Charles Tripp. Charles Tripp. Charles Tripp is a professor of politics with reference to the middle east at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. He is a member of the board of trustees of the London Middle East Institute (LMEI); this article (with minor editorial variations) was published in the LMEI's monthly journal, The Middle East in London (March 2009) Charles Tripp is the author of A History of Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Islam and the Moral Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Also by Charles Tripp in openDemocracy: "Iraq: the politics of the local" (25 January 2008) The murder of three journalists and their driver in the city of Mosul in September 2008 is a reminder of the mortal danger faced by journalists and their support-staff in Iraq.
This makes Iraq by the far the most dangerous place in the world, let alone in the middle east, to work as a journalist. Among openDemocracy's articles on media in the middle east: Islam and the Moral Economy. A History of Iraq. Professor Charles R H Tripp. Charles Tripp · Militias, Vigilantes, Death Squads: Iraq’s Shadow State · LRB 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 recycled Cold Warriors clustering round the Bush administration, or they had failed to inform their ‘key ally’ of their determination to dismantle Iraq’s state and security structures. More ominously, Blair seemed wholly uninterested in Iraq as a complex and puzzling political society, wanting confirmation merely that deposing Saddam Hussein would remove ‘evil’ from the country. ‘Security’, defined in military terms and suggesting a military solution, was used to justify the invasion and subsequent occupation, as it had been used to justify the UN sanctions. You are not logged in.