Campaigns In Iraq Research Articles

Knowledge, attitudes, and practices of university students towards risk factors, screening, and perceived barriers of screening regarding colorectal cancer: A multi-country study from the eastern Mediterranean region.

e22543 Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) tends to be diagnosed at a younger age and at a more advanced stage. Knowledge and awareness of CRC and its screening in Middle East are suboptimal, and most countries lack national screening programs. Our objective was to assess the knowledge, attitudes and practices of university students regarding risk factors, screening and perceived barriers to CRC screening in Middle Eastern countries. Methods: A cross-sectional study using a convenience sampling method was done in different universities across ten Middle Eastern countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia (KSA), and others (Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait). Data were collected using a questionnaire shared with students in various universities. It comprised five main sections: socio-demographic characteristics, CRC knowledge, risk factors, symptoms and screening, attitudes, practices and barriers related to CRC screening. The questionnaire developed on the basis of a literature review, was properly translated and validated using factorial and reliability analysis. Results: A total of 4597 students participated in the study with a mean age of 24.28 ± 7.62 years. Participants’ countries of residence were Lebanon 1107 (24.1%), Jordan 811 (17.6%), Iraq 769 (16.7%), Palestine 478 (10.4%), Syria 450 (9.8%), Saudi-Arabia 438 (9.5%), Egypt 499 (10.9%) and others 45 (1.0%). Most participants had heard about CRC (87%). 2491 (54.2%) had first or second -degree relatives diagnosed with cancer. 84.2% of participants intend to undergo CRC screening in the future, however, 25.1% wouldn't pay for the screening if it is not covered by health insurance. The majority of students demonstrated good knowledge of CRC (96.5%), with Egypt demonstrating the highest level (98.2%), followed by Lebanon (97.1%) and Iraq (97.1%), and Jordan the lowest (94%). Factors associated with good knowledge were age (aOR = 1.03; 95%CI: 1.00-1.05), health-related studies (aOR = 2.80; 95%CI = 2.00-3.93), and the participant’s country of residence. The most important barrier to CRC screening in Lebanon was the lack of financial resources with high cost of test (52.6%), lack of health insurance in Syria and Jordan (50.4% and 49.3% respectively), poor counseling from doctors in KSA (52%), and the inadequacy of awareness campaigns in Iraq (57.1%), Egypt (56.1%) and Palestine (55%). Conclusions: Students in the Middle East demonstrate good knowledge of CRC. Nevertheless, they perceive barriers to CRC screening, including limited financial resources, high cost of tests not covered by health insurance, and inadequate awareness campaigns.

Afghanistan and the “Great Chessboard”

The article is devoted to US politics in Eurasia in the context of the US claims to a key role in the world and the desire to independently manage the pieces on the “Great Chessboard”. The article examines US policy in the Middle East and the relationship between the military campaign in Iraq and the situation in Afghanistan. The author concludes that at present the United States concentrated attention on the territories around the Russian Federation, forming a belt of unfriendliness.

The surge of spreading harmful information through digital technologies: a distressing reality in complex humanitarian emergencies

The surge of spreading harmful information through digital technologies: a distressing reality in complex humanitarian emergencies

The US Oil Lobby’s Activities during the American Campaign in Iraq in 2003: Political Lessons

The US Oil Lobby’s Activities during the American Campaign in Iraq in 2003: Political Lessons

Turkey's Military Operations in Iraq: Context and Implications

AbstractTurkey has pursued an assertive military campaign in Iraq to eliminate the presence of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been supported by elements of hard power, coercive diplomacy, and an increasingly emboldened foreign‐intelligence apparatus. This article traces the roots of this new phase in Turkey's cross‐border military engagement to two interrelated factors. First, Ankara has adopted a new counterterrorism doctrine that relies on a militarized regional policy. Second, the course of Turkey‐Iraq relations since the liberation of Mosul and the Kurds' failed independence bid has allowed Ankara to forge a relationship of dominance over Baghdad and Erbil, facilitating its interventionism. Next, the article evaluates the broader implications of Turkey's determination to sustain the ongoing campaign. First, Turkey's military operations against the PKK may play a decisive role in the organization's evolution. Second, they may expose the challenges and limits of Ankara's new assertiveness and reliance on the use of force in the Middle East. Third, Turkey may have to pursue a delicate line in its coercive policy, lest it further undermine the fragile internal balances of Iraq. Last, while Ankara's assertiveness may test the tense relationship with Tehran, it may not end the new understanding the two countries reached in their regional policies.

