Militias, Vigilantes, Death Squads: Iraq’s Shadow State
Charles Tripp, 25 January 2007
At a Downing Street meeting in November 2002 attended by Tony Blair, Jack Straw and six academics familiar with Iraq and the Middle East, two things became clear. The first was that Straw thought post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post-Soviet Russia and could thus be easily pigeonholed as that strange creature, a ‘transitional society’. Either he had been persuaded of this by the...