Archives for August 2009

A series of coordinated truck bombings targeted Iraqi government ministries and other facilities on Wednesday morning, killing nearly 100 persons and wounding some 500. Poorly equipped and staffed emergency rooms in the capital were overwhelmed. One of the massive explosions targeted the Foreign Ministry building, killing nearly 60 persons and breaking windows in the nearby […]

On Wednesday morning, on the eve of Afghanistan’s elections, gunmen in the Seraji district of Kabul invaded the Pashtani Bank while laying down small arms fire and setting off explosions, a little over a mile from the presidential palace. Afghan security forces responded, and the clashes continued through Wednesday morning, with the attacks firing indiscriminately […]

Today’s story about Iraq is a story of conflict between Gen. Ray Odierno and the Iraqi parliament. Elements in the cabinet and the parliament put pressure on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki not only to put the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the US to a referendum on Jan. 15, but also to allow Iraqis […]

President Barack Obama gave a major speech on the Afghanistan War to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona, on Monday. Ironically, the American Taliban was milling around outside the hall with guns as Obama spoke. Others have pointed out that Bush’s handlers would never have allowed any such thing. Hell, they unconstitutionally designated […]

Incumbent Afghan president Hamid Karzai is clearly feeling the breath of his main rival in the presidential contest on the back of his neck. He haughtily declined to debate his leading rivals earlier this summer. But on Sunday, he went on television to debate two of them. A third leading rival, Abdullah Abdullah, refused to […]

In Baghdad, two bombs went off near a falafel stand and killed 8 and wounded 21 persons Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] reports in Arabic on other attacks on Sunday. In Fallujah, armed guerrillas invaded the home of a policemen, killing 4 family members and wounding 3 others. They then blew up the house, in […]

While Americans are debating their own health system, they are unindicted co-conspirators in an effort to degrade the health, mental and physical, and to half-starve the people of Gaza. The callousness, ruthlessness and selfishness of this policy, in which all Americans are implicated, is breathtaking. In Gaza, there really were death panels deciding who lived […]

Some 22 militants died in fighting in Gaza between Hamas and the Army of God’s Helpers on Friday, the latter being a radical fundamentalist cult that took some of its cues from al-Qaeda and the Taliban and demanded the imposition of a rigid understanding of Islamic law in Gaza, as well as plotting global holy […]

Check out this blog of an interesting experiment in American public diplomacy in Syria: “The American MidEast Leadership Network’s (AMLN’s) Virtual Scrapbook is an online collection of the thoughts, musings, favorite things, photographs, and video/audio clips collected by the participants and administrators of AMLN’s Grassroots Diplomacy Program, a three-week cultural exchange program between American and […]