Archive for the ‘Iraq’ Category
This Is a Farewell Kiss, Dog
One Hundred Years in Iraq
Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:
The most interesting exchange came at the very end, and it was about Iraq. The money quote—the bit that could come back to haunt McCain—went like this:
Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.
McCain: Make it a hundred.
That’s the sound [...]
Bush Administration Iraq Lies Quantified
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the [...]
Basra Violence Plummets after British Troop Withdrawal
Independent.ie, 11/16/2007:
The British army says violence in Basra has fallen by 90% since it withdrew from the southern Iraqi city earlier this year.
Around 500 British soldiers left one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in the heart of the city in early September and stopped conducting regular foot patrols.
A spokesman says the Iraqi security forces still come [...]
General Petraeus vs. the US Military
In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.
Fallon [...]
The Dark Assessment
"Facing the 'Dark Assessment'" at Firedoglake:
We’ve had an extraordinary week of leaked candor about the catastrophic state of US foreign policy under the Bush/Cheney regime, predictably followed by Presidential denials that al Qaeda is back and blatant propaganda that we’re making "satisfactory" progress on the few Iraq benchmarks that are virtually meaningless. The White [...]
CIA, Eight Months Ago: Iraq Regime Failure “Irreversible”
Bob Woodward in the Washington Post, July 12, 2007:
Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.
For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a [...]
White House Begins to Confront Iraq Withdrawal
"White House Debate Rises on Iraq Pullback" -- David Sanger in The New York Times, July 9, 2007:
White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the [...]
NYT: “It Is Time for the United States to Leave Iraq”
"The Road Home" -- New York Times banner editorial, July 8, 2007:
It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.
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Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the [...]
Army Gangs in Iraq
[A]ccording to gang experts, including one who has been called to testify, the real mystery is why it took the Army so long to accept that [Sergeant Juwan] Johnson was the victim of a growing epidemic of gang violence that has infected all branches of the armed services. Lax enlistment standards have inadvertently allowed thousands [...]
British Soldiers
Yoke Your Paranoia to Your Technical Knowledge
Common wisdom holds that 140,000 generally churchgoing Americans in Iraq are locked in mortal combat with some of the world’s most serious monotheists. To me, a new, less orthodox faith seems to have arisen, something far more personal and circumstantial. You could see it every time you watched a grunt throw away a box of [...]