Coalition military personnel with stabilised facial fractures are less likely to require tracheostomy: a comparison of treatment in US and UK Medical Treatment Facilities during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts

Introduction: The United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) deployed Medical Treatment Facilities (MTF) in support of the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The approach to treatment of patients with facial injuries differed between nations, reflecting management protocols and the capabilities of deployed surgeons.

Facial injury management undertaken at US and UK medical treatment facilities during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts: a retrospective cohort study

ObjectivesTo perform the first direct comparison of the facial injuries sustained and treatment performed at USA and UK deployed medical treatment facilities (MTFs) in support of the military campaigns in...

Tony Blair’s gamble: The Middle East Peace Process and British participation in the Iraq 2003 campaign

Tony Blair tried throughout the preparatory phase of the US-led Iraq intervention in 2003 to influence US policy on the Middle East Peace Process. This article tries to understand how Blair fared in this endeavour. Using newly declassified documents, it examines the circumstances under which the US administration listened and engaged with British ideas and when and why it ignored British requests. The study shows that Blair was able to extract the greatest US concessions on the Middle East Peace Process in moments when Great Britain’s participation in the Iraq campaign was the most uncertain. The findings promote fresh thinking on how, when and why the United Kingdom can influence US decision-making.

Weapon of choice: small arms and the culture of military innovation

Over the past decade, the study of change and transformation in military organizations has become a major and very productive subfield of security and strategic studies. The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have led researchers to explore mechanisms of military change beyond the ‘major transformations’ studied in the 1990s, in particular bottom-up adaptation. One of the contemporary challenges for the field is to reconcile the study of top-down innovation, including the introduction of major weapon systems that have had a structuring effect on the armed forces, with the analysis of small-scale, incremental change. In particular, there is a need for more studies exploring how adaptation can become institutionalized as this subject is currently under-researched. Matthew Ford's book helps fill this gap in a creative and well-researched manner, which makes it an important point of reference for future work in the field. First, Ford correctly identifies that innovation studies are usually overly focused on major weapon systems at the expense of smaller innovations. Second, instead of seeing culture as a barrier to the institutionalization of bottom-up adaptation, he contends that an approach rooted in the social shaping of technology (SST) yields more explanatory power. Indeed, there is an ontological problem in treating culture as an independent or intervening variable. An approach weaving together technological practices and their cultural environment helps capture the struggles for power, status and authority between competing individuals and groups, which shape weapon design, production and adoption.

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an interactive virtual reality narrative performance made for the EVL’s CAVE2™ large-scale 320-degree panoramic virtual reality environment that visualizes stories of violence and the post-traumatic stress experienced by ordinary American soldiers who became torturers in the course of serving their country. During the American-led counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism campaigns in Iraq in the years after 11 September 2001, the torture and abuse of detainees was a commonplace tactic.

You Are Not Expected to Survive: Affective Friction in the Combat Shooter Game <em>Battlefield 1</em>

You Are Not Expected to Survive: Affective Friction in the Combat Shooter Game <em>Battlefield 1</em>

