The unravelling: high hopes and missed opportunities in Iraq. By Emma Sky
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1468-2346.12582
ISSN1468-2346
Autores Tópico(s)Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
ResumoComing some years after the glut of writing that accompanied the US-led occupation of Iraq is this unusual and unlikely story of ‘a British woman, advising the top leadership of the US military’ (p. 4). That woman is Emma Sky, who was a 35-year-old working for the British Council when the American tanks rolled into Baghdad. Sky had already spent time working abroad, including in the Middle East, although her only experience of Iraq was her previous opposition to conflicts in the country when she signed up to be a human shield in 1991. Suddenly, she found herself on a military transport plane out to the region in response to a Foreign and Commonwealth Office advert. Sky can be described as a romantic liberal of sorts, whose subsequent experience with the US military opened her mind to a very different culture of working. She warns herself that ‘Mesopotamia will always get the better of those who come to love her’ (p. 89) and the book is a very honest appraisal, from someone who clearly cares deeply for the country and the people she has spent time working with. It is also the story of a wanderer, an only child whose time at boarding school seemed to give her drive that found its direction in Iraq. Sky describes how ‘[she] had felt so alive in Iraq, with such a strong sense of purpose. The best times of my life—and the hardest times—were in Iraq’ (p. 362). Her enthralling, readable and fascinating account is simultaneously ‘an Iraqi story. It is an American story. It is my story’ (p. 341).
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