Jacqueline S. Ismael

Whither Iraq? Beyond Saddam, sanctions and occupation

The question of Iraqs future in the wake of 35 years of dictatorship and 13 years of sanctions is a major problem on the global agenda. This question is complicated by numerous factors, not the least of which are military occupation by the worlds sole superpower, growing resistance and hostility to the presence of foreign troops and contractors, and the post-occupation influx of international terrorist groups into Iraq. To address the question of ‘whither Iraq’, this paper represents an effort to identify guideposts to Iraqs future that are manifest in its present. These guideposts are identified as a function of the interplay between national, regional and international political dynamics. Iraqs future is situated in an interaction between history and contemporary political dynamics. The USAs policy of nation-building and state-building in Iraq are examined against two earlier models of political reconstruction there—British and Baathist. Using the guideposts revealed, four scenarios are posited based on different sets of assumptions about the state of state- and nation building.

Studying the Arabs: Myths and metaphors

The relationship between knowledge and power is examined in this article in terms of the social science literature base on Arab countries. It is argued that knowledge imposes normative constraints on the exercise of power, and the exercise of power is dependent on the lack of knowledge. This is examined in terms of the knowledge base on Iraq and Palestine, the two countries in the Arab world most decimated in the post-World War II era by the exercise of external power politics. The study is organized in three phases: (1) delimiting the population of scholarly literature in the social sciences on the Middle East by country; (2) drawing representative samples of scholarly literature on Iraq and Palestine from this population; and (3) content analysis of the samples.