Erasing Iraq in Change.org and Washington Report
Check out this review of Erasing Iraq by HELO’s Daniel J. Gerstle in Change.org and this in-depth feature in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, written by Jeremy R. Hammond.
Gerstle writes:
What I really respected most about Otterman’s approach was that unlike sooooo many other journalists and researchers, he goes directly to the local witnesses. It may not always be possible to get into Baghdad during a bombardment and interview people while it’s happening, but any shrewd research should reduce the time committed to White House press briefings and Think Tank brown bags in order to increase time committed to reading through the many growing local witness blogs. With the Iraq debate we did last year, Otterman was the only non-Iraqi to bring in very specific local witness descriptions of events. And so this new book is much more.
And Hammond recounts:
“U.S. war in Iraq did not start in 2003—it started in 1991,” Otterman explained in an interview with the Washington Report. Asked how Iraq today compares with the past, he pointed out that, prior to the first Gulf war, Iraq was a highly modernized society that “boasted the region’s best healthcare and education system. Literacy rates were high and there was a 100 percent gross enrollment rate on the primary school level. The state’s free and universal healthcare was the envy of its neighbors. Women’s rights flourished—in 1989, for example, more than 10 percent of the seats in Iraq’s national assembly were held by women.
“But the first Gulf war changed everything,” he said. “It shattered the Iraqi state—and it has never recovered.”