Archives for August 2009

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that a delegation from the (Shiite) United Iraqi Alliance [UIA] met for three hours on Sunday with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, seeking his advice on how to rebuild the coalition ahead of January’s parliamentary elections. A leading member of the political delegation was the former BFF of the Neoconservatives, Ahmad Chalabi. […]

See my regular column in Salon.com, “Sarah Palin, meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: You two right-wing populists have a surprising amount in common.” Excerpt: “Palin portrays herself as the small-town outsider. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment,” she proclaimed last fall. She blamed her bad press on not being in the “Washington elite,” when, […]

“Speech by George W. Bush, President of the United States at the United Nations General Assembly, 12 September 2002″, making the case for going to war with Iraq: … In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it […]

My interview at Rooz Online on Iran is now up. The trial of 100 leading protesters against the announced outcome of the June 12 presidential elections commenced on Saturday, complete with pitiful coerced recantations. Amazingly, former president Mohammad Khatami’s web site openly denounced the trial as just that, a show trial. Khatami’s problem was always […]

The NYT on Friday published a memo from Col. Timothy R. Reese, Chief, Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, MND-B, Baghdad, Iraq, in which he argued for a more or less immediate departure of US troops from Iraq. AP notes that most US officers in Iraq do not agree with Reese. Some believe he is being […]

Posted to an email list. I made some minor spelling corrections. This is going to be a slightly disjointed email, I’m sorry in advanced. It’s already well passed midnight here and we just finished returning from the streets protesting. But I wanted to make sure to get this out tonight. Today marked the 40th day […]