Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

T h e worlds major powers and the United Nations (UN) are increasingly using economic sanctions to achieve international political objectives. For example, the United Nations recently imposed sanctions to force Iraq out of Kuwait, to compel Serbia to stop aiding the Bosnian rebels, to topple the Haitian military, and to end apartheid. Similarly, the United States has threatened to punish China economically for human rights abuses and has tightened its long-standing embargo of Cuba. From 1991 to 1994 the UN Security Council imposed mandatory sanctions eight times, compared to only twice from 1945 to 1990.' A critical signal that faith in economic sanctions continues to grow was given in January 1995, when then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali prop s e d the creation of a new UN agency to monitor the implementation of economic sanctions and to assess in advance the likely effectiveness of contemplated sanctions? Military instruments are often thought to be the only effective means for achieving ambitious foreign policy goals like taking or defending territory, altering a state's military behavior, and changing a state's regime or internal political structure. Since World War I, however, economic sanctions have come to be viewed as the liberal alternative to war.3 From crises involving the League of Nations before World War I1 to disputes involving the United Nations today, proponents typically argue that economic sanctions can often be as effective as military force and are more humane. As David Baldwin has stated, \"Reasonable people may differ with respect to the utility of

Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work

of his career but also, and more significantly, claiming that here she is providing 'for the first time, a stylistic analysis of one of the American theatre's most fascinating practitioners.' That she has this justification depends, partly at least, on the fact that his plays and productions have commonly been regarded as belonging largely, if not indeed exclusively, to the realm of the popular stage, whereas she seeks to draw them within the orbit of those revolutionary endeavours which in divers European countries sought to establish a new theatrical 'naturalism' both in play composition and in play presentation the avant-garde activities to be found in the work of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Danish Theatre Royal, the French Theatre Libre, and the German Freie Blihne. That her endeavour is indeed fully warranted is demonstrated by the fact that when, for example, the Russian company and its companion organizations visited the United States various critics stressed their belief that its prod uctions 'had nothing new to teach Broadway.' Still more significant is the fact that Stanislavski himself put the seal of his approval on the activities of the American directorplaywright by actually making him an honorary member of the Moscow troupe. No doubt labels in themselves are of little or minor consequence, and no doubt on occasion they can prove misleading: yet it is of importance that we should teach ourselves how properly to interpret and evaluate outstanding achievements such as those manifested by such men as Belasco, and here Mrs Marker's study must be regarded as indeed a most valuable and accomplished textbook, or guidebook, call it which we will (ALLARDYCE NICOLL)

The great war and modern memory

The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics

In the aftermath of the U.S.-led coalition’s defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, many observers believed that Saddam Hussein would eventually be toppled in a military coup. After years of dashed hopes, however, few expect that the Iraqi military is likely to undertake such action. Many analysts claim that the Iraqi regime is, in fact, coup-proof. Saddam Hussein’s staying power should cause any similarly led U.S. coalition to rethink not just the possibilities of both coups and coupprooang but how it would aght and defeat a coup-proof regime. In this article, I analyze how states become coup-proof, focusing speciacally on the policies that Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria have adopted to achieve this goal. These policies include reliance on groups with special loyalties to the regime and the creation of parallel military organizations and multiple internal security agencies. The United States has a particular interest in how these countries have made their regimes coup-proof. Saudi Arabia is an important U.S. ally, Iraq is a hostile state, and Syria is somewhere in between. Conoict between the United States and either Iraq or Syria, however, pits a superpower with a short attention span against regimes that have accepted serious constraints on their ability to exercise their full military potential. Both states have developed heavily politicized militaries that are incapable of realizing this potential as long as their leaderships continue to divert resources to protect their regimes. At the same time, they have created a militarized politics that is surprisingly resilient in the face of defeat. If a U.S-led coalition decides that it wants to overthrow a coup-proofed regime through military action, it will have to devote serious attention to the regime’s true underpinnings. Field commanders will need more extensive means of understanding their opponent’s political-military situation and greater insight into the coalition’s political intentions. Moreover, the coordination of political-military operations will require greater political involvement

