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IRAQ WEEKLY HEADLINES
September 2000 - May 2003:
An Index
This is a strange and, at least at first sight, perhaps rather forbidding document. It is an index to a collection of international newspaper articles on Iraqi/US relations and related matters collected together and sent every week to the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. The document covers broadly the period from the election of George Bush as President of the United States in December 2000 to the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath.
It begins very simply, with just a list of headlines. As it develops however, the collections become larger, weekly introductions appear - sometimes amounting to short essays, and there are often quite elaborate critical remarks on individual articles. From the end of January 2001 onwards the lists of titles are broken down into subject categories. By the time of the invasion the weekly mailings, though still very far from being comprehensive, have become enormous. The headline lists contain links to the relevant collections of articles on the CASI discussion list Archive.
We reproduce this index here partly as a reference to the CASI collection which, buried as it is in the discussion list archive, is almost inaccessible; but also because even by itself it is a useful aide-memoire to some of the dramas of the past two and a half years - the process by which the Iraqi government was multiplying economic contacts with its neighbours and the wider world; the series of scare stories, even before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, about Iraq's military capacity and possible longer term projects; the bombing missions in the 'No Fly Zones'; a moment at which it looked as if they might have been suspended; the attempts to establish a link between the Iraqi government and Al Qaida; the opposition to war within the US establishment; the drama of the weapons inspections. There is quite extensive coverage of Kurdish politics and also of the wider implications for the 'New World Order', especially at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan. By itself the index can be used to gain a broad overview of this whole terrible period of world affairs but, especially in conjunction with the articles cached on the CASI website, it also provides access to a host of little details, important or simply picturesque, which could otherwise easily be overlooked.
The index was originally prepared for the Internet by Fay Dowker. The introductions and commentaries are all written by the compiler, Peter Brooke. The opinions he expresses are his own and not necessarily shared either by other members of the CASI discussion list or by Fay Dowker.