Voices from Post-Saddam Iraq
Voices from Post-Saddam Iraq

Author: Victoria Fontan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2008-12-30

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0313365334

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Even today, most Americans can not understand just why the fighting continues in Iraq, whether our nation should be involved there now, and how we could change our tactics to help establish a lasting peace in the face of what many fear will become a full-fledged civil war. In the book at hand, Victoria Fontan - a professor of peace and conflict studies who lived, worked and researched in Iraq - shares pointed insights into the emotions of Iraq's people, and specifically how democratization has in that country come to be associated with humiliation. Including interviews with common people in Iraq this work makes clear how laudable intentions do not always bring the desired result when it comes to international conflict and cross-cultural psychology. For example, Fontan explains, one might consider the comment of a young Shiite: The greatest humiliation of all was to see foreigners topple Saddam, not because we loved him, but because we could not do it ourselves. This gripping text is focused on a new and growing area of human psychology - humiliation studies. In it, this leader at the United Nations-mandated University for Peace spotlights aspects of U.S. actions - and Iraqi perceptions - that have fueled ongoing conflict and left some increasingly outspoken residents of the U.S., and the rest of the world, demanding that foreign forces be withdrawn and the Iraqis left to their own accord. The work examines issues including how and when the Iraqis began to see the United States, as not a liberator but as an occupier; how both Abu Ghraib and our ensuing handling of the scandal heightened Iraqi humiliation and fighting; how we've fueled the ethno-religious unrest that still rages today; and how the Post-Saddam elections paved the way for civil war. Fontan also describes the role of women in Iraq who may ultimately be an important key to peace and explains her views on the new role the U.S. may play to better help establish peace.

Patriotic Ayatollahs
Patriotic Ayatollahs

Author: Caroleen Marji Sayej

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-04-15

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1501714767

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Patriotic Ayatollahs explores the contributions of senior clerics in state and nation-building after the 2003 Iraq war. Caroleen Sayej suggests that the four so-called Grand Ayatollahs, the highest-ranking clerics of Iraqi Shiism, took on a new and unexpected political role after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Drawing on previously unexamined Arabic-language fatwas, speeches, and communiqués of Iraq’s four grand ayatollahs, this book analyzes how their new pronouncements and narratives shaped public debates after 2003. Sayej argues that, contrary to standard narratives about religious actors, the Grand Ayatollahs were among the most progressive voices in the new Iraqi nation. She traces the transformative position of Ayatollah Sistani as the "guardian of democracy" after 2003. Sistani was, in particular, instrumental in derailing American plans that would have excluded Iraqis from the state-building process—a remarkable story in which an octogenarian cleric takes on the United States over the meaning of democracy. Patriotic Ayatollahs’ counter-conventional argument about the ayatollahs’ vision of a nonsectarian nation is neatly realized. Through her deep knowledge and long-term engagement with Iraqi politics, Sayej advances our understanding of how the post-Saddam Iraqi nation was built.

Voices from Iraq
Voices from Iraq

Author: Mark Kukis

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011-06-21

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 023152756X

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A Time magazine foreign correspondent shares “moving stories from the Iraqis who lived through the nightmare” in this oral history of the Iraq War (Kikrus). Journalist Mark Kukis presents a history of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq as told by Iraqis who live through it.Beginning in 2003, this intimate narrative includes the accounts of civilians, politicians, former dissidents, insurgents, and militiamen. The men and women sharing their firsthand experiences range from onetime Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to resistance fighters speaking on the condition of anonymity. Divided into five parts, these interviews recount the 2003 invasion; the two years of chaos that followed; the start of a new order in 2006; the rise of sectarian violence; and the effort to reconstruct their society since 2008. In each section, interviews grouped into themes, with brief epilogues for the participants. As Studs Terkel's The Good War did for World War II, Voices from Iraq brings the meaning and legacy of America's campaign in Iraq to vivid life.

Iraq Then and Now
Iraq Then and Now

Author: Karen Dabrowska

Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9781841622439

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Unlike other publications since the downfall of Saddam's regime, Iraq: Then & Now traces the history of the country from ancient times until the present. Supplementary boxes, many written by Iraqis themselves, reflect on life today as compared with life in Saddam's Iraq and even earlier, describing their experiences, hopes, fears, ambitions and visions for the future.The book self-consciously avoids making any judgement on the political debate surrounding the 2003 war and subsequent occupation; instead it presents the varying views, and offers a rounded, balanced picture.Published to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the change, this guide to the country and its people, provides information on Iraq's culture and archaeology, the south, Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle. The northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan stands apart as a success story and the travel appendix provides essential information for the increasing numbers of visitors to this region.

