'Iraq War' tag archive

Commentary On humanitarian bombing Andrew chitty Since World War II the United States has dropped bombs on twenty-one different countries. That is an average of one new country every two years. In the last two years the rate has been higher, with first-time bombings of Afghanistan, Sudan and Yugoslavia, plus a return trip to Iraq. […]

Commentary War and democracy Kate soper Whether they welcomed the prospect of the ʻnewʼ world order it would supposedly inaugurate, or were appalled by its imperial ambitions and the disasters it would unleash, few can have doubted the historic import of the decision to go to war with Iraq. Those who have committed the globe […]

Commentary Fast train coming The political pedagogy of Fahrenheit 9/11 Mandy merck This August, when Fahrenheit 9/11 had long since surpassed all records to become the most commercially successful documentary ever made, the New Yorker ran an article anxiously attempting to establish it within a generic tradition stretching from Grierson and Flaherty to Fredric Wiseman […]

‘Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête.’ David Rieff, perhaps the best-known American writer on humanitarianism and human rights, chose Pascal’s aphorism as the epigraph to his latest collection of essays. This cynical take on good intentions can arguably stand for the prevailing view of action in the name of humanity, or at least the […]

Forensic architecture Only the criminal can solve the crime Eyal weizman A strange story unfolded in the shadows of the legal and diplomatic furore that accompanied the release, on 15 September 2009, of Richard Goldstone’s Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which alleged that the Israeli army (and Hamas) […]