Archives for August 2009

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that five major Shiite fundamentalist parties along with some other personalities and small parties have announced the National Iraqi Alliance, the successor to the United Iraqi Alliance that had grouped the same parties plus the Islamic Mission (Da’wa) Party of current prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. This move could keep Nuri al-Maliki […]

Wissam Ali Kadhem Ibrahim was put on television in Iraq confessing his role in last Wednesday’s bombings. The former Baathist official described an operation that drew on old-time Baathist assets in Diyala province to Iraq’s northeast. The official spoke with cold, clinical precision. He showed no signs of torture. I found the confession at least […]

Adam L. Silverman writes in a guest op-ed for IC The recent increase in political violence in Iraq has once again led to renewed discussions of the potential religious component. Violence has recently been directed against the heterodox Kurdish population and a recent NY Times article also addressed the question of sectarian issues. One key […]

Obama, unlike Bush: 1. Has no plans to invade any new oil countries.2. Knows who president of Pakistan is3. Knows how to safely consume pretzels4. Does not take orders from his veep5. Not on vacation 40% of time6. Clears away Bush’s harm, rather than clearing brush on farm7. Worried about 47 million uninsured, not about […]

The Financial Times argues that the final judgment on how upright the Afghan elections were matters enormously to the Obama administration. If the US public decides these election results were phonied up, it will turn, FT argues, even more against the war than it already is (51 percent oppose the Afghanistan war in the US). […]

It was worse. Back in the bad old days of Bush’s corrupt gang, we on the left were pilloried for suggesting that the administration was manipulating terrorism-related news in order to win the 2004 elections. But when Tom Ridge says it . . . In fact, I argued in summer, 2004, that when Ridge did […]

Violence that left some 50 dead, and a relatively low turnout in some provinces marred Afghanistan’s presidential election on Thursday. McClatchy reports that the largest election monitoring organization refused to sign off on the polls’ legitimacy until more information had come in. Some 95% of polling stations were said to have opened. But the southwestern […]

The US military announced on Wednesday that 6 US troops had been killed in Afghanistan. As Afghans go to the polls in what is being widely decried as a flawed presidential election, a new Washington Post- ABC News opinion poll shows that American support for the Afghanistan War is collapsing. For the first time in […]

Speculation has been flying around in the news media and on the internet about who was behind Wednesday’s gory bombings in Baghdad. Let me lay out the various theories behing put forward, and then I’ll come back and give my view. If my conclusion is correct, it also helps answer the question of whether a […]