Making Sense of Hybrid Warfare

IntroductionSince the Russian Federation invaded Crimea in March 2014, analysis and commentary on the concept of warfare have increased exponentially.1 An Internet search will identify hundreds of entries covering the phenomenon. Hybrid warfare has become the most common term used to try and capture the complexity of twenty-first-century warfare, which involves a multiplicity of actors and blurs the traditional distinctions between different types of armed and even between war and peace. Hybrid warfare has ceased to be a topic only for military strategists, as it has now entered the broader public domain and become a major security concern for Western governments. Both NATO and the European Union (EU) are working on strategies to strengthen defensive capabilities and prevent attacks.This article seeks to clarify the different ways in which the term warfare and related terms have been used by scholars and policy analysts and summarize discussion on the topic to date. The paper will examine, in particular, the Russian approach to warfare as demonstrated by operations in Ukraine and will briefly assess the significance of these developments for Western security policy.Defining Hybrid WarfareNot surprisingly, there are many definitions of warfare. The concept has been delineated in different, if related, ways and these definitions have evolved in a relatively short period of time. Defining warfare is not just an academic exercise. The way the term is defined may determine how states perceive and respond to threats and which government agencies are involved in countering them.One approach to warfare takes an historical perspective. This defines the term simply as the concurrent use of both conventional and irregular forces in the same military campaign. Military historian Peter R. Mansoor, for example, defines warfare as conflict involving a combination of conventional military forces and irregulars (guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists), which could include both state and non-state actors, aimed at achieving a common political purpose.2 Viewed from this perspective, warfare is clearly nothing new. There are numerous examples of techniques and approaches at the tactical, operational and strategic levels stretching back at least as far as the Peloponnesian War and the writings of the Chinese philosopher, Sun Tzu, in the fifth century BC. Irregular fighters have proved to be the bane of numerous conventional militaries. Formidable armies such as Napoleon's Grand Armee and Hitler's Wehrmacht struggled to combat irregular fighters who understood and exploited the local human and geographical terrain and targeted vulnerable logistic bases and lines of communication. Over time, guerrilla operations had a significant and lasting impact on the broader conventional military campaigns of which they were part. Recent counter insurgency (COIN) campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have once again highlighted the difficulty of defeating de- termined irregular fighters without committing human rights abuses against the local population and consequently undermining domestic and international public support for the campaign.During the 2000s, the use of the term hybrid became a common way to describe contemporary warfare, particularly because of the increasing sophistication and lethality of violent non-state actors and the growing potential of cyber warfare. Although there was no agreement that this necessarily constituted a new form of warfare,3 definitions of warfare emphasized the blending of conventional and irregular approaches across the full spectrum of conflict. For example, in 2007 Frank G. Floffman, a leading analyst of the concept, defined warfare as Threats that incorporate a full range of different modes of warfare including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder, conducted by both sides and a variety of non-state actors. …

Can Limited Intervention Work? Lessons from Britain’s Success Story in Sierra Leone

ABSTRACTFollowing frustrating campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western interventions are becoming more limited, with troops being deployed for short bursts and residual peace-building tasks being left to others. Although this approach limits exposure for the intervening government, it struggles to achieve meaningful political change. Examining the comparatively successful British intervention in Sierra Leone (2000–02), this article identifies the conditions for effectiveness in these campaigns. It challenges the historiography of the case by framing armed confrontations and raids as enablers of politics rather than ends in themselves; indeed, in both the conduct and study of intervention, politics must reign supreme.

