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| 1 |
ID:
122233
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
By 2008, the initially promising security situation in Basra had deteriorated to the extent that the British Army had withdrawn to the airport, kilometres from the city. Domestic pressure was also hastening the UK's handover to local security forces. The British became onlookers in Basra's insurgency; Operation Charge of the Knights was the result. In this article, Richard Iron identifies the lessons of the British campaign in Basra and the strategic nature of the mistaken conduct of the counter-insurgency campaign.
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| 2 |
ID:
172436
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This article traces the legal and political-economic disputes surrounding the construction of the Basra port in the era of World War I and the Mandate. Although the port was nominally an Iraqi institution, British colonial authorities vested it with a jurisdictional reach that actually extended beyond its own physical boundaries. It grew to encompass local municipalities, multinational corporations, and central state authorities on either side of the porous river border between southern Iraq and Iran. While this anomalous spatio-political arrangement facilitated British colonial extraction in Iraq and a wider imperial project in the Gulf, it also repeatedly broke down amid competing claims to space and sovereignty by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Pahlavi state. The history of these conflicts helps bring together the often siloed historiographies of Iraq and the Gulf, and position both in larger scholarly debates on the political geography of borderlands, infrastructure, and empire.
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| 3 |
ID:
122220
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2013.
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In recent years a number of commentators have posited that the British reputation for conducting small wars has suffered in the wake of setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. The argument here contests whether such a tradition can be truly said to have ever existed. A close examination of this supposed tradition reveals it to be a myth. In fact, rarely have the British armed forces claimed a facility for counter-insurgency or small war. Invariably, commentators outside the Army have ascribed the tradition to them. Most notably, commentators in the United States keen to discern practices of minimum force or rapid institutional learning generated the narrative of British COIN expertise. Ultimately, what this myth reveals is that, when deconstructed, it is political will, not an ingrained understanding of fighting insurgencies, that has determined Britain's success, or otherwise, in so-called small wars.
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| 4 |
ID:
097742
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2010.
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Post-conflict cities represent a laboratory in which to explore the substate orientation of security. Based on an analysis of developments in Baghdad, Basra and Falluja since 2003, this article argues not only that security is inherently selective, but also that the exclusionary actions of local or sectarian groups are more influential than those of state-based agents or projects based on security for the individual. The notion of security can accommodate multiple interpretations, but in practice a dominant discourse controls its meaning, and negotiation soon develops into patterns of domination and exclusion. This typically leads to a 'ghettoization' of security, whereby specific groups are secure only in specific areas. Security thus reflects the sum of myriad local arrangements. The key issue, therefore, is not whether there can be security for all, but the nature of the concessions made by substate and state-based types of security, and the contrast between them and models based on security for the individual.
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| 5 |
ID:
121570
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
IN LATE April 2003, I rode in an open car down Baghdad's wide-open airport highway. U.S. Army and Marine units had seized the city just two weeks before, at the end of a short invasion. I had come to Iraq for a few months, detailed to the White House from another agency, and I was heading that morning to Basra, the southern city occupied by the British Army.
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