The Peace Process Phase One Past Accomplishments Future Concerns

As a result of a conference on the peace process in the Middle East, co-hosted by the Strategic Studies Institute and North Georgia College in March 1996, the authors discussed the developing crises in that area. They have analyzed three crucial areas of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors- -Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In these three essays, the authors analyze several key aspects of what can be considered the first phase of the Mideast Peace Process.

This book investigates whether an international institution can alter state behaviour and thereby contribute to the peaceful resolution of a conflict. Kenneth Dombroski focuses on the series of interrelated peacekeeping efforts undertaken to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1948-1994. Analyzing these sequential operations over a forty-six year period provides evidence as to the relative importance of institutions in a state-centric international system. He provides an alternative approach to the study of international peacekeeping that evaluates the long-term effects of peacekeeping on state behaviour, and concomitantly, the effects of varying state behaviour on an international regime. This book offers new perspectives on the relative importance of regimes, the utility of regime analysis in explaining the importance of international institutions, the significance of a peacekeeping regime's role in influencing state behaviour, and the impact of varying state behaviour on regime evolution.

Oil and the Kurdish Question critiques the conventional narrative of the Iran-Iraq War and the associated Anfal campaign. This narrative claims that in the last two years (1987-88) of the Iran-Iraq War the Ba’thists dominated the fighting using gas attacks. According to this narrative, the Ba’thists also used gas in a fearsome campaign of extermination against the Kurds of northern Iraq. This book argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the Iraqis trained hard to turn the tables on Iran in the last months of the war and won by superior generalship without the use of gas. Further, it was only when the Iranians conceded defeat that the Iraqi army went north and—in the space of nine days, using conventional arms—suppressed pockets of Kurdish insurgent unrest. The book also examines how publicists exploited the myth of the Kurdish holocaust as justification for America to declare war on Iraq. It exposes a scheme laid out before the war that aimed to defeat Iraq, deconstruct it, and create an autonomous Kurdish Regional Government which would then let lucrative oil concessions to interests mainly in the west. The intrigue accomplished two things: it subverted Iraq’s oil nationalization law which forbade granting concessions to foreigners, and it ended Iraq’s existence as a sovereign nation-state.