Iraq

“I am obsessed with the next five years in Iraq, not the last five years in Iraq.” - UK Foreign Secretary,

David Miliband, December 2007

Since the 2003 invasion, over a million Iraqis have been killed, over three million have been forced to flee their homes, and sectarian violence has led to the balkanisation of Baghdad, now broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls.

According to an October 2006 Lancet-published survey (using a methodology…

After additional research undertaken in rural Iraq, Britain's ORB (Opinion Research Business) polling agency has largely confirmed on 28 January its earlier estimate that over a million Iraqis have died since the invasion of British and American forces.

The revised estimate puts the death toll at 1,033,000 people down from the 1.2m-figure published in August.

The initial analysis was based on surveys from primarily urban areas. ORB decided to check their results when…

A new estimate by the US Congress's Joint Economic Committee puts the US cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars at $1.7 trillion, almost double the sum the Bush administration has asked or received to finance the two wars through 2008.

Released by Democrats on 13 November, the report incorporates such expenses as medical care for wounded soldiers, interest on borrowed money and the impact on oil prices since the invasion, in addition to the funds necessary to sustain the occupation.…

The Chagos Islanders

The right of Chagos islanders to return to their homeland has been once again thwarted by the British government. On November 6th the government declared that it was going ahead with its decision to appeal to the House of Lords to seek clarification about the status of its overseas territories. The appeal will be heard in 2008.

Darfur

The conflict in Darfur has escalated in recent months with civilians bearing the brunt of the violence.

The…

Much has been made in recent weeks of the apparent success of the US “surge” the massive increase in US troops deployed to Iraq.

In fact, the picture is less rosy when we look closely.

In a report published on 5 November, former Pentagon analyst Anthony Cordesman observed that the recent decline in the worst kinds of violence in Iraq was due to a combination of factors, “the most important of which had little to do with the `surge' in US troops”.

“Much of the…

Not long after the discovery of oil in Persia in 1908, Winston Churchill instigated a programme to convert the British navy from coal-to oil- powered vessels. Control over the oilfields of the Middle East - including, of course, those of modern-day Iraq - became a major priority of western foreign policy, and to a large extent has shaped the face of the peace movement today.

Jon Sack's Iraqi Oil for Beginners is a comic history of Iraq which takes us through the fascinating (and for…

In mid-October, the United Nations reported that 2,000 Iraqis flee their homes every day. 2.2 million are refugees in their own country, while more than 2.2m have fled to neighbouring countries. (1m were displaced prior to the 2003 invasion.)

In Syria, the 1.2m Iraqi refugees amount to 7% of the population; while in Jordan, 500,000 - 750,000 Iraqi refugees make up perhaps 10% of the population.
    A comparable inflow in Britain…

Last month, over a thousand Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad in protest at the building of a separation wall in the poor, mainly Shi'ite neighbourhood of al-Washash.

It is not the first wall to be built in the city: the US military - which regards separation walls as a centrepiece of its strategy to end sectarian violence in the area - began construction of a three- mile, 3.6-metre-high concrete wall in April and are currently in the process of erecting more in at least five…

When the polling agency ORB's findings came out [see last issue], I was sure that The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times and other major papers would cry out in outrage and pronounce in thick, black ink across their respective front pages that 1.2 million Iraqis had died because of the Iraq war: a genocide revealed.

I expected fervent discussion, indignation and controversy across the entire world.

I was wrong: the poll was ignored.

Although it…

The privatisation of so much of the US military machine has been more than just a subplot of the Iraq war, and Jeremy Scahill's comprehensive study of the rise of mercenary company Blackwater is a useful guide to the reconfigured military-industrial complex the anti-war movement now faces.

Blackwater was founded by Christian conservative Erik Prince in 1997 to meet the “anticipated demand for outsourcing” in the US military.

From a relatively low-key initial training role, it…

A poll of 1,461 adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 regions indicates that as many as 1.2 million Iraqis have died violently because of the conflict since the invasion

British polling agency ORB, which has conducted polls for the BBC and the Financial Services Authority, asked randomly-selected adults in face-to-face interviews in mid-August how many members of their immediate households had “died as a result of the conflict (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old…

These two books are moving and compelling explorations of the lives of Iraqi women. One is a work of fiction; the other an oral history. While the narrative forms allow an intimate and detailed view of individual lives, both books are suffused with an understanding of how the political situation of Iraq has always gone to the core of how life is experienced.

Haifa Zangana weaves together the stories of five women exiled in London during the late 1990s. Despite differences of politics…

An opinion poll released in August found that Iraqis oppose plans to open the country's oil fields to foreign investment - by a factor of two to one.

The poll, conducted by US- based Custom Strategic Research, found that there are no ethnic, sectarian or geographical groups that prefer foreign companies.

The poll also found that most Iraqis feel kept in the dark about future oil plans. Only 4% of respondents felt the information they'd been given about the oil…

Gordon Brown is succeeding with his first great spin campaign, appearing to distance himself from the aggressive policies of his predecessor while at the same time escalating his two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

YouGov found in early August that 73% of respondents think the new prime minister is not as close to US president George W. Bush as Tony Blair was, and 57% think Brown has got the relationship with the US “about right”.

At the same time, according to the Sunday…

On 30 July, WWII merchant navy veteran and 1991 Gulf Peace Team camper Richard Crump, 87, marked 16 years of his weekly Whitehall vigil for Iraq. Originally a demonstration against the economic sanctions on Iraq, the vigil has continued as a protest against the US/UK occupation - and against the entire “war on terror”. Most Mondays, Richard can be found at the corner of Whitehall and Parliament Square between 12noon and 2pm.