"Toby Dodge" is an English political scientist whose main area of interest lies in the Middle East. He completed a PhD on the transformation of international system in the aftermath of the First World War and the creation of the Iraqi state at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He also taught international relations and Middle Eastern politics in the Department of Political Studies at SOAS for four years. Toby was Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick. He is currently a Reader in the International Relations department at London_School_of_Economics/LSE and Senior Consulting Fellow for the Middle East at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Toby is an expert on the politics of Iraq and has published several books relating to this and international relations more generally. His expertise has led to a series of television appearances on news programmes to discuss the invasion of Iraq.

Dodge has also served as an occasional adviser to U.S. general David Petraeus in Iraq.

More Toby Dodge on Wikipedia.

It's increasingly becoming a war of all against all, with no rules. . . . The Iraqi security forces themselves are becoming just another of the players, and if they owe allegiance to anything, it's to their commanders or communities, and not remotely to the state itself.

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Does the process dump the Sunnis by the wayside or do they stay and hammer out a compromise?

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The response has to be swift and it has to be bloody to prove to the population of the town, and the whole of Iraq, that any attack on the president will be punished in brutal and horrific terms.

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They're negotiating about an institution that doesn't exist and shows no signs of coming to life, ... The state collapsed in June, 2003, and definitely needs to be rebuilt.

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The British presence has been incredibly light, they have a laissez-faire attitude.

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[The attempt to ensure passage] was a mixture of arrogance and stupidity, ... It would have made a Sunni boycott (of Saturday's vote) inevitable.

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It's pretty messy and I think ultimately it won't do anything positive but just aggravate the violence.

105

This isn't shaping up to be just a civil war - it's worse than that. It's a war of all against all. What we have is a security vacuum that has given rise to various different forces fighting each other for control ... it's much more fractured than a civil war.

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