Three quarters of American voters say that the Iraq War is a very important or extremely important issue for them. I talk around the country on Iraq and I also find widespread concern about and interest in the subject. A smart television news program that gave renewed attention to Iraq instead of ignoring it would […]
Archives for October 2008
The Iraq War Bluff Revisited
Thanks to Mark Ganzer for digging back out a long post of mine from summer of 2002 about the Iraq War, then looming, and its likely consequences: Reprint edition from July 31, 2002: There is not any doubt that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz intend to go to war against Baghdad, and the signs I’ve seen are […]
McCain Racism, Hypocrisy on Khalidi Issue
The increasingly sleazy John McCain, who once promised to run a clean campaign, has now attacked my friend Rashid Khalidi and attempted to use him against Barack Obama. Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the […]
Iraqis Want Strict Withdrawal Timetable; $6 Bn. Spent on Private Security Guards by Bush
Remember how John McCain insisted to Wolf Blitzer that the security pact being negotiated by Iraq and the Bush administration talks about the withdrawal of US troops as “conditions-based” rather than tied to a strict timetable? That was not true of the draft, which called for US troops out by 2011 but did contain language […]
Iraq Condemns Syria Raid; Seeks Renegotiation of Security Accord
Iraqi government spokesman Ali Dabbagh on Tuesday backed off his earlier support for the US raid into Syria. He said that the Iraqi constitution forbids third parties to use Iraq as a staging ground for attacks on other countries. It is not clear whether Dabbagh was just issuing a pro forma condemnation or whether the […]
Contacts begin with Taliban DPs Suffer in Camps
AFP reports: “Pakistani and Afghan officials and tribal leaders agreed Tuesday to make contact with Taliban militants in an attempt to end the raging insurgent violence along their porous border. The declaration came after two days of talks in Islamabad aimed at finding a lasting solution to the unrest which has wracked the region since […]
The hypocrisy of the ‘One-Party Rule’ Gambit
The McCain campaign is now warning against “one party rule” if Obama is elected president at at time when there will likely be a Democratic landslide in the House and the Senate. Well, first of all, having one party in control of the White House and Congress could have the benefit of allowing them to […]
US: Raid Targetted al-Qaeda Facilitator; May Complicate Security Agreement with Iraq
US government sources maintained on Monday that the cross-border raid into Syria that left 8 dead had succeeded in killing “Abu al-Ghadiyah” (Badran al-Mazidi) of Mosul, a member of the fundamentalist vigilante group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (originally called “Monotheism and Holy War” but more recently “The Islamic State of Iraq”). Al-Zarqawi was killed in […]
Middle East Press Negative on US Attack on Syrian Soil.
The USG Open Source Center surveys the Middle Eastern press reaction to the US raid on Abu al-Kamal in Syria, finding it mostly negative and based on Syrian reports. Lesson: If the US had just gotten word out about its side of the story more quickly and effectively, it might have blunted the generally negative […]
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