Writing Iraqi history

...Although I did not intend it this way, the book has a bearing on the sensitive issues that Sunnis and Shi`is have been debating since the establishment of modern Iraq: who is an Iraqi, and who represents the true spirit of Arabism in Iraq...

...Were Iraq to splinter, the Shi`is in the south would lose the capital Baghdad (where Shi`is are more than half of the population) and the shrine cities of Kazimain and Samarra, situated in central Iraq, as well as substantial revenues from the oil wells in the Kurdish north...

...Warning against an alarming development within the Party, 'Alawi wrote: The intellectuals in charge of our publications began omitting the term "imperialist" from the Party's literature, replacing it with terms like "the new world order" and the "international community...

...What touched me in that experience is the fact that my book gave Iraqi Shi`is an opportunity to look in a mirror, and in the process also to acknowledge me and to admit my existence...

...In one simple stroke he managed to destroy the infrastructure of an entire CIA operation intended to undermine his rule...

...Both those who related positively to the book and those who rejected it outright have shared three basic concerns: How valid and useful are the book's major conclusions for explaining modern Iraqi society and politics...

...1. For Lami's review and the subsequent correspondence in al-Quds al-Arabi see: 'Ala' al-Lami, "A Suspicious Reading of the Sectarian Composition of Iraqi Society," 26, 27, and 28 February, 1997...

...The upshot was that the Syrian publisher asked for and received formal permission to publish the translation from Princeton University Press (a move almost as unusual in the Arab world as it would be in China...

...Metaphors and vocabulary that were part of the language of the ArabIsraeli conflict in the period before Oslo were easily invoked once again: the Israeli who has no place in our midst, the outsider who has no right to study our history, the Jewish-Zionist and imperialist infiltration of Arab culture and Muslim civilization...

...This joke is said to be widespread these days in the streets and coffee shops of Baghdad...

...OBODY KNOWS what the future will bring to Iraqis...

...The timing of the initiative is also interesting: when the Syrian publisher approached me in late 1994, the Syrian and Israeli ambassadors to the United States were meeting at a site near Washington, D.C...

...A series of letters to the editor followed Lami's review...

...Alawi's letter was published in Tariq alShdb, one of the organs of the Iraqi Communist Party...

...Like their parents and grandparents earlier in this century, the younger generation of Iraqi Shi`is continues to search for its identity...

...Salim al-Wasiti, "The Place of Conspiracy Theory in Iraqi Culture," 15-16 March, 1997...

...Seven years after the Gulf War, suffering and despair have forced Iraqis to fall back on their primordial identities: the family, the clan, the sect, the region...

...These reviews, and the numerous encounters that I have had during the last year with Iraqis of various backgrounds, both in the United States and in England, testify to the way that Iraqis in exile have confronted not only the book and its author, but also their own history and predicament...

...Lami is a hard-core Maoist who lives in Geneva and sometimes works for Barzan al-TakritiSaddam's half-brother and Iraq's ambassador to Switzerland...

...Yes," I said, "I remember that review...

...As part of a strategy for survival, the Party promoted a nationalist ideology intended to project it as the bearer of Pan-Arabism...

...To this day, there has not been any genuine willingness on the part of the U.S...

...Journalists visiting Iraq report that the Iraqi middle class has reached a state of destitution, and very little is heard of the lower classes, whose members must be in worse condition...

...Nevertheless, Iraq's rulers were determined to keep power in Sunni hands, and they therefore ignored Shil claims that they were "the indigenous sons of the country" and that their tribal origin was proof of their Iraqi and Arab identity...

...One way to justify this has been to portray the Sunnis as better Arab nationalists than the Shi`is, while DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 27 POLITICS ABROAD presenting Shi'i grievances and protests against discrimination as acts of disloyalty that promote sectarian divisions...

...This suggests that behind the power struggles between Shi`is and Sunnis in modern Iraq there exist two sectarian groups that are in fact quite similar...

...If I needed any confirmation that Iraqi communists were facing a major ideological crisis, it came in the form of an open letter addressed to the leadership of the Party by Hadi al-Alawi, an Iraqi Shi`i communist turned Maoist, based in Damascus...

...The idea that many of us are recent converts to Shi`i Islam, and that Iraqi and Iranian Shilsm are different in nature, fills a huge gap between those two extreme positions...

