It will be interesting to see exactly which customs the Vatican is going to allow from the past rich five centuries of Anglican worship, life and thought.
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 ColumnsPaul Rogers Li Datong Fred Halliday Mary Kaldor Daniele Archibugi The World
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geopolitics of iraqi warFrom Somalia to Pakistan, Japan to Central Asia, Europe to America, openDemocracy writers present global perspectives on Saddam’s overthrow.
The damning findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report in Washington on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction highlight larger political failures, says Charles Peña.
By launching a “war on terror” after 11 September 2001, America made a tragic mistake, says George Soros. The country must now learn a different lesson: fighting terror by creating more innocent victims perpetuates the cycle of violence, creates a permanent state of war, and corrodes the open society that wages it.
American leaders invaded Iraq high on national vainglory and moral absolutism, says Marcus Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies. United States forces there will never gain legitimacy. They should leave as soon as possible and allow Iraqis to find what America itself needs: a new relationship with the world.
America gave “the terrorists” their victory in Iraq by invading. It must now leave, on its own terms, says the Cato Institute’s Charles Peña, as he judges the occupation against one overriding concern: the security of Americans in their own homeland.
The Iraq war is only one aspect of a “greater west Asian crisis” that carries the extreme danger of further, terrible violence. Fred Halliday joins knowledge, insight, empathy and anger to assess the current “winners” and “losers” and insist on the central importance of listening to the Iraqi people.
When citizens’ fundamental freedoms are made a casualty of sweeping political objectives, the damage is to democracy itself. The experienced British lawyer Geoffrey Bindman draws a lesson from those imprisoned without trial in Tony Blair’s backyard – Belmarsh prison.
Could the insurgency of the radical Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr fuse with the Sunni rebellion to ignite Iraqi nationalism against the occupiers?
What lies behind the revolt of the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Shi’a followers? Does it signal the end of American rule in Iraq? Laura Sandys sees parallels and portents in an earlier period of colonial rule.
One year on from the Iraq war, an experienced researcher of military conflict and peacemaking asks: was there an alternative, what can be done now, and what are the lessons of Iraq for conflict prevention and peace-building worldwide?
Japan is learning a new geopolitics. Its sense of identity, capacity, and relation to the world is shifting amidst great economic, military and regional pressures. But what kind of foreign policy model will Japan choose? One of the country’s foremost analysts explores the possible answers to a reopened question.
What political choices should the United States now make in Iraq? Christopher Hitchens, Mark Danner, Samantha Power and David Frum debated recently in front of a packed New York audience. James Westcott was there.
The arrest of the Iraqi dictator presents a huge opportunity to the country’s new political figures. Can they seize it?
Amid terrorist carnage, military blunders and CIA panic, Mary Kaldor finds hope for a democratic future in the creative social energies of ordinary Iraqis. Will its possibilities be crushed by America’s vaulting strategic ambition and Britain’s disdainful pragmatism? The US presidential election in 2004 may help decide.
Before agreeing to any military involvement in Iraqi peacekeeping, the United Nations and its member states should recall the bitter experience of the disastrous United States/UN operations in Somalia a decade ago.
Why has the Japanese government decided to send armed forces to Iraq to assist in its economic recovery? A leading scholar of Japanese politics places the decision within the context of the country’s search for a self-defined global role over the past generation.
The Iraq Reconstruction Assessment Mission, an independent team of experts commissioned by the Pentagon, recently published a report of their ten-day Iraqi tour. After presenting evidence to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the authors draw on their report to challenge the Coalition’s masters of war to a gargantuan effort of peacemaking and society-building.
The transition from war to post-war in Iraq is proving more painful and bloody than coalition leaders expected. US and British troops on the ground are forced to adapt quickly from the role of war-fighters to peace-keepers, while strategic planners confront the failures and lacunae of pre-war projections. If lives are to be saved and the reconstruction of Iraqi society is to succeed, an urgent rethinking is needed.
Finland’s anti-war prime minister, Anneli Jäätteenmäki, was forced to resign over her conduct in relation to a leaked memo on Iraq. As questions to American and British leaders intensify over their own record in the prelude to war, does Finland’s ‘Iraqgate’ reveal a political culture where consistency between words and actions still matters?
The debate over the Iraq war’s legitimacy focused crucially on Saddam’s weapons programmes. One of the war’s most influential advocates has retracted his view of their threat. Does this make his original work an example of propaganda masquerading as scholarship?
Despite huge public dissent over its support for war in Iraq, Spain’s ruling Popular Party suffered only marginal damage in the country’s municipal elections. The most severe lesson of the results is the failure of the Spanish left to understand the changes that are transforming Spanish society, and to match the right’s reinvention with its own.
The Spanish government ignored its people’s almost universal opposition to war in Iraq. This, itself the latest in a series of convulsive internal crises, raises serious questions about Spain’s political direction and even the commitment to democracy of its prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar. As a crucial election cycle approaches, will the bond between a troubled Spain and a hawkish US be renewed or broken?
Turkey’s triple role in the Iraq war confounded many experts. While its neo-Islamist government supported the US invasion of Iraq, and its military refrained from major incursion into the Kurdish-controlled north, its parliament refused help to American forces. Turkey’s relations with the US were strained, yet without any diplomatic benefit from the EU to compensate. The crisis has shifted the political ground under Turkey’s feet. Who will design the new maps?
The Iraq war found the Czech Republic torn between traditional loyalties to the US and UK and its ties to ‘old Europe’. As the country prepares for its referendum on membership of the EU, the Prague-based director of the Institute for European Policy asks whether the Czechs can continue this uncomfortable balancing act.
What was the war in Iraq all about and what does it mean for international relations? First, you have to look beyond the surface explanation to what was an ambitious plan for the Middle East. Secondly, you have to subject the perceived threats and their solution to the rigours of ‘just war’ theory. Only then can you begin to assess both the true nature of the conflict so far and the extent of damage which the world order could suffer as a result.
The Iraq war has provoked deep divisions within the political left. But the resignation of distinguished columnist John Lloyd from Britain's ‘New Statesman’ was motivated by the magazine's evasion of modern political realities and resort to moralistic anti-Americanism rather than its anti-war stance. Here he builds on his argument to ask: what future has the left if it cannot deal honestly with the rise of terrorism and the crimes of dictators?
Battling power cuts to get onto the internet, our correspondent in Cameroon reports on the war in Iraq seen from an African point of view, and voices a plea, and a warning to Anglo-American belligerence.
The regime of Bashar al-Assad, now under intense pressure from the US in the wake of Saddam’s fall, appears to be one of the losers of the Iraq war. But modern Syrian history offers a warning to America that combative rhetoric of the ‘rogue state’ variety may be less effective in encouraging progress than the quieter diplomacy of its British ally.
After destroying the Saddam regime, the US faces an even bigger task – winning the trust of Iraq’s people. It is time for a historic act of symbolic atonement.
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