapter first considers the US decision to invade Iraq, before discussing the war, taking into account the US’s Operation Iraqi Freedom and the war’s costs to the US and to Iraq. It also examines the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and concludes with an assessment of the ‘Arab Spring’.


Author(s):  
Matt Carlson

This chapter looks at how two newspapers used unnamed sources in reports leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. When Iraq's weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize, critics on the left and from within journalism chastised the New York Times and Washington Post for overly credulous, unnamed source-laden investigative reporting appearing on their front pages in the buildup to the war. The newspapers responded by revisiting their unnamed sourcing practices, but not until more than a year after the invasion. These self-assessments generated attention around two problems negatively impacting prewar coverage: the calculated press management strategies of the Bush administration, and the willingness of the competing newspapers to reproduce official statements anonymously. The complex problems marking the journalist-unnamed source exchange come to light through these efforts to attach blame both to the sources and the journalists.


2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 190-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Lewandowsky ◽  
Werner G.K. Stritzke ◽  
Klaus Oberauer ◽  
Michael Morales

Media coverage of the 2003 Iraq War frequently contained corrections and retractions of earlier information. For example, claims that Iraqi forces executed coalition prisoners of war after they surrendered were retracted the day after the claims were made. Similarly, tentative initial reports about the discovery of weapons of mass destruction were all later disconfirmed. We investigated the effects of these retractions and disconfirmations on people's memory for and beliefs about war-related events in two coalition countries (Australia and the United States) and one country that opposed the war (Germany). Participants were queried about (a) true events, (b) events initially presented as fact but subsequently retracted, and (c) fictional events. Participants in the United States did not show sensitivity to the correction of misinformation, whereas participants in Australia and Germany discounted corrected misinformation. Our results are consistent with previous findings in that the differences between samples reflect greater suspicion about the motives underlying the war among people in Australia and Germany than among people in the United States.


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