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- Volume 6, Issue 3, 2012
International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2012
Volume 6, Issue 3, 2012
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Madeleine’s medals: Unlimited imperialism, unspeakable crimes
Authors: Dirk Adriaensens and Raymond BakerThe calculated destruction of Iraq will rank as one of the greatest war crimes of the twenty-first century. The fateful decisions that knowingly ‘ended’ the Iraq state, decimated Iraqi society and killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens were taken over the course of more than a decade. The United States led the assault on Iraq. It did so for reasons of empire. The new Iraq, compliant with US global and Israeli regional dominance, would implant American imperial power in the very heart of the oil-rich and strategically critical Arab world. American exceptionalism, a particularly virulent form of nationalism, would empower a bold leadership as ‘history-makers’, who would step out of history to create a new ‘unlimited imperialism’. Even lost wars would be profitable. In addition to the classic patterns of resource extraction from targeted territories, the military-industrial-congressional complex would secure war-making resources and windfall profits from a fearful, compliant US population, stripped of safety nets and basic services. An understanding of the common cause of movements of resistance to imperialism in the centre and in targeted sites like Iraq in the periphery is emerging. Hope lies with these mass movements of ordinary citizens and dissident intellectuals in both the Arab world and the West, in the US and in Iraq. They will come to recognize in each other victims of the same structures of domination. From them will come cooperative actions to expose the lies and disrupt the machinery of the new unlimited imperialism that revealed itself in such obscene ways in Iraq.
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Iraq’s state-building enterprise: State fragility, state failure and a new social contract
More LessIn this article, the author argues that the historical magnitude of long-term Iraqi state fragility needs to be adequately taken into account when trying to push forward and consolidate the current state-building exercise in Iraq. The historical depth of the Iraqi challenge is grounded in prolonged state fragility that existed since Iraq’s creation by Britain through a League of Nations mandate and was compounded by the collapse of the state following the invasion and subsequent occupation in 2003. Drawing on the conceptual literature on state fragility and state failure, the article demonstrates the extent to which Iraq requires a state to be built physically and conceptually. It then explores the literature on state-building to develop ideas on how to consolidate the Iraqi state, based on an inclusive and enduring social contract. This social contract must be grounded in a national political dialogue, but politics should be complemented by similar elements of the social contract addressing and manifesting themselves in the economy and security.
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Firm conviction or forced belief? The Islamic Da‘wah Party’s response to Khomeini’s theory of wilayat al-faqih
More LessThis article assesses how the Islamic Da‘wah Party, Iraq’s oldest Islamist organization, responded to Khomeini’s theory on the guardianship of the jurist (wilayat al-faqih). Iraq’s Islamist movement and Khomeini’s political efforts evolved and prospered in close proximity to each other. Khomeini spent almost thirteen years in exile in Najaf, where he witnessed the ascent of Iraq’s Islamist movement and its later suppression by the Ba‘ath regime. It was here that he held his renowned lectures on wilayat al-faqih. After Khomeini’s accession to power in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iraq’s Islamists found refuge in Iran in thousands. Funded and supported by Iran, they contributed to the war efforts of the Islamic Republic, endorsed Khomeini’s claim to leadership over the whole Muslim community and advocated wilayat al-faqih. The article attempts to reconstruct the relationship between the Da‘wah Party and Khomeini during his exile in Najaf. It goes on to examine how the party dealt with wilayat al-faqih on a theoretical level and assesses the reasons for the party’s change in ideological alignment.
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Disrupted identity: Naim Kattan’s Farewell Babylon and the exile narrative of Baghdadi Jews
By Amin MalakIn his multi-genre writings, the Québécois-Canadian author Naim Kattan often refers nostalgically to his early years as an Iraqi Jew growing up in the 1940s’ Baghdad. His autobiographical novel Farewell Babylon (1975) represents an important historical document about the complex reality of the life of Iraqi Jews, often referred to as the Babylonian Jews. Part of the novel’s historicity is the dramatization of the Farhud (violent looting) of 1941, which took place in Baghdad and to which the author was a witness as a young boy. The novel traces the trajectory of the coming of age of an aspiring intellectual, facing challenging personal, social and political obstacles in a fraught, alienating and bigoted environment, with exiting the country being the only possible salvation.
This article argues that both minority persecution and exile create identitarian havoc for those subjected to them, especially when evoking the vexed, often misunderstood, issue of the Arab Jew. Kattan’s novel, as well as those of the other forcibly exiled Iraqi-Jewish writers, illustrates nevertheless the notion that while uprootedness is painfully destabilizing, it carries with it a potential for rebirth, the reinvention of self and the accretion of layered identities. Moreover, the article foregrounds Kattan’s skilful deployment of the autobiographical novel as a genre to convey complex intellectual and political issues while maintaining his reader’s sympathy and interest. Finally, the article aims to pay tribute to Naim Kattan, an often-overlooked writer by both Iraqi and Canadian critics, and highlight his touching, lyricized narrative of nostalgia about his birthplace, Baghdad.
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‘A true Iraqi’: blogging from the Green Zone in post-invasion Iraq
More LessThe use of digital spaces to record everyday experiences and speak against oppression has taken on different forms throughout the Middle East over the last decade. Following the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iraqi women used online spaces to grapple with the politics of everyday life – growing up and working in war-torn Iraq. In this paper we engage with one Iraqi woman – Neurotic Iraqi Wife (or ‘Neurotica’) – who works and blogs from Iraq’s Green Zone. Neurotica questions her presence in the Americanized Green Zone and agonizes over her identity as a married ‘Iraqi expat’. Her blog tells a story of movement, struggle, alienation, longing and nostalgia. In her blog, Neurotica practises a digital self that questions political processes, occupation, intervention and her own presence in Iraq. Her blog offers a glimpse into a life-world shaped during a time of war, social chaos and violence.
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The (re)imagined Mosul: Online appropriations of a negotiated particular identity within the greater Iraqi context
More LessThis article examines the appropriations of online media space(s) by Iraqis, in particular Iraqis that descend from the city of Mosul. It looks at one forum in particular, and how the participants negotiate their national and local identity and relationship to the homeland, specifically after the 2003 war on Iraq. The article looks at how the said forum is used to construct a re(imagined) Mosul, through elements of nostalgia to the past, and an idealization process of the homeland in a way that does not, in reality, exist in the present. The article sheds light also on arguments on the particularistic assertions of identity within the greater Iraqi context, and how they challenge a dominant Iraqi national discourse that borders Mosul from the south, and a Kurdish cultural and political power that challenges it from the north.
The article includes arguments of a fragmegrated identity that the forum invites its participants to have: accepting the national Iraqi identity, but also clinging into the particularity of the Maslawi identity that differentiates them from the rest of the population.
This article builds arguments on what characterizes the Iraqi online communities by looking at Anderson’s imagined community, Brah’s diasporic borders, Hall’s cultural identity , Sreberny’s diasporic gaze and Rosenau’s theory of fragmegration. The research also sheds light the lack of literature on Iraqi diaspora, both external and internal, and argues for the need for empirical research on the effects of the Iraqi dispersal on the formation of the Iraqi national identity.
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