Insights from the Army's Drawdowns

Abstract: This article provides five insights extracted from discussions concerning the Army's long history of drawdowns. Perhaps the most important take-away is the Army can, and should, use the current drawdown constructively. ********** With the termination of the recent campaign in Iraq and the winnowing of forces in Afghanistan, the US military faces a drawdown of standing force structure and capabilities. The policy debate concerning how best to carry out this force reduction, however, lacks proper historical perspective. Twenty-four civilian historians and military professionals recently offered such a perspective by focusing on previous drawdowns over the span of American history. Beginning with a consideration of the cyclical nature of drawdowns and whether a crisis mentality is warranted in such periods, three major questions emerged. Was the attempt to preserve military effectiveness during drawdowns contradictory to traditional American values? Given the reoccurrence of force reductions in American history, how did the military best preserve combat capabilities? What was the relationship between the regular standing Army and militia/National Guard forces, and how did these reflect broader attitudes towards the military? Insights from the discussions follow. (1) 1. The drawdown of American forces has been a cyclical part of the nation's military experience. Whether they allowed colonial forts to fall into disrepair or furloughed hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened Union troops after the US Civil War, Americans historically have tightened their financial belts at the conclusion of major conflicts. This attitude reflects traditional Anglo-American values dating back to the late-Middle Ages in England. Latent fears of regular armies surfaced before the Revolutionary War with both the Quartering Act and the Boston Massacre. Americans carried these attitudes forward into the twenty-first century. The debate over the US military establishment has never been a purely rational one with biases inherent in the American cultural framework. Concerns over previous drawdowns have not run counter to traditional American values, and have not always been justified even by initial combat effectiveness. For example, the Kennedy/Johnson administrations reversed conventional drawdowns of the Eisenhower era in time to create the most competent US Army ever to engage in the initial battle of any war up to 1965. American forces also met with initial successes in 2001 and 2003 after a decade of drawdowns, paralleling the US experience nearly forty years earlier. However, American forces have not always reconstituted effectively for battle. Significant drawdowns left the Army unprepared for initial campaigns in the early 1790s against Native Americans, the War of 1812, the US Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, and the Korean War. Significantly, these wars ended in American military victory, indicating the initial risk of fielding forces based on reduced military infrastructure, though costly in first battles, has often been acceptable in terms of overall strategic costs. Put differently, US foreign policy and national strategy objectives often exceeded military means. There was unanimous agreement among conference participants on this point. 2. Competition between the Regular Army and National Guard (militia) has always been part of the American military discourse. A number of scholars highlighted the historical importance of this competition. This debate is both rational and irrational as it stems from Anglo-Americans' historic preference for virtuous militia over suspect standing armies, while overlooking the sometimes poor initial military performance of militia/National Guard forces. A serving officer's presentation detailed how the relationship between active and reserve components works best in a complementary (but not interchangeable) arrangement. …

Influence without power? Reframing British concepts of military intervention after 10 years of counterinsurgency

British attitudes towards military intervention following the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have undergone what appears to be considerable change. Parliament has voted against the use of Britain's armed forces in Syria and the public are unenthused by overseas engagement. Conscious of the costs and the challenges posed by the use of British military power the government has been busy revamping the way it approaches crises overseas. The result is a set of policies that apparently heralds a new direction in foreign policy. This new direction is encapsulated in the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) and the more recent International Defence Engagement Strategy (IDES). Both BSOS and IDES set out the basis for avoiding major deployments to overseas conflict and instead refocuses effort on defence diplomacy, working with and through overseas governments and partners, early warning, pre-conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. Developing a number of themes that reach from across the Cold War to more contemporary discussions of British strategy, the goal of this special edition is to take into account a number of perspectives that place BSOS and IDES in their historical and strategic context. These papers suggest that using defence diplomacy is and will remain an extremely imprecise lever that needs to be carefully managed if it is to remain a democratically accountable tool of foreign policy.

Operational Leadership

Generating strategy may be easy, but implementing it is difficult. Initially understanding the problem is tough; worse, it may itself change as an operation goes on. Reflecting on his experience on recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, former US general and commander of ISAF, Stan A McChrystal, outlines the challenges of operational leadership and suggests some key lessons for leaders and policy-makers.

Learning to forget: US Army counterinsurgency doctrine and practice from Vietnam to Iraq

Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq By David Fitzgerald Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013 285 pages $45.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Learning to Forget, David Fitzgerald traces the effects of the Vietnam War's legacy on the US Army's understanding and approach to counterinsurgency. Fitzgerald, a Lecturer in International Politics at University College Cork, Ireland, broaches this topic chronologically, assessing first the role of counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War and then how the memory and lessons of that conflict shaped future institutional attempts to avoid, learn from, repeat, or even recall whatever it was that happened. The overarching argument is the memory of Vietnam has been neither static nor uncontested, but reinterpreted depending on the dominant context and personalities at any given time. The legacy, thus, remains fluid and open to reconstruction (210-211) and is used to justify a range of often incompatible arguments. As Fitzgerald implies, this historiographical tug-of-war reveals the long shadow the conflict still casts over the US Army as an institution. The book's strengths include its argumentation and structure; it is an eminently readable text. It weaves its way from Vietnam and the codification of its immediate lessons in the 1970s, to the re-encounter with irregular challenges in Central American in the 1980s, and then to the peace operations of the 1990s, and their relationship to the Army's counterinsurgency legacy. The last two chapters consider the spectacular highs and lows of counterinsurgency during the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Throughout, counterinsurgency has most commonly been marginalized as an institutional priority and area of investment, a trend bucked only by major traumatic events, (206) most recently the fear of utter failure during the civil war in Iraq. A second strength of the book is its measured tone and analysis. Fitzgerald has authored a sober and dispassionate study that resists the hyperbole and sensationalism typical of other related works. Perhaps Fitzgerald's distance from the debate, as an Ireland-based academic, affords him the necessary perspective. Nonetheless, the nuanced take on this all-too-often overheated topic is refreshing and, also, necessary. Third, the research is thorough and well documented in over sixty pages of footnotes. It is clear that Fitzgerald has consulted the relevant works, which he applies with due recognition of contending interpretations. The eye to detail and fastidious sourcing may be explained by the book's origins as Fitzgerald's own doctoral thesis, something evident in the book's initial literature review and primer on methodology. This last point relates also to one of the book's two weaknesses. Whereas Fitzgerald's analysis is commendably detached, one might wish he more often established his own view on controversial and divisive topics. He cites the dominant voices both for and against counterinsurgency's inclusion as a US military priority but refrains from presenting his own verdict. He covers the Iraq and Afghanistan wars well, but it is never explained why Fitzgerald thinks counterinsurgency succeeded in the former yet failed to produce the tangible results it needed in Afghanistan (198). …

