Prosody and ideology

The focus of this paper is on the role choices in phonological systems (Brazil 1997; Halliday & Greaves 2008) play in the ideological work of a text. Using an instance of news reporting of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, we show how prosodic choices – both those shared with other texts in this register, and those specific to this instance – contribute to the ideological force of the text. The ideological effects of prosodic choices in this text, we argue, include projecting a very particular interpretation of the invasion as if distant and objective, and giving prominence to claims that the invasion was measured and targeted, and by implication in accordance with international law.

NO CONQUEST, NO DEFEAT: IRAN’S NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

One of the lasting outcomes of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the rising regional influence of Iran across the Middle East, which has been amplified by the dynamics of the region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Since then,there are many academic and journalistic attempts to explain and understand Iran’s policies towards the region. Tabatabai’s No Conquest, No Defeat: Iran’s National Security Strategy is an attempt to explain Iran’s foreign and security policies, particularly towards the Middle East, by putting them into a historical and cultural context. A frequent contributor to the leading US think tanks and recently appointed as a senior advisor position at the US Department of State, Tabatabai considered her study to ‘sit at the intersection’ of Iran’s military history and its politics.

5. George W. Bush and the Iraq War

‘George W. Bush and the Iraq War’ looks at the diplomacy of George W. Bush in the run up to the Iraq War, which marked the triumph of the militarization of American diplomacy and an era of endless wars. With UK support, and despite United Nations warnings, in 2003 Bush approved the airstrikes that preceded the invasion of Iraq in March that year. The war with Iraq lasted just over a month. George W. Bush finally got the war he wanted; the regime change he wanted. And he got his way. The militarization of American diplomacy had been achieved and a war of choice had inaugurated an era of endless wars.

The tyranny of strangers: transformative occupations old and new

In the aftermath of the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003, considerable attention was given to the apparent emergence of a new type of belligerent occupation—the ‘transformative occupation’ which apparently challenged the traditional assumptions of the law of occupation. The suggestion here is that, as an examination of the British occupation of Mesopotamia between 1914-1924 reveals, the ‘transformative occupation’ is by no means a new institution, but is one that may be associated with a tradition of thought and practice in which the institution of belligerent occupationwas made congruent with the operational rationalities of colonial rule by re-imagining it as a form of sacred trust. The legacy of that history, it is contended, is critical for understanding the role of occupation law today.

Maritime demarcation in the Gulf after 2003

This paper uses the Iranian detention of twelve British naval and marine personnel in the Northern Gulf in March 2007 as a prompt to examine the place of the 2003 invasion of Iraq within the continuities and ruptures of the international legal imagination, including that of critical international lawyers.

How Much Does the Compellence Theory Explain?

This chapter focuses on the case of Turkey against the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers' Party; PKK) in 1984–1999, which involves a democracy conducting a counterinsurgency campaign on its own territory against its own populace. Elite accommodation in Turkey took the form of government support for the great Kurdish landowners of the southeast, providing impunity for illegal smuggling and other accommodations in exchange for the provision of organized violence, controlling civilians to cut the flow of resources to the insurgency. The militia and military campaigns cleared vast areas of the region of their inhabitants. Indeed, the campaign defeated the PKK threat militarily. It captured and imprisoned its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, with U.S. assistance, and the insurgency withered. It was the structural change of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that created the opportunity for remnants of the PKK to regroup and reopen their campaign from northern Iraq, as well as within Turkey. Ultimately, Turkey shows the external validity of the compellence theory because it is considered a particularly brutal campaign and thus should bear little similarity to successful campaigns conducted by democratic great powers and lauded as models if the governance approach explains counterinsurgency success.

Counting the dead and making the dead count: configuring data and accountability

This article examines the relation between counting, counts and accountability. It does so by comparing the responses of the British government to deaths associated with Covid-19 in 2020 to its responses to deaths associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Similarities and dissimilarities between the cases regarding what counted as data, what data were taken to count, what data counted for, and how data were counted provide the basis for considering how the bounds of democratic accountability are constituted. Based on these two cases, the article sets out the metaphors of leaks and cascades as ways of characterising the data practices whereby counts, counting and accountability get configured. By situating deaths associated with Covid-19 against previous experience with deaths from war, the article also proposes how claims to truth and ignorance might figure in any future official inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.