Archives for 2005

Government to be Formed by Sunday? Iraqi official sources maintained on Tuesday that negotiations between the United Iraqi Alliance and the Kurdish Alliance to form a government are well advanced, and that the ministries have been apportioned among the two. Iraq nowadays is like the United States was in the early 19th century, during the […]

Wolfowitz Romancing Tunisian World Bank Employee? I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this gossipy story that Paul Wolfowitz is romantically involved with Shaha Ali Riza, a Tunisian woman brought up in Saudi Arabia formerly married to Bulent Riza, a Turk. I don’t think the private lives of people are relevant to their public service […]

Live-Blogging 11:00 am Sorry I’m getting to the Brookings event on blogging, which is being webcast here, a little late this morning. One of the disadvantages of being a professor blogger is that other duties sometimes take precedence. The panelists are discussing whether blogging is journalism, and whether it is an interesting question. I have […]

10 Killed in Iraq Sistani Impatient Ed Wong does his usual good job of reporting on developments in Iraq. The guerrilla war continued apace, with ten Iraqis killed in separate incidents. Guerrillas in Anbar Province killed a US Marine on Monday, as well. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is expressing impatience with the inability of the […]

45 Dead in Continued Guerrilla War Baghdad Pitched Battle Kills 24 AFP reports that violence in Iraq on Sunday left 45 dead in separate incidents. The biggest incident involved an ambush about 15 miles from Baghdad. Details are sketchy, but it resulted in a firefight between US troops and local guerrillas, with 24 of the […]

Iraq and Vietnam Although Martin van Creveld in the Boston Review is pushing the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam (with Moshe Dayan in Saigon as an interesting plot device), in fact the conflict does not resemble Vietnam. In Communism, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had a universal ideology with a nationalist subtext that could […]

Iraq Two Years Later Tom Engelhardt pulls it all together in his essay on the state of affairs in American Iraq. It is a comprehensive and timely meditation, given that we have just passed the 2-year anniversary of the start of the US invasion. Engelhardt’s clear-eyed deconstruction of the boosterist myths of devotees of neo-Empire […]

Hariri and al-Qaeda? Really? I don’t have a dog in the fight about who killed Rafiq Hariri, but I don’t find the case for the Syrians being behind it is airtight. I worked for Monday Morning Co. in the late 1970s in Beirut as a journalist/translator and the Syrian secret police used sometimes to pull […]