...Because the Ba`th has always sought to control the definition of Iraqi and Arab nationalism, it has been sensitive to any suggestion that the Iraqi Shi'is were first and foremost Arabs...

...At its peak in the 1950s, before the emergence of the Ba`th, the Communist Party was the most powerful in Iraq, Shi`is forming the majority of its constituency...

...Their reactions to my book, and to me, have turned the act of writing The Shi`is of Iraq from a purely scholarly endeavor into a meaningful personal experience...

...It is more difficult to figure out why the Syrian government would allow a translation of the work of an Israeli...

...The Security Council responded with a mild condemnation, while the U.S...

...Although Nakash is neither a Sunni nor a Shil, his analysis nevertheless is charged with a spirit of sectarian hatred, very much like his friends in the Iraqi opposition in exile...

...Arabic titles translated...

...A pirated edition has also appeared, printed most likely in Beirut late in 1996...

...In January 1996 the Arabic translation duly appeared in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, and soon after in Jordan, as well as in Europe, where large communities of Iraqis live...

...The motives of Iraqi communists in undertaking the translation are not that difficult to divine...

...Curiously, the book has so far escaped the normal fate of Western studies that engage the realities of ethnic or sectarian politics in the Middle East: it has not been denounced as Orientalist...

...Likewise, the image of an invincible Saddam still looms on the horizon, affecting power relations between Iraqis everywhere and the regime in Baghdad...

...In late February 1997 a lengthy review appeared in al-Quds al-Arabi, the editor of which is a Palestinian who has taken a pro-Saddam stand both during and since the Gulf War...

...Nevertheless, it is already clear that the book has sold many more copies in Arabic than in English, and to a much more diverse audience, extending beyond academic readership...

...He is currently writing a book on Shi`ism and nationalism in the Arab world...

...The following story, from which I have stripped a few identifying details, demonstrates this: While on a visit to England early in 1997, I had dinner with some Iraqi Shi`i Islamists...

...The suggestion in my book that ShCism in Iraq and Iran are different in character has been picked up by participants in the current debate among observant Shils something that I had not anticipated or intended at the time of writing the book...

...The resort to tribalism, then, does not mean that Iraq is in any danger of disintegrating...

...He succeeded in driving a wedge between the United States and Russia, while acting with determination to get a timetable from the UN to end its weapons inspections, which, ultimately, would lead to the lifting of sanctions against Iraq...

...One of the men to whom I was introduced shook my hand and said: "You know, I owe you an apology...

...their conversion took place mainly during the nineteenth century as the bulk of Iraq's Arab nomadic tribes settled down and took up agriculture...

...Saddam was there to stay, and Iraqis of various political inclinations began angling themselves toward the regime in Baghdad...

...Why...

...They know that fragmentation would end their political hegemony and prosperity, leaving them, and the Arab Sunni minority that accounts for 20 percent of the population, in control of a small territory in central Iraq with access neither to the sea nor to oil...

...The exchange was often very informal...

...The book is now in its fourth printing with sales around four thousand copies—a good figure for an academic book on the Middle East...

...obviously, I have no information regarding the print run of this edition...

...These intellectuals have given up on their core nationalist principles, and have begun writing our modern history in a tone similar to the discourse used by the British and the Americans...

...But what if such a work were to appear in Arabic...

...Your book is immensely important for people like me...

...Today, the debate centers around the question of what Shilsm should be in the twentyfirst century: should it be a set of fixed religious values, unaffected by time, which cut across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries or should it evolve into a flexible identity shaped by the particular circumstances and the environment in which Shils live...

...The second major thesis of the book is that Iraqi Shilsm is radically different from its Iranian counterpart, not in its formal doctrine, but in its sociocultural attributes as well as in the way it has interacted with politics and the economy...

...It remains to be seen whether the Clinton administration will live up to its promise to stand firm on Iraq...

...Both those tribesmen who converted to Shi`ism and those who remained Sunni largely because they kept to the desert way of life still share POLITICS ABROAD Arab social codes and cultural attributes...

...At the same time, the strongly Arab character of Iraqi Shilsm reinforces the assertion of Shi`is that they are no less nationalistic than the Sunnis, giving credence to their call for a redistribution of power that would end Sunni minority rule in Iraq...

...And how relevant is the history of Iraq as presented in the book to the problems and dilemmas that Iraqis in exile face today...

