Saddam

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) released its latest human rights report for Iraq covering the first half of 2009. The U.N. noted the decrease in violence in Iraq, but that there were still deaths everyday in the country. More importantly, it recorded continued institutional abuses in the justice system, and reminders of the old regime.

The Pre-War Situation

The August 2009 issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies contains an article by Micah Zenko entitled, “Foregoing Limited Force: The George W. Bush Administration’s Decision Not to Attack Ansar Al-Islam.” Before 2003, the Bush White House singled out Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamist group, and its camp in Kurdistan as a reason to invade Iraq. The U.S. claimed hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters had fled there after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

One of the major points of contention over Iraq is whether the war has improved the standard of living for the average citizen. Obviously there is much more freedom now than under the previous dictatorial regime of Saddam, and Iraq is a fledgling democracy. Being able to vote however does not provide people with food, jobs or services. A comparison of aggregate statistics from before and after the 2003 invasion actually shows a mixed bag of results for Iraq.

In the July/August 2009 issue of The National Interest, former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer painted a picture of the first round of Iraq inspections in the 1990s. On the one hand, his piece is informative because it explains how international support for inspections in Iraq deteriorated. This was pushed along by Saddam’s astute use of bribes and lucrative petroleum deals through the United Nations’ Oil for Food program to sow dissent amongst the Security Council.

Much of the commentary about Iraq is driven by U.S. experiences, which are not always the reality in Iraq. When the sectarian war took off in 2006 for example, much of the writing about the country was focused upon the Sunni-Shiite divide. A common argument was that these two interpretations of Islam had always been in conflict, and could not coexist in Iraq. Later, when the U.S. began working with the tribes in Anbar, which became known as the Awakening, a new line of thinking opened up claiming that Iraq was at heart a tribal society.