Barham salih biography of rory
•
First, the mines remain an unbelievably serious issue. They are ensuring that not just a lot of agricultural land but much of the urban centres of Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa are almost uninhabitable. This is not just a question of the ordnance buried in those buildings. The old city of Mosul is so profoundly damaged that it is almost impossible to understand what we can do to rebuild these places without ceilings falling in on people’s heads. We are talking about many billions of pounds-worth of damage. This brings us to the question of the role that parliamentarians can play, and actually there is one. There is a gloomy analysis of countries such as Iraq, which would have suggested 10 or 12 years ago that there was nothing much we could do, but it is striking that a new generation of leadership is now emerging. The recent visit of the President of Iraq, Barham Salih, shows the emergence of a new, more progressive type of politics in Iraq that wishes to engage with Members of Parliament. That does not mean that we in this House hold the panacea for what is happening in Iraq, in Myanmar or indeed anywhere else, but respectful relationships, partnerships, modelling ways of behaviour and exchanging thoughts with h
•
Executive Summary
March 2023 marks two decades since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein is long gone, memories of the post–invasion civil war are fading (from the American mind, at least), even as the large troop cohort that invaded Iraq, and later surged to stanch a spiraling insurgency that it helped create, have been redeployed. Parliamentary elections are routine, and the ISIS threat has been significantly degraded. The political and perceptual domestic and foreign costs of both intervention and withdrawal have, for the most part, already been incurred. The level of violence is much reduced and oil is flowing. The problems facing a new generation of Iraqis are largely economic, as massive protests in 2019 made clear, and a year–long effort to seat a government after the 2021 parliamentary election made it equally clear that the structure of Iraqi politics was both durable yet dysfunctional. The memory of the sectarian civil war that followed the U.S. invasion and the ISIS conquest of much of the country still looms large for Iraqis.
U.S. interests in Iraq are derived from an interest in regional stability and impel the continuation of an “advise, assist, and enable” mission in the near term. There is no need, however, to maintain a long–term mil
•