...Abd al-Ilah, whom I had met in London prior to that incident, is a very gentle man, incapable of hurting a fly, let alone a human being...

...So God summoned Azrael, the angel of death, and told him to go down to Earth and take up Saddam's soul...

...They strive to reshape the worldview of our masses, while seeking help from the imperialists...

...For the Shil majority of some 55 percent, the question is rather one of gains and losses...

...The tension fueling the sectarian problem in Iraq is thus primarily political rather than ethnic or cultural...

...He comes from an Iraqi Sunni background and in his youth was active in the rank and file of the Iraqi Communist Party...

...My Israeli and Iraqi-Jewish origin, and the fact that I also have U.S...

...POSTSCRIPT: As this article went to press in August, Saddam Hussein's government broke off all cooperation with UN weapons inspectors...

...A year or even five, ten years from now, the temple of horror erected by the Bath might still stand intact...

...Unlike the Kurds (who constitute a distinct ethnic group with its own nationalist aspirations), Iraq's other two major groups, Arab Sunnis and Shi'is, are meshed together, and each retains a strong interest in protecting the country's integrity...

...Tribal heritage is something that a majority of the country's Arab population shares, and the government has therefore encouraged a revival of tribalism during and since the war to foster national cohesion among its people...

...This phone call led to further dealings with the director of the Arabic press...

...Shi'i preference of Iraqi to Pan-Arab nationalism was taken as evidence that the Shils did not share the commitment of the government to the ultimate goal of an Arab state extending beyond the 28 n DISSENT / Fall 1 998 borders of Iraq...

...they just try to make it, to find POLITICS ABROAD enough food to feed themselves and their children...

...Although for a few weeks during the summer of 1996 the book was listed as a best-seller in some of the London-based Arabic newspapers, only two reviews appeared then, and those were quite short and insignificant...

...Then, word came that the translator, 'Abd al-Ilah al-Nu'aymi, had been beaten up in Prague by some Iraqi sympathizers of Saddam Hussein on account of his translation of the book...

...In order to maintain its monopoly on power in Iraq, the Sunni ruling minority has had to keep the Shi`i majority in check...

...In November 1997 Iraqis were again reminded of Saddam's resourcePOLITICS ABROAD fulness...

...The Shi`is of Iraq attempted to bring to life a political community marked by its own distinct identity—people who are not necessarily the precursors of a radical Islamic state that would align itself with Iran...

...The ShVis of Iraq," Lami declared, "is the most comprehensive work of fabrication of modern Iraqi history, written in order to ruin Iraq's future...

...Its content, however, has larger ramifications for Shils than the debate of the 1930s because of the growing dilemmas and pressing needs of a younger generation of Iraqi Shils, who constitute a majority among the four million Iraqis living in exile...

...citizenship, became a topic of discussion...

...Moreover, if confined within a state smaller than the present Iraq, the Shi`is would not be able to realize their dream of attaining power in a state that has been dominated by a Sunni elite since the formation of modern Iraq by the British in 1921...

...REALITY, however, is not as grim as this account might suggest...

...Abd al-Salam Muhammad Mujahid, "Imam al-Khalisi and his Nationalist School of Thought," 25 April, 1997...

...meanwhile, I got full control over the text and wrote a special introduction for this legal Arabic edition...

...As the twentieth century draws to an end, a similar debate is under way among observant Shils...

...Saddam Hussein might be there too, continuing to defy the wish expressed by the United States since the Gulf War that a "nice" Sunni general would finally manage to topple the Iraqi president...

...Well, I have to tell you: I am the one who wrote that review...

...Iraqis have come very close to hitting the bottom...

...and its allies to review long-established policy assumptions regarding the nature of government in Iraq and the existing reality of Sunni minority rule...

...God," said Azrael, "you don't know what I have been through...

...How authoritative is the author's portrayal of the distinct nature of Shi'i Islam in Iraq...

...My decision to focus on the Shi'is grew out of the Iran-Iraq War, when, like other observers, I was puzzled by the fierce fighting between the Iraqi Shils and their Iranian coreligionists...

...Unfortunately, I could not write a positive one because if I had written a good review, people here and the government at home would have accused me of promoting sectarianism in Iraq...

