Toby Dodge

Never has the old line about those who fail to understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the world. Examining the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British empire - the first attempt by a Western power to remake Mesopotamia in its own image - renowned Iraq expert Toby Dodge uncovers a series of shocking parallels between the policies of a declining British empire and those of Coalition forces in Iraq since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Dodge shows that the state created by the British held all the seeds of a violent, corrupt, and relentlessly oppressive future for the Iraqi people, one that has continued to unfold. Like the British empire eight decades before, the United States and Britain took upon themselves today the grand task of transforming Iraq and, by extension, the political landscape of the Middle East.… (mere)

The theme of this book can be best described as being that everyone has a plan that will not work. This is seeing as while Dodge was apparently attempting to be the first out of the gate in terms of informing Washington & London that 'I told you so', events have progressed far beyond the level of failure he expected back in '03 when this monograph/polemic came out.

This being the case, why should one bother with this work? The remaining reason is probably to get a sense of the mind set of the British officials who took the initial stab at creating a workable Iraqi state that would be subservient to Western interests. This is along with an examination of the rise of the principle that soverignty trumps all other values, leaving world society with the problem of the failed state cluttering up the international landscape.

One also almost comes away with some pity for Bush & Blair, if the world-weary tone radiated by this book is the best that the experts can offer to the practical men trying to cope with a problem (Iraq) that was not going to go away, even if you bewail the hash the administration has made out of trying to come up with a viable solution. I certainly don't expect the likes of Sadr to do so, now that political Islam is going to have it's chance to strut over the corpse of what was Iraq.… (mere)