Counterinsurgency in El Salvador: the lessons and limits of the indirect approach

Following two frustrating counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a drive to find new and more viable ways of addressing irregular security challenges. In this effort, the 1980s' campaign in El Salvador has gained prominence, as it resulted in the defeat of the guerrilla adversary yet involved only a modest deployment of US personnel and resources. The use of history to search for models and precedents can be fruitful, but past conflicts must be understood on their own terms and not made to fit the preconceived ideas of the day. A deeper appreciation of what happened in El Salvador reveals not only the unique circumstances that shaped the campaign but also the limited results of the counterinsurgency program to which the war's outcome is now being ascribed. This article adopts a broader lens, focusing on the real yet undervalued factors that produced peace in El Salvador and whether the final outcome was truly quite as successful as is now commonly assumed.

Reflections on the Counter-Insurgency Era

This June, General David H Petraeus (Rtd) became the 35th recipient of the RUSI Chesney Gold Medal, awarded by the Institute to mark both his role in devising and implementing the US counter-insurgency doctrine that was used to such great effect in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his distinguished lifetime service and contribution to international defence and security. In his acceptance speech – an edited version of which is presented here – General Petraeus reflects on the ‘Counter-Insurgency Era’ of the past decade and draws lessons for the future.

From Kabul to Baghdad and back: the U.S. at war in Afghanistan and Iraq

From Kabul to Baghdad and Back provides insight into the key strategic decisions of the Afghan and Iraq campaigns as the United States attempted to wage both simultaneously against al-Qaeda and its supporting affiliates. It also evaluates the strategic execution of those military campaigns to identify how well the two operations were conducted in light of their political objectives. The book identifies the elements that made the 2001 military operation to oust the Taliban successful, then with combat operations in Iraq as a standard of comparison, the authors analyze the remainder of the Afghan campaign and the essential problems that plagued that effort, from the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2002, through the ill-fated transition to NATO lead in Afghanistan in 2006, the dismissal of Generals McKiernan and McChrystal, the eventual decision by President Obama to make the Afghan campaign the main effort in the war on extremism, and the final development of drawdown plans following the end of the war in Iraq. No other book successfully compares and contrasts the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan from a national strategic perspective, analyzing the impact of fighting the Iraq War on the success of the United States campaign in Afghanistan. It is also the first book to specifically question several key operational decisions in Afghanistan including: the decision to give NATO the lead in Afghanistan, the decisions to fire Generals McKiernan and McChrystal and the decision to conduct an Iraq War-style surge in Afghanistan. It also compares the Afghan campaigns fought by the Soviet Union and the United States, the counterinsurgency campaigns styles in Iraq and Afghanistan and the leadership of senior American officials in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In the final chapter, the key lessons of the two campaigns are outlined, including the importance of effective strategic decision-making, the utility of population focused counterinsurgency practices, the challenges of building partner capacity during combat, and the mindset required to prosecute modern war.