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Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War
This book analyzes the ways in which US policy toward Iraq was dictated by America's broader Cold War strategy between 1958 and 1975. While most historians have focused on “hot” Cold War conflicts such as Cuba, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, few have recognized Iraq's significance as a Cold War battleground. This book argues that US decisions and actions were designed to deny the Soviet Union influence over Iraq and to create a strategic base in the oil-rich Gulf region. Using newly available primary sources and interviews, this book reveals new details on America's decision-making toward and actions against Iraq during the height of the Cold War and shows where Iraq fits into the broader historiography of the Cold War in the Middle East. Further, it raises important questions about widely held misconceptions of US-Iraqi relations, such as the CIA's alleged involvement in the 1963 Ba'thist coup and the theory that the US sold out the Kurds in 1975.
Covert Relationship
This modern study of the Iran-Iraq War utilizes newly available primary materials to analyze American policy towards the war and question the veracity of the United States' claims of strict neutrality. The Iran-Iraq War lasted from September 1980 to August 1988, dominating the landscape of the Middle East and polarizing many of the world's nations for nearly a decade. This new work analyzes the United States' policy towards this vicious and extremely costly war, and questions the veracity of America's claims of strict neutrality. The contents of Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence, and the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988 can be broken down into five sections: the conflict's origins, the Carter administration's response to the war, the Reagan administration's actions, changes to American policy during the Iran-Contra Affair, and the collapse of neutrality in the final two years of the war. The author boldly refutes the arguments of other authors about the war, and provides timely and relevant insights regarding American-Iraqi relations in light of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
An Analysis of Hamid Dabashi's Iran
Hamid Dabashi’s 2007 Iran: A People Interrupted is simultaneously subtle, passionate, polarizing and polemical. A concise account of Iranian history from the early 19th-century onward, Dabashi’s book uses his incisive analytical skills as a basis for creating a persuasive argument against the views of Iran that predominate in the West. In Dabashi’s view, Western approaches to Iran have been colored time and time again by the assumption that it is somehow trapped between regressive ‘tradition,’ and progressive ‘modernity.’ The reality, he argues, is quite the opposite: Iran has its own distinctive ideology of modernity, which is nevertheless opposed to many Western ideals. In or...
A Revolution in Rhyme
A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic tells the story of the lives and works of Iranian poets whose personal and literary career were shaped by the Iranian revolution in 1979. By drawing on similar examples, such as Soviet Russia, the book tries to tackle some key questions: how did these poets come to be known in the literary scene? What did they write about, and what were their ideas, styles, and literary techniques? And, last but not least, what kind of relationship have they established with the ruling power on the course of the past four decades? In a detailed study, Shams tackles the life and work of ten Iranian poets whose personal and literary lives transformed and were transformed by the 1979 Revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic, shedding light on ways in which the current ruling state in Iran uses literature and particularly poetry as a tool for ideological dissemination.
Reassessing Order and Disorder in the Middle East
The Middle East is undergoing a period of profound change, partly brought about by the United States’ interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also by the Arab Spring. This is affecting regional relations between states and between the region and the US. For example, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have supported rebel groups in Syria against the government, which was supported by Iran. Political Islam is a threat to both monarchies in the Gulf and secular states. Non-state actors, such as Islamic State (IS) and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) are assuming an increasingly important role in shaping the region. Further, states such as Qatar and Turkey have undertaken their own quest...
A Brief History of Now
Exploring the rise and fall of global power from the mid-nineteenth century, this book tracks the long and interrelated trajectories of the most serious challenges facing the world today. Although at first the urgency of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 seemed to take precedence over other global problems such as socioeconomic inequality and climate change, it has ultimately exacerbated these issues and created opportunities to address them boldly and innovatively. A Brief History of Now provides a bird’s-eye view of world hegemony, economic globalization and political regimes as they have evolved and developed over the last two hundred years, providing context and insights into the forces which have shaped the Western world. Presented in an accessible and engaging narrative, the book addresses key contemporary challenges and explores the repercussions of a technological revolution, the potential instability of democracy over the coming years, and the urgent struggle to tackle climate change. With his book, Diego Olstein helps to answer pressing questions about our world today and provides a roadmap for analysing future trajectories.
The Achilles Trap
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker • Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction “Excellent . . . A more intimate picture of the dictator’s thinking about world politics, local power and his relationship to the United States than has been seen before.” —The New York Times “Another triumph from one of our best journalists.” —The Washington Post "Voluminously researched and compulsively readable." —Air Mail From bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Steve Coll, the definitive story of the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein, and a news-breaking ...
The PKK-Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s Regional Politics
This book presents a theoretical framework to study dissident ethnic movements’ imagination of world politics, with a special focus on the PKK as a case study. Dissident ethnic movements are not only a challenge to the existing hegemonic power, but they also produce an alternative closed society based on different ethnic imagination. Instead of taking the armed PKK movement as a pure resistant, this book approaches contemporary Kurdish nationalism led by the PKK as a counter-hegemonic with a narrative that entails the emergence of a new kind of identity and sense of belonging, through which the PKK has been able to exercise its power. This book is an attempt to go beyond resistance-oriented approach, unveiling the two faces of the PKK’s representation of world politics: its transformative effect on the Kurds, and its exclusionary function towards traditional and alternative Kurdish subjects/institutions.
Proxy Warfare on the Cheap
This book seeks to shed more light on the US strategy of proxy warfare in modern times with the Syrian Civil War as a case study. The two authors combine Modern History with International Relations and Strategic Studies in order to offer an up-to-date and critical analysis of this unique partnership between a state (USA) and a non-state actor (Syrian Kurds) against another non-state actor (ISIS) - amidst a wider civil war. They argue that this partnership ended up as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it defeated ISIS at a minimum cost in treasure and blood in comparison to the Iraq War, but, on the other hand, it ensnared the USA into a tangled web of competition and conflict with other powers with no easy way-out. In other words, proxy warfare - as the two authors show-case - may prove a not-so-cheap investment in the end.
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy
“The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy quickly established itself as a classic when it first appeared in 1981. This edition makes it even better, incorporating as it does new material about the Cold War and up-dating to include subsequent developments. Filled with insights and penetrating analysis, this volume is truly indispensable.” —Robert Jervis, Author of How Statesmen Think "Freedman and Michaels have written a thorough and thought-provoking guide to nuclear strategy. The authors analyze the causes of both wise and unwise strategic decisions in the past and thereby shine a bright light on dilemmas we face in our common nuclear future." —Scott Sagan, Stanford University, USA “With...