...Thus, in the wake of the 1991 Shi`i uprising against Saddam Hussein, Ba`th government officials mounted a massive campaign in the media against the Shil marsh Arabs, portraying them as "un-Iraqi" and describing their culture as "primitive and debased...

...6 (January 1996), p. 10...

...Although I was born in Israel and spent most of my life there, I have always been curious about the birthplace of my parents and ancestors, members of a community that had lived in Iraq for two-and-ahalf millennia from 586 B.C.E., after Nebuchadnezzar occupied Judea and razed Jerusalem, to 1949- 1951, when most Jews left for the state of Israel...

...The book advances two major theses...

...Saddam lost the Gulf War, but he seems thus far to have won "the mother of all battles," securing his own survival and that of his Ba`th regime...

...The barrier of fear, which cracked a bit following the Gulf War and the Shi`i and Kurdish insurrections of 1991, is as high as ever today, and remains unbroken even among those who live in exile...

...Meanwhile, a dictatorial regime in Baghdad has managed to regain much of its prewar coercive domestic power, thriving on the deterioration of Arab-Israeli relations and the paralysis of U.S...

...Upon his return, God asked Azrael: "Where the hell have you been all this time...

...The Shi'is of Iraq was first published in April 1994 by Princeton University Press...

...On hearing this, God turned pale and beseeched Azrael: "I hope you didn't tell them that I sent you...

...The Iraqi president was in his palace, and Azrael went there without delay, trying to get in through the main gate...

...Yet, as long as the book was available only in English, its findings had little relevance to the debate between the Sunni Ba`th government and the I N SEPTEMBER 1994 I received a phone call from an Iraqi who said he was on the editorial board of a publishing house in Damascus— Dar al-Mada, which is closely associated with the Iraqi Communist Party...

...Under the Ba`th, Sunni political hegemony was bolstered further...

...It throws a new light on our past, and it enables us to approach our history as well as our Iraqi Shil origin and identity from an entirely different angle...

...The caller went straight to the point: Dar al-Mada would like to translate my book into Arabic, and, he asked, "would you be willing to consider the idea of writing an introduction for the Arabic edition...

...Inside the Iraqi Communist Party some new winds were blowing...

...These differences between Iraqi and Iranian Shi`ism help explain why eighteen years after the Iranian Islamic revolution, the large majority of Iraqi Shi`is have not been swayed by it...

...The picture as a whole is very complex, revealing what lay behind the facade of Arab politics and what was on the mind of Iraqis in exile across the entire sociopolitical spectrum...

...From the Syrian point of view, the publication of a book dealing with the main (Twelver) branch of Shil Islam enables the 'Alawi ruling minority to reaffirm that the `Alawis (a heterodox group whom both Sunnis and Shi`is have usually considered beyond the pale) are part of mainstream Shi'l Islam, and that their deviant religious beliefs in no way impinge their credentials as Arabs...

...Iraqis were preoccupied with my personal 30 n DISSENT / Fan 1998 background and my motives (or secret agenda) for writing the book...

...DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 33 34 n DISSENT / Fall 1998...

...I asked...

...Those who are lucky enough to be outside the country have to cope with a different set of worries, having started new lives in unfamiliar environments that have not always been welcoming...

...The association of Iraqi Shi`ism with Persian culture and Iranian history has been a recurring theme in textbooks and government propaganda in modern Iraq...

...This sensitivity has not extended to academic studies published in Western languages...

...I did receive some touching personal letters and appreciative phone calls from Iraqis who liked the book, but these struck me at the time as nothing more than the isolated reactions of a few individuals...

...about the advantages and disadvantages of dismembering Iraq, Arab Sunnis and Shi`is did not really contemplate going their separate ways...

...By 1997 Iraqis in exile had come to terms with the fact that Saddam was stronger than at any time after the Gulf War...

...Azrael went to look for Saddam...

...THE ASSAULT on 'Abd al-Ilah made me realize that Iraqis were not as indifferent toward the book as I had thought...

...Hadi al-'Alawi and the Central Committee of the Iraqi Communist Party," Tariq al-Shdb, no...

...In this crisis, Saddam Hussein clearly had the initiative...

...The green light given for the translation may also have reflected the willingness of the Syrian Ba`th to tease its Iraqi counterpart and irritate the Sunni Takriti minority that rules Iraq...

