The sudden assertion of human criteria within a dehumanising framework of political manipulation can be like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape
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iraq - the war & afterVoices from all sides discuss the Iraq war and an aftermath of war which brought tragedy to two of our columnists in the Baghdad bombing of the UN. You miught like to visit Arthur Helton and Gil Loescher's humanitarian monitor Iraq: the human cost, Paul Rogers's definitive Global Security column, and Wendell Steavenson's writings on Afghanistan and Iran.
George W Bush's administration has unfinished business with Tehran and Baghdad
Iraq’s people vote on their draft constitution on 15 October. A single sentence in the document may be the key to its success, says Tamara Chalabi. Read the rest of this post...
The United States-led assault on Fallujah signals the political failure of the attempt to stabilise Iraq by re-empowering supporters of Saddam’s Ba’ath party and the Sunni elite it represents, says Sama Hadad. Read the rest of this post...
The death of three young Scots soldiers in central Iraq may, says a grieving Stephen Howe, be the decisive moment for Scotland’s democratic nationalism to assert itself over the imperial militarism that sent its sons into a killing–field. Read the rest of this post...
The assault on Fallujah is inflicting great political as well as humanitarian damage, reports Dahr Jamail from Baghdad. Read the rest of this post...
Six months after their first trip to post-Saddam Iraq, Mary Kaldor and Yahia Said return to find that trust in the coalition has collapsed. They assess the nature of the violence and the likelihood of overcoming it. A catastrophe is possible but not necessary, is the conclusion to their report, from which we publish this extract. Read the rest of this post...
Will Iraqis unite in revolt against US forces? Beneath the boiling surface of Iraqi anger lies a more complex and fractious reality which points to a different outcome. Read the rest of this post...
An Iraqi Kurd who welcomed the US war in his country sees arrogance and force crushing chances for freedom. His view: American occupation policy is dangerously misjudged. Read the rest of this post...
A distinguished Arab commentator says US strategy in Iraq is unravelling. It is time to put aside simplistic caricatures, and think harder about the future of the Iraqi people. Read the rest of this post...
Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarded as the “father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”, was accused then pardoned by President Musharraf for his role in trafficking nuclear technology. What sort of man is Qadeer, and what does his story reveal about the United States’s role in Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation? A nuclear physicist from Pakistan reports. Read the rest of this post...
Cem Özdemir is a child of Istanbul who became Germany’s first member of parliament of Turkish origin. The terrorist bombs of November 2003, he writes, attack the city’s most precious inheritance: its multicultural, tolerant heart. Read the rest of this post...
The primary target of the suicide bombings of Jewish and British institutions in Istanbul was Turkey itself. Will the assaults explode the delicate political balance of forces in this “secularist Muslim” country? Read the rest of this post...
The Iraq Survey Group has just published its interim report on the Saddam regime’s weapons programmes and capabilities. Ron Manley, a chemical weapons expert who oversaw the United Nations inspection operations in Iraq in the early 1990s, assesses it. Read the rest of this post...
If any continent deserves intervention, it is Africa. In the Democratic Republic of Congo and East Africa a devastating human crisis – failed states, ethnic violence, rampant disease and endemic insecurity – presents Bush and Blair with a moral as well as a political challenge. Read the rest of this post...
From 19th century imperial rivalries to Soviet communism and now the ‘war on terror’, the states of Central Asia have been targets of manipulation in the great games of superpower politics. Today, the domestic impact of US strategic ambitions is increased repression and denial of human rights. America may secure short-term political influence, but the lasting achievement of its current policy will be radical disaffection among the region’s people. Read the rest of this post...
A democratic scholar-activist in Egypt is now free after a three-year ordeal of trial and imprisonment on hollow charges. But the individual story of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a naturalised American citizen, is less one of law and human rights than of an Egyptian state caught between authoritarian rule and strategic and financial dependence on the United States. Read the rest of this post...
Paul Rogers, professor at Bradford University’s school of peace studies, is one of the most informed and acute observers of the military and strategic problems of the post-Cold War era. He will be writing regular reports in openDemocracy tracking the crisis unfolding after the attacks of 11 September, of which this is the first. Read the rest of this post...
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