Archives for September 2009

Here is the ranking by health researchers of 19 industrialized nations by how well their health systems intervene to stop preventable deaths. The US is now dead last at number 19, below not only France and Japan but also Denmark and New Zealand. (Original study here in pdf.) The US has fallen four places in […]

Jonathan Landay of McClatchy reports as an eye-witness on the guerrilla attack in Kunar Province on an Afghan Army expedition to Ganjgal village that killed 4 US marine trainers. AFP says that 10 Afghan army personnel and one policeman were killed and ten others wounded. Landay’s powerful, Hemingwayesque account of the ambush reveals the flinty […]

Jim Krane writes in a guest op-ed for IC The contrast is startling. Dubai is Iran’s window through the US embargo, one of its largest trading partners, and an offshore Mecca for Iranian business. “Dubai is the most important city on earth to the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the exception of Tehran,” says Saeed […]

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the Islamic Mission Party [Da’wa] headed by Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki is holding public demonstrations against Syria over its alleged role in harboring Baathist terrorists that hit Iraqi government buildings two Wednesdays ago. The demonstration in al-Hillah south of Baghdad on Monday did not strike me as that impressive, […]

The unemployment rate as I write is inching toward 10 percent nationally, and that is only counting people who were still looking for a job recently. A vast bank robbery by the corrupt on Wall Street has deprived them of the credit that made the economy go. Labor Day was passed by Congress under Grover […]

A Taliban-set roadside bomb hit a German convoy in Kunduz province on Saturday, likely in vengeance for the NATO air strike on hijacked fuel trucks that killed so many locals. Four German soldiers were lightly injured. On Sunday morning, another US soldier was killed, in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban are becoming increasingly proficient in laying […]

Journalist Besan Sheikh recently visited the Guantanamo Bay prison facility run by the US, where al-Qaeda and other prisoners from Bush’s ‘war on terror’ are held. (Many of the prisoners appear to have been sold by the Taliban or swept up indiscriminately in the vicinity of a battlefield). Sheikh told the pan-Arab London daily, al-Hayat […]

Earlier this week, Taliban had hijacked NATO fuel trucks. On late Thursday or early Friday, NATO war planes located and struck at the trucks, after aerial surveillance seemed to show insurgent activity around them. But unexpectedly, the NATO air strikes did not just kill a few insurgents, but rather dozens of people– at least 95 […]

Conservative columnist George Will, having argued earlier this week for a US withdrawal from Afghanistan, today says we should get out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Will’s main arguments are: 1. The past 6 1/2 years in Iraq have produced 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded2. The US military is exhausted and needs a […]