Coup-proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East

Preface Note on Transliteration 1 The Land and People of Modern Iraq 2 The British Mandate, 1920--1932 3 The Erosion of the British Legacy, 1932--1945 4 The End of the Monarchy, 1946--1958 5 The Qasim Era, 1958--1963 6 The Arab Nationalists in Power, 1963--1968 7 The Era of Ba'th Party Rule, 1968--1979 8 The Saddam Husain Regime, 1979--1989 9 The Saddam Husain Regime, 1990--2003 10 The US Attempt at Nation-Building in Iraq, 2003--2006 11 The Stabilization of Iraq, 2007--2011 12 Economic, Social, and Cultural Change in Iraq, 2007--2011 Appendix: Tables Notes Glossary Political Personalities Bibliography Index

The Modern History of Iraq

If we think there is a fast solution to changing the governance of Iraq, warned U.S. Marine General Anthony Zinni in the months before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, \"then we don't understand history.\" Never has the old line about those who fail to understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the world. Examining the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British empire—the first attempt by a Western power to remake Mesopotamia in its own image—renowned Iraq expert Toby Dodge uncovers a series of shocking parallels between the policies of a declining British empire and those of the current American administration. Between 1920 and 1932, Britain endeavored unsuccessfully to create a modern democratic state from three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which it had conquered and occupied during the First World War. Caught between the conflicting imperatives of controlling a region of great strategic importance (Iraq straddled the land and air route between British India and the Mediterranean) and reconstituting international order through the liberal ideal of modern state sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandate system, British administrators undertook an extremely difficult task. To compound matters, they did so without the benefit of detailed information about the people and society they sought to remake. Blinded by potent cultural stereotypes and subject to mounting pressures from home, these administrators found themselves increasingly dependent on a mediating class of shaikhs to whom they transferred considerable power and on whom they relied for the maintenance of order. When order broke down, as it routinely did, the British turned to the airplane. (This was Winston Churchill’s lasting contribution to the British enterprise in Iraq: the concerted use of air power—of what would in a later context be called \"shock and awe\"—to terrorize and subdue dissident factions of the Iraqi people.) Ultimately, Dodge shows, the state the British created held all the seeds of a violent, corrupt, and relentlessly oppressive future for the Iraqi people, one that has continued to unfold. Like the British empire eight decades before, the United States and Britain have taken upon themselves today the grand task of transforming Iraq and, by extension, the political landscape of the Middle East. Dodge contends that this effort can succeed only with a combination of experienced local knowledge, significant deployment of financial and human resources, and resolute staying power. Already, he suggests, ominous signs point to a repetition of the sequence of events that led to the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein’s murderous tyranny.

Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied

Under the Eisenhower Doctrine, the United States pledged to give increased economic and military aid to receptive Middle Eastern countries and to protect - with US armed forces if necessary - the territorial integrity and political independence of these nations from the threat of "international communism". Salim Yaqub demonstrates that although the United States officially aimed to protect the Middle East from Soviet encroachment, the Eisenhower Doctrine had the unspoken mission of containing the radical Arab nationalism of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom Eisenhower regarded as an unwitting agent of Soviet expansionism. By offering aid and protection, the Eisenhower administration hoped to convince a majority of Arab governments to side openly with the West in the Cold War, thus isolating Nasser and decreasing the likelihood that the Middle East would fall under Soviet domination. Employing a wide range of declassified Egyptian, British and American archival sources, Yaqub offers a comprehensive account of Eisenhower's efforts to counter Nasserism's appeal throughout the Arab Middle East. Challenging interpretations of US-Arab relations that emphasize cultural antipathies and clashing values, Yaqub instead argues that the political dispute between the United States and the Nasserist movement occurred within a shared moral framework - a pattern that continues to characterize US-Arab controversies in the 21st century.

Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East

In this paper, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Stephen M.Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government contend that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is its intimate relationship with Israel. The authors argue that although often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, the U.S. commitment to Israel is due primarily to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.\" This paper goes on to describe the various activities that pro-Israel groups have undertaken in order to shift U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.

L. Carl Brown

Papers

The Modern History of Iraq

Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied

Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

The 1953 Coup in Iran