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| The case for withdrawal |
Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New Press 2006; ISBN 1 59558 079 4; 185pp; £14.99)
Reviewed by: MOKEY
Prefaced with accolades from a galaxy of anti-war and progressive luminaries ranging from John Berger to Eve Ensler, this is a short (105 pages plus afterword and notes) but powerful polemic, containing much useful information and analysis.
The title, though, is slightly misleading: only one of the seven chapters is explicitly devoted to making the case for immediate withdrawal (and rebutting the counter-arguments). Instead other chapters address the underlying motivations for the 2003 invasion, the United States' long history of imperial intervention (and its erasure from historical memory) and a potted history of Britain's earlier occupation of Iraq.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the brevity of the book itself, several issues are dealt with too briefly, eg insurgent atrocities (p61) and the question of a possible UN force to replace the existing occupation (p82). Likewise, some crucial information, for example the Saudi study on the motives of "foreign fighters" travelling to Iraq (which found that "the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists [but] became radicalised by the war itself"), is missing.
This reader could also have done with much more on the realities of occupied Iraq for ordinary Iraqis (which are briefly touched on in Chapter 2) and felt that the claim - cited with apparent approval - that "the fundamental division in Iraq today ... [is] between `the pro-occupation camp and the anti-occupation camp'" is too simple a gloss on the complex and fragmented reality of today's Iraq, where at least three identifiable wars are taking place simultaneously.
Nonetheless, the book's length hopefully means that it will be picked up and read by open-minded readers who want to get an "anti-occupation" perspective as well as by anti-war activists - who will definitely want to read it even if it isn't exactly the "complete manual for those who wish to resist the occupation" that Arundhati Roy claims on the dust jacket.