Iraq Archive

If you want to get an early read on the ultimate success or failure of the Obama administration’s policies for the Middle East, keep an eye on Syria. From the earliest days of the administration, even before it assumed power, its planned strategy for dealing with a number of conflicts in the region has included changing Syria’s behavior. After all, Damascus has not only complicated life for U.S. forces in Iraq, it has also proven over the years to be an important ally of the Iranian regime and a key partner of radical militant organizations in Lebanon and Gaza. Syria […]

On Feb. 16, following decades of disruption, Turkey and Iraq restored a rail link running from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul to Gaziantep in southern Turkey, via Syria. The move is a concrete illustration of Turkey’s increased efforts to develop commercial ties with Iraq, initiatives that Ankara has in turn used to establish a platform upon which it can deepen its diplomatic role and limit destabilizing spillover effects from its volatile neighbor. The strategy has paid off, as demonstrated by the recent visits to Ankara of a host of Iraqi political players — including ‘Ammar al-Hakim, Humam Hammoudi and […]

Christopher R. Hill, United States Ambassador to Iraq, briefed reporters on the lead up to the Iraqi elections scheduled for early March. Of election monitoring efforts, which will be closely watched to ensure legitimacy of the results, Hill said “We are working very closely with the UN and with the U.S. forces to help secure having 26 four-person monitoring teams.” In other developments, the Ambassador said “Iraq has made important strides in its economy in recent months.” Read the full transcript of the briefing here.

The NY Times has two interesting articles on a subject I’ve written about before: film and literature inspired by the Iraq and Afghanistan War. Like me, they note the lack of novels, as compared to memoirs, although this is to be expected given the lag-time before good fiction usually appears. Interestingly, they also discuss something that I’d ignored, namely the lack of political criticism in both the literature and cinema that has come out of the wars to date. In some ways, that was implied in my previous remarks, given the nature of the great post-War and Vietnam-era film and […]

In a two-round bidding procedure that concluded in mid-December, the international oil industry regained access to Iraq’s upstream resources for the first time since the 1975 nationalization, with service contracts awarded for the development of 13 major fields. Although some critics denounced the deals as a sell-off of Iraq’s resources to foreigners, Iraqi Oil Minister Husain al-Shahristani negotiated very good terms for them. Production will rise from the current 2.5 million barrels per day (mbpd) to 12 mbpd, and Iraq will be in control of every drop of oil extracted on payment of fees amounting to only $1 to $1.50 […]

“Iran engagement” is beginning to take on the attributes of kabuki theater, with all of the major participants engaging in pre-determined, stylized dance steps. The latest case in point is the announcement earlier this week by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Tehran is now open to some form of the scheme proposed by the International Atomic Energy Agency last October, by which Iran would export its low-enriched uranium to France and Russia to be turned into fuel rods for its research reactor. As Howard LaFranchi reported, this “was received favorably by Russia, and it prompted Chinese officials to call for […]

Whether or not he’s actually dead, Hakimullah Mehsud illustrates one of the dangers of a CT strategy based on organizational decapitation — namely, that the No. 2 guy waiting in the wings might actually prove to be more dangerous than the guy whose charred boots he filled. A similar phenomenon has been noticeable among the Basque ETA terrorist group, which has replenished its ranks with what appears to be an even more militant younger generation. (Of course, Americans need only look to their own very recent past for another useful illustration.) I have admittedly been among those who have made […]

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair testified before a governmentinquiry in London into the Iraq war. Blair remains adamant that hisdecision to go to war was the right one, saying that Sadaam Hussein was”a monster” and someone who he and former U.S. President George Bushhad to “deal with.” VOA’s Sonja Pace reports.

One of the subjects of the France 24 week-in-review panel discussion program I took part in on Friday — link to follow, hopefully, because it was a great group — was Tony Blair’s appearance before the U.K.’s Iraq War inquiry commission. Blair, it seems, suggested that among the reasons he had supported the invasion of Iraq was because he didn’t want the U.S. to be “alone.” This reflected, as one of the other panelists put it, how the Iraq War was a war in search of a cause, to which I responded that it seems to me that Blair had […]