Archive for the ‘War’ Category
Food Fight
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 [...]
Our School Was Burned
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 [...]
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 [...]
Bush Would Defy Withdrawal Legislation
"Rice Says Bush Will Not Abide by Legislation to Limit Iraq War" -- International Herald Tribune, February 25, 2007:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress not to interfere in the conduct of the Iraq war and suggested President George W. Bush would defy troop withdrawal legislation.
But Sen. Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of [...]
No Christmas Letter
Lancet Study: The Numbers Do Add Up
In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.
Talk of confidence [...]