Download or read book Voices from Post Saddam Iraq written by Victoria Fontan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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and left some increasingly outspoken residents of the U.S., and the rest of the world, demanding that foreign forces be withdrawn and the Iraqis left to their own accord.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.
Download or read book Hell Is Over written by Mike Tucker and published by Lyons Press. This book was released on 2006-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Hell is Over written by Michael James Tucker and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Saddam Hussein goes to trial, a chilling testimony to his unrelenting brutality.
Download or read book Patriotic Ayatollahs written by Caroleen Marji Sayej and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Sounds of Silence written by Heather A. Rodriguez and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using personal interviews and works of art, I bring into focus the suffering of Iraq's people who lived through the sanctions period (1990-2003) under the regime of Saddam Hussein. In particular, I examine the effects of the sanctions regime on their everyday lives in regard to family, the economy, medical care, education, and culture. My research centers on the presentation of events from the Iraqi point of view, adding a new perspective to existing articles and books written by non-Iraqis who were not affected by sanctions personally. By providing historical background as a foundation, I demonstrate the ways in which Iraq and its people fell into a downward spiral after Saddam Hussein took control in 1979. Through primary research, I examine corrupt acts committed by the United States and Iraq that began during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and continued throughout the sanctions period. I argue that, in view of this oral history research, the conditions in Iraq during this period were far more devastating than previously acknowledged. Finally, I illustrate how the United States government and the media exacerbated the struggles of the Iraqi people by willfully neglecting them.
Download or read book Voices from Iraq written by Mark Kukis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book After Saddam written by Nora Bensahel and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2008-07-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Voices of Baghdad written by Fernando Ochoa and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger is on another adventure. As a journalist, he travels to Iraq for the first elections since Saddam Hussein was deposed. At first, he finds a population that wants to create a democracy and freedom, but when he returns after the election, he finds a people who are demoralized and learns about the tragedy that is Iraq.
Download or read book Baghdad Burning written by Riverbend and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Iraq Then and Now written by Karen Dabrowska and published by Bradt Travel Guides. This book was released on 2008 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book To Start a War written by Robert Draper and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Essential . . . one for the ages . . . a must read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post “Authoritative . . . The most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today.” —LA Times One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020 To Start a War paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. Robert Draper’s fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. There are no cheap shots here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August and Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective scurrying for evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false—evidence that was then used to justify a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.
Download or read book State of Repression written by Lisa Blaydes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new account of modern Iraqi politics that overturns the conventional wisdom about its sectarian divisions How did Iraq become one of the most repressive dictatorships of the late twentieth century? The conventional wisdom about Iraq's modern political history is that the country was doomed by its diverse social fabric. But in State of Repression, Lisa Blaydes challenges this belief by showing that the country's breakdown was far from inevitable. At the same time, she offers a new way of understanding the behavior of other authoritarian regimes and their populations. Drawing on archival material captured from the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's ruling Ba'th Party in the wake of the 2003 US invasion, Blaydes illuminates the complexities of political life in Iraq, including why certain Iraqis chose to collaborate with the regime while others worked to undermine it. She demonstrates that, despite the Ba'thist regime's pretensions to political hegemony, its frequent reliance on collective punishment of various groups reinforced and cemented identity divisions. At the same time, a series of costly external shocks to the economy—resulting from fluctuations in oil prices and Iraq's war with Iran—weakened the capacity of the regime to monitor, co-opt, coerce, and control factions of Iraqi society. In addition to calling into question the common story of modern Iraqi politics, State of Repression offers a new explanation of why and how dictators repress their people in ways that can inadvertently strengthen regime opponents.
Download or read book The Devil You Don t Know written by Zuhayr Jazāʼirī and published by Saqi Books - Saqi Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographies & Autobiographies.
Download or read book Return to Ruin written by Zainab Saleh and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Baghdad Diaries written by Nuha al-Radi and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this often moving, sometimes wry account of life in Baghdad during the first war on Iraq and in exile in the years following, Iraqi-born, British-educated artist Nuha al-Radi shows us the effects of war on ordinary people. She recounts the day-to-day realities of living in a city under siege, where food has to be consumed or thrown out because there is no way to preserve it, where eventually people cannot sleep until the nightly bombing commences, where packs of stray dogs roam the streets (and provide her own dog Salvi with a harem) and rats invade homes. Through it all, al-Radi works at her art and gathers with neighbors and family for meals and other occasions, happy and sad. In the wake of the war, al-Radi lives in semi-exile, shuttling between Beirut and Amman, travelling to New York, London, Mexico and Yemen. As she suffers the indignities of being an Iraqi in exile, al-Radi immerses us in a way of life constricted by the stress and effects of war and embargoes, giving texture to a reality we have only been able to imagine before now. But what emanates most vibrantly from these diaries is the spirit of endurance and the celebration of the smallest of life’s joys.
Download or read book Debriefing the President written by John Nixon (Middle East expert) and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first man to conduct a prolonged interrogation of Saddam Hussein after his capture explains why preconceived ideas about the dictator led Washington policymakers and the Bush White House astray.
Download or read book Saddam is Iraq written by Jerrold M. Post and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identified as a member of the "axis of evil" by President George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein's Iraq continues to pose a major threat to the region and to Western society. Saddam has doggedly pursued the development of weapons of mass destruction, despite U.N. sanctions imposed at the conclusion of the Gulf crisis. To deal effectively with Saddam Hussein requires a clear understanding of his motivations, perceptions, and decision-making. To provide a framework for this complex political leader, a comprehensive political psychology profile has been developed, and his actions since the crisis analyzed in the context of this political psychology assessment
