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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > General
Volume 2 takes up the account after Iraq withdrew from Khuzestan
and is based upon material from both sides, from US Intelligence
data, British Government documents and secret Iraqi files. Iraq's
withdrawal exposed the great southern city of Basra to Iranian
attack but it was shielded by fortifications based upon a huge
anti-tank ditch, the so-called Fish Lake, which the Iranians tried
to storm in the summer of 1982. This bloody failure left Tehran in
a position where prestige prevented a withdrawal into Iran but the
armed forces lacked the resources to bring the conflict to a
favourable conclusion. During the next four years the Iranians
tried to outflank the Fish Lake defences initially through the
marshes in the north and finally through an attack on the Fao
Peninsula which increased national prestige but was a strategic
failure and paved the way for Iraq's massive victories in 1988.
This followed a series of successful defensive battles in which the
Iranians were driven back with great loss. This account describes
the battles in greater detail than before and, by examining them,
provides unique insights and ends many of the myths which are
repeated in many other accounts of this conflict.
In Reencounters,Crystal Mun-hye Baik examines what it means to live
with and remember an ongoing war when its
manifestations-hypervisible and deeply sensed-become everyday
formations delinked from militarization. Contemplating beyond
notions of inherited trauma and post memory, Baik offers the
concept of reencounters to better track the Korean War's illegible
entanglements through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic
memory works that includes oral history projects, performances, and
video installations rarely examined by Asian American studies
scholars. Baik shows how Korean refugee migrations are repackaged
into celebrated immigration narratives, how transnational adoptees
are reclaimed by the South Korean state as welcomed "returnees,"
and how militarized colonial outposts such as Jeju Island are
recalibrated into desirable tourist destinations. Baik argues that
as the works by Korean and Korean/American artists depict this Cold
War historiography, they also offer opportunities to remember
otherwise the continuing war. Ultimately, Reencounters wrestles
with questions of the nature of war, racial and sexual violence,
and neoliberal surveillance in the twenty-first century.
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