After Saddam
After Saddam

Author: Nora Bensahel

Publisher: Rand Corporation

Published: 2008-07-15

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0833046381

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This monograph examines prewar planning efforts for the reconstruction of postwar Iraq. It then examines the role of U.S. military forces after major combat officially ended on May 1, 2003, through June 2004. Finally, it examines civilian efforts at reconstruction, focusing on the activities of the Coalition Provisional Authority and its efforts to rebuild structures of governance, security forces, economic policy, and essential services.

Hell Is Over
Hell Is Over

Author: Mike Tucker

Publisher: Lyons Press

Published: 2006-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781592288854

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Here is the first inside perspective on what it was like to endure the horrors of Saddam Hussein. In Hell Is Over: Voices of the Kurds After Saddam, author Mike Tucker offers frank and evocative accounts of the Kurdish people, from veterans of the Kurdish uprising, the Revolution of 1961, to members of the peshmerga who helped U.S. forces quickly take key northern cities. Hell Is Over is a testimony to the anguish of political prisoners, survivors of chemical attacks, and victims of torture. Tucker also offers readers the unbridled joy and optimism of Kurdish artists and poets and of old warriors who now look forward to putting down the guns they've carried for decades. Hell Is Over is the moving narrative of a long-suffering nation, chillingly told one precious individual at a time.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History

Author: Jens Hanssen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 0191652792

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The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History critically examines the defining processes and structures of historical developments in North Africa and the Middle East over the past two centuries. The Handbook pays particular attention to countries that have leapt out of the political shadows of dominant and better-studied neighbours in the course of the unfolding uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. These dramatic and interconnected developments have exposed the dearth of informative analysis available in surveys and textbooks, particularly on Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria.

Baghdad Burning
Baghdad Burning

Author: Riverbend

Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

Published: 2005-04-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1558616160

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Since the fall of Bagdad, women’s voices have been largely erased, but four months after Saddam Hussein’s statue fell, a 24 year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging. In 2003, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging about life in the city under the pseudonym Riverbend. Her passion, honesty, and wry idiomatic English made her work a vital contribution to our understanding of post-war Iraq—and won her a large following. Baghdad Burning is a quotidian chronicle of Riverbend’s life with her family between April 2003 and September of 2004. She describes rolling blackouts, intermittent water access, daily explosions, gas shortages and travel restrictions. She also expresses a strong stance against the interim government, the Bush administration, and Islamic fundamentalists like Al Sadr and his followers. Her book “offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed” (Publishers Weekly). “Riverbend is bright and opinionated, true, but like all voices of dissent worth remembering, she provides an urgent reminder that, whichever governments we struggle under, we are all the same.” —Booklist “Feisty and learned: first-rate reading for any American who suspects that Fox News may not be telling the whole story.” —Kirkus

Return to Ruin
Return to Ruin

Author: Zainab Saleh

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1503614123

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This volume of exiles’ accounts “[uses] the stories as springboards to discussing Iraqi history, politicization, and diasporic experiences in depth” (International Journal of Middle East Studies). With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqis abroad, hoping to return one day to a better Iraq, became uncertain exiles. Return to Ruin tells the human story of this exile in the context of decades of U.S. imperial interests in Iraq—from the U.S. backing of the 1963 Ba’th coup and support of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion and occupation. Zainab Saleh shares the experiences of Iraqis she met over fourteen years of fieldwork in Iraqi London—offering stories from an aging communist nostalgic for the streets she marched since childhood, a devout Shi’i dreaming of holy cities and family graves, and newly uprooted immigrants with fresh memories of loss, as well as her own. Focusing on debates among Iraqi exiles about what it means to be an Iraqi after years of displacement, Saleh weaves a narrative that draws attention to a once-dominant, vibrant Iraqi cultural landscape and social and political shifts among the diaspora after decades of authoritarianism, war, and occupation in Iraq. Through it all, this book illuminates how Iraqis continue to fashion a sense of belonging and imagine a future, built on the shards of these shattered memories.