...This type of propaganda, which suggests that the Iraqi Shils have an indelible "Persian connection," is intended to dispute the Arab credentials of the Shil majority and to place the Shils on the defensive...

...After three months of severe torture, a guard came and told Azrael that he was "clean" and free to go...

...For some time to come, their fighting will not be against Saddam, but for their own survival...

...I communicated with Iraqi Shi`is using Iraqi Jewish dialect, something that would have been out of the question in the old days when Jews in Iraq made a point of using a Muslim dialect in their dealings outside the community...

...A very perceptive Iraqi Shil journalist explained to me what was on the mind of young Iraqis, both ordinary people and activists of various political inclinations: "On the one hand, we have the staunch secularists among us—mainly communists and Ba'thists who deny that there is a sectarian problem or that there is such a thing as a Shil identity, stressing that we are all Arabs...

...After coming to power, the Ba`th depicted the Iraqi communists as a Trojan horse, pointing to contacts between the Iraqi Communist Party and its Iranian counterpart as evidence that Iraqi communists were not true Arabs...

...The first clear sign pointing to this was his successful excursion into the Kurdish north in August 1996...

...In my book, I discussed aspects of this debate as manifested in the struggle among Shils in Najaf during the 1930s over the future of the Shi'i college institution (madrasa) in the period following the establishment of nation-states in the Middle East...

...While the reformers sought to detach Shi'i education from the influence of the past, and reshape it in conformity with modern times, the conservatives insisted on preserving the curricula and teaching methods as they existed in the time of their predecessors...

...I met these people as they tried to sort through their past while continuing to hope for a better future...

...But the guards caught Azrael and threw him into prison...

...This time the Iraqi leader cornered the Clinton administration, forcing the United States to rely on a Russian-negotiated face-saving solution (allowing the return to Iraq of UN weapons inspectors) so as to avert a serious confrontation...

...For the Sunni Takriti clan, whose members rule Iraq today, Iraq's integrity is a question of survival...

...The DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 31 POLITICS ABROAD enthusiasm that some observant Shils have expressed toward the book, and the ambivalence and reservation of others, echoed an old debate between reformers and conservatives within Shi'i Islam...

...I was relieved to hear recently that the British Home Office was considering 'Abd al-Ilah's application for asylum in Britain on political and humanitarian grounds...

...The book was well received in academic circles in the United States and in Europe, and the paperback has been adopted in courses taught by historians and social scientists...

...response thus far in this crisis has been strangely muffled...

...2. Hadi al-'Alawi, "A Dialogue between Mr...

...Thus, even on those occasions during and after the Gulf War, when there was talk in the U.S...

...YrrzHAK NAKASH teaches Middle East history at Brandeis University and is a 1998-1999 member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...

...Perhaps you remember that some time ago your book was reviewed in one of the Arabic newspapers here in London...

...For almost seventy years, therefore, successive Sunni governments in Iraq have questioned the Arab origin of the Shi'is as well as their loyalty to the Iraqi state...

...they were searching for direction in the period immediately after the Gulf War, when there was much talk about "a new world order" dominated by the United States as the only superpower...

...In particular, there has been a resurgence of tribal affinities and institutions in a country where most people are descendants of nomadic Arab tribes...

...Yet as we approach the eighth anniversary of the Gulf War, there is still a tendency in the West (and among some of Iraq's Arab neighbors) to view the Iraqi Shi`is as part of the larger Shi`a population in Iran...

...To those Iraqis, 'Abd al-Ilah was a traitor and a collaborator...

...The similarities between the two groups undermine the claim of the Sunni ruling minority to be "more Arab" than the Shi`is, and hence call into question their right to rule and to define the meaning of Arab and Iraqi nationalism...

...Far from it...

...STILL, the absence of plans for divorce does not imply a happy marriage...

...The review was a furious attack on the book by 'Ala' al-Lami, an Iraqi whose name reveals his descent from the Bani Lam Shil tribe...

...The Party is outlawed in Iraq today and operates mainly from Syria...

...More Iraqis started relating positively to it, while others have clearly been agitated by it...

...Iraqi communists therefore had a stake in pursuing the translation of a book that shows the Arab origin of the Shi`is...

...There were occasions in this century, of course, when Iraqi governments found it expedient to reward the Shils so as to reduce sectarian tension and rally Shil support...

...There has been a good deal of debate surrounding my discussion of the sectarian problem in Iraq...

