Archives for September 2009

Daniel Graeber covers the debate about Iraq on university campuses and finds that attention has largely turned elsewhere. And, indeed, even Gen. Ray Odierno, who had earlier opposed a quick drawdown in Iraq, is now suggesting that he may accelerate the US troop exodus. End/ (Not Continued)

A suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a NATO convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday morning. There are reportedly casualties but early reports did not specify them. Roadside bombs set by anti-government guerrillas in Afghanistan killed 36 civilians in a 24-hour period ending Tuesday, with a single bombing of a bus near Qandahar accounting for […]

Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, reaffirmed Monday that a date would soon be set for the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the planned nuclear enrichment facility near Qom about which the Iranian government informed the IAEA on Monday a week ago. If Iran really does permit full, ongoing IAEA […]

There is no good evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It has offered to allow regular International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the newly announced facility near Qom, which would effectively prevent it from being used for weapons production. There is a secret nuclear facility in the Middle East, however, producing plutonium and […]

On Sunday morning, a Taliban suicide bombing attack struck at the entourage of Ismail Khan, the Afghan Minister of Energy and Water, in Herat, according to the Afghan Voice Agency writing in Persian. Ismail Khan is from the western, Dari Persian-speaking city of Herat, and was its governor before being inducted into the central government’s […]

American and Western discussions of what to do about Iran almost completely ignore Iraq. But no economic sanctions can effectively be placed on Iran without Iraqi support. A gasoline embargo would fail completely if Iraqis smuggled gasoline to Iran (which they certainly would, both for economic and religious reasons). Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, […]

The news in the US is about several terrorist plots, some by Christians and some by Muslim expatriates, which have been averted by good police work, by the FBI and its local colleagues. In Pakistan, the news is about a terrorist plot that was not averted. Update: Two further blasts in the Northwest brought the […]

Usama Bin Laden’s latest screed on the Western evacutation from Afghanistan is the height of hypocrisy, since Bin Laden actively connived at getting Western troops to go there. Abdel Bar Atwan is a prominent Arab journalist and intellectual. Here what he said about his meeting with Bin Laden in 1996: ‘ Osama Bin Laden told […]