MER Article The Trouble with the Tribunal “Baghdad, if you ask your friends about it, has one re- markable peculiarity.” [1] So wrote Freya Stark in 1937 in her famed, and more than slightly Orientalist, collection of travel essays, Baghdad Sketches. Today, Baghdad has a number of peculiarities, though its most staggering is the pervasiveness of the Jennifer R. Ridha • 10 min read
MER Article Oil Prices and Regime Resilience in the Gulf The steady summertime creep of oil prices past $40 per barrel and over an unprecedented $45 surprised most oil analysts, including this one, who were expecting the price to drop after the US-led invasion of Iraq. But no one is likely to have been as stunned as the Bush administration Fareed Mohamedi • 8 min read
MER Article The Paris Club, the Washington Consensus and the Baghdad Cake In October 2004, representatives from the G-8 and 11 other countries will meet without fanfare or press coverage in a quiet room in the French Finance Ministry. It is unlikely that their lunchtime dessert will actually be a cake decorated with the stripes and green stars of the Iraqi flag, Justin Alexander • 5 min read
MER Article State Rebuilding in Reverse In June 2003, L. Paul Bremer, head of the now dissolved Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), announced the broad outlines of the Bush administration’s plan to rebuild Iraq along strict free market principles. “The removal of Saddam Hussein,” Bremer helpfully explained, “offers Iraqis hope for a better economic future. For Khalid Mustafa Medani • 14 min read
MER Article Silent Battalions of Democracy Sheikh Majid al-Azzawi was one proud Iraqi. His office, surrounded by sandbags, barbed wire and tall concrete walls, looked more like a military base than an administrative building. But even the pitch-black darkness that swirled in the corridors most of the day did not dampen al-Azzawi’s spirits. “We are Herbert Docena • 21 min read
MER Article The Insurgency Intensifies Within months after the fall of Saddam, the US military was engaged in a low-intensity guerrilla conflict throughout the predominantly Sunni Arab towns north and west of Baghdad. At first, the US dismissed the attacks as the work of Baathist “diehards” and “dead-enders,” a minor problem that would swiftly disappear Steve Negus • 16 min read
MER Article Castles Built of Sand: US Governance and Exit Strategies in Iraq Speaking to the American Enterprise Institute on February 26, 2003, George W. Bush invoked the examples of Germany and Japan to underline that, the United States would leave behind in Iraq "an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom." After Christoph Wilcke • 23 min read
MER Article Yusif Sayigh Yusif Sayigh (1916-2004) was a Palestinian nationalist, an Arab nationalist and one of the most influential exponents of Palestinian and Arab planning and development. He entered the national scene just after World War II as the primary organizer of a fund to raise money through taxes and tolls to buy Roger Owen • 1 min read
MER Article Maxime Rodinson Maxime Rodinson died on May 24, in Paris, at the age of 89. He was a contributing editor of this magazine from 1988 to 2000, and was honored for his pioneering work at MERIP’s fifteenth anniversary celebrations in Washington in 1986. As a scholar, Maxime Rodinson first approached the Joe Stork • 1 min read
MER Article Mahfoud Bennoune Mahfoud Bennoune died on May 17, succumbing finally to amyloidosis, an auto-immune disease he had battled since 1990. Mahfoud authored numerous pieces on colonial and post-colonial Algeria and Maghribi workers in Europe for Middle East Report (then MERIP Reports) beginning in the mid-1970s. He was selected as one of the Joe Stork • 1 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Fall 2004) It is not hard to understand why the judiciously written and copiously footnoted report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States debuted to widespread acclaim in July 2004. Coming as it did amid the febrile US presidential campaign season, the report rode the quadrennial wave of Deborah J. Gerner, Chris Toensing, The Editors • 10 min read
