Iraq Archive

Qatar refused earlier this month to hand over visiting Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi to the Iraqi central government, which has charged him with running death squads. In an email interview, Reidar Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and member of the Gulf Research Unit at the University of Oslo, discussed Iraq-Qatar relations. WPR: How have Iraq-Qatar diplomatic and trade relations evolved since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003? Reidar Visser: Like most other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, Qatar has had a strained relationship with Iraq since 2003, in particular after the emergence […]

Since at least 2003, Americans have overestimated our influence in Iraq. Although the U.S. invasion and overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime paved the way for both a bloody civil war and a new form of government, the key actors in Iraq were and remain the Iraqi people themselves. Most recently, GOP critics of the Obama administration have been quick to fault the White House for withdrawing U.S. troops at the end of 2011. But the incessant, myopic focus of many Republicans on America’s military means is wrong-headed and ignores where the administration has actually fallen short in Iraq. The […]