ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the debates that circulated in the Iraqi press at the time of the British occupation and Hashemite monarchy. It describes their role in fostering vitriolic critique of the incumbent regime, in mobilizing the public to protest and in serving as the people's watchdog over the elite. It is precisely the egalitarian and democratic tendencies found throughout the media/political nexus of Colonial Iraq that provide for a new vision of Iraqi history that is directly at odds with traditional views of Iraqi and Middle Eastern political culture. The chapter explores the contradiction between Britain's rhetoric as a harbinger of democracy and its contemporaneous attempts to quell Iraq's free press and curtails democratic reform. The Colonial period of Iraqi history brings to the fore the problematic nature of this widely held assumption, and reveals the contrapuntal discourses of Western civilization: a force for democracy and human rights on its own soil, a force for despotism and oppression abroad.