...Opponents of the peace process who kept out of sight until 1997 now had the opportunity to come into the open and vilify the book and its author...

...THE IRAQIS I met dream about a new Iraq where people can openly express an opinion, and discuss Iraqi society and politics, without fearing for their lives...

...It will be a long time before ordinary Iraqis are able to recover from their ordeal and try to take matters into their own hands, as they did in 1991 when they rebelled against Saddam following the encouragement of the Bush administration...

...First, contrary to the view that Shi`is constituted a majority in Iraq from early Islamic times, the book shows that by and large the Iraqi Shi'is are recent converts to Shi`ism...

...Its leaders and intellectuals were torn between ideological and practical considerations...

...These attributes were taken as proof that the book was a Zionist conspiracy in the service of Western imperialism.' The timing of all this is telling...

...It was through writing that I sought to explore Iraq—a land to which for obvious political reasons I could not travel...

...its appearance in January 1996 coincided with the release of the Arabic translation of The Shi`is of Iraq...

...on the other, our ulama tell us that Iraq is the cradle of Shfism, 32 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 that Shil Islam is universal, and that our Shi`ism dates back to the time of the Prophet...

...policy in the Middle East...

...Saddam's reassertion of power coincided with the collapse of the Oslo agreement and the subsequent deterioration in Arab-Israeli relations...

...As I reflect on that experience, it strikes me as a unique opportunity that allowed author and audience to affirm one another...

...3. For the Hayat review see Falih 'Abd al-Jabbar, "The Shf is of Iraq as Portrayed in Ishaq Naqqash's book," alHayat, 9 June, 1997, p. 19...

...The canny behavior of Saddam, and his remarkable sense of survival, have had a very sobering effect on Iraqis...

...Abd al-Karim Sabir, "Ishaq Naqqash and Imam (Mandi) alKhalisi," 28 March, 1997...

...M r INTEREST in writing on Iraq has a good deal to do with my Iraqi Jewish background...

...I have no concrete information as to who DISSENT / Fall 1 998 • 29 POLITICS ABROAD bought the hook, but chances are that most purchasers were Iraqi Shils in exile...

...Iraq's rulers have presented Shi'ism as a subversive heresy motivated primarily by Persian hatred for the Arabs, and they have stressed the Persian threat to Iraq posed by neighboring Iran...

...A second printing followed in June, bringing the number of legally printed copies to six thousand...

...The meetings that I had with Iraqi communists during 1997, and a review of The Shi`is of Iraq in al -Hayat by an Iraqi communist who challenged 'Alawi's line of thought, further alluded to that dilemma.' Within Shi`i religious circles, my hook seems to have touched a different nerve...

...This exchange has done much to compensate for the lack of an Iraqi academic reception of the book—an inconceivable idea in the Middle East as it currently is...

...It tells us something about the current frame of mind of Iraqis, and underscores the fact that the "Republic of Fear" built by the Ba`th Party since its coming to power in 1968 is still firmly in place...

...This clearly manifested itself during and immediately after the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 when Iraqi Shi'is, who formed the majority of the infantry's rank and file, fought their Iranian coreligionists, demonstrating that their loyalty to the state overrode their sectarian allegiance and their discontent against the Sunni Ba`th government...

...Saddam's guards caught me and tortured me really badly—I almost died down there...

...UN Secretary General Kofi Annan clinched a deal with Saddam Hussein at the eleventh hour, averting a war between the United States and Iraq, much to the relief of the administration...

...Indeed, Dar alMada is now printing a book on the Shi`is of Iraq, which portrays the history of modern Iraq as a history of conflicts between Shi`is and Sunnis, not the history of the struggle [of Iraqis] against British imperialism.' `Alawi's letter reveals the acute dilemma of Iraqi communists in the post-Soviet era: should they stick to their old guns or should they try to transform themselves and forge new contacts with the West...

...The stir that the book created was evident in the reviews that appeared in London-based Arabic newspapers in the first half of 1997...

...I suspect that factors other than the scholarly value of the book, the relative literary freedom in Syria in the mid-1990s, and the desire of Dar al-Mada to make some profit were at play...

...The February 1998 standoff between Baghdad and Washington underscored the isolation of the United States—even among its own closest allies— due in part to the administration's lack of a coherent policy toward Iraq...