MER Article From the Editor (Summer 2003) Two months after the welcome demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime, it has become customary to say that the US won the war and is losing the peace in Iraq. This formulation, coined to describe US neglect of Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban, gives the Bush administration too much credit. The The Editors • 3 min read
Current Analysis Occupational Hazards Reluctantly, some American officials recently began to use a new word when talking about our presence in Iraq: occupation. Even though the Bush administration worked hard to keep this word out of our national vocabulary before and during the war, it has nonetheless started to appear in press briefin Elliott Colla • 3 min read
Current Analysis Bush Misled Public About Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction At long last, many are realizing that President Bush misled the public about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But unlike the vigorous questioning of Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain on the same issue, our long overdue debate about Saddam Hussein’s presumed illicit arsenal is missing the point. Chris Toensing • 2 min read
Current Analysis Dual-Use Material and the Weapons Search in Iraq Before the US-British invasion of Iraq, most skeptics did not argue that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed no illicit weapons of mass destruction. Rather, the majority of the international community doubted that Iraqi non-conventional weapons capabilities posed a pressing threat to the peace. Repeatedly presented with false, dated, improperly Alistair Millar • 9 min read
Current Analysis Shiite Religious Parties Fill Vacuum in Southern Iraq Religious Shiite parties and militias in Iraq have recently stepped into the gap resulting from the collapse of the Baath Party, especially in the sacred shrine cities. This development must have come as a shock to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who in early March preferred Iraqis as US Juan Cole • 9 min read
Current Analysis Pro-Israel Hawks and the Second Gulf War On the eve of the Second Gulf War, Rep. James Moran (D-VA) told a meeting of his constituents that "if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this." Leaders of the organized Jewish community Joel Beinin • 10 min read
Current Analysis Egypt Struggles to Control Anti-War Protests For the second consecutive Friday, thousands of Egyptians gathered at Cairo's al-Azhar mosque on March 28, 2003 to voice their opposition to the US-led invasion and bombing of Iraq. But it was immediately apparent upon arrival at al-Azhar that the March 28 demonstration would be very different from Paul Schemm • 8 min read
Current Analysis Turkey's Dangerous Game During his diplomatic attempts to avert the war now underway in Iraq, Abdullah Gul, until recently prime minister of Turkey and now foreign minister, said that he was suffering from sleepless nights. Today Gul's body language signals his distress at the deadlock faced by his neo-Islamist Justice and Yuksel Taskin, Koray Caliskan • 10 min read
Current Analysis Irrelevance Lost As the United States and its small band of supporters begin a war against Iraq without Security Council authorization or even a majority show of support, questions about the future of the United Nations seem ever more urgent. For the last several months, Bush administration officials have issued dire warnings Marc Lynch • 8 min read
Current Analysis "Free People Will Set the Course of History" As the Bush administration struggled to find a justification for launching an attack on Iraq, churning out sketchy intelligence reports about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda, Washington wordsmiths produced their own grist for the war mill: the prospect of a democratic pax Robert Blecher • 22 min read
MER Article Groundswell The day after many hundreds of thousands of Americans joined millions in hundreds of cities across the world to protest a war which had not even started, the day after what was perhaps the largest mass action in history, George W. Bush shrugged. "First of all, size of protest, Bilal El-Amine, Chris Toensing • 17 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Spring 2003) Yes, Thomas Friedman admitted in early March of 2003, the costs of George W. Bush's increasingly unilateral Iraq adventure are beginning to mount. Friedman, along with ex-National Security Council man Kenneth Pollack, has been a reassuring voice of reason coaxing fellow Establishment liberals into what another New York The Editors • 8 min read
