Archives for 2009

A little bit of irony from the British archives on Iraq. “Muhammad al-Sadr, the President of the Senate, is believed to aspire one day to head a predominantly Shia Cabinet, but,though his name has been mentioned recently in political circles as a possible Prime Minister, the Sunni effendi element is unlikely ever to accept a […]

With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have entered the age of micro-wars. The first wars that Israel fought with its Arab neighbors were conventional struggles in which infantry, artillery, armor and air forces played central roles. Israel’s enemies had few effective tools in the 1950s and 1960s. Abdel Nasser encouraged Palestinian resistance from Gaza […]

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports of Israel’s heavy artillery bombardment of densely populated Gaza on Saturday that “The American School north of Gaza was directly hit and almost completely destroyed, with one school guard killed. In addition, at least three to five schools were damaged by Israeli shelling of […]

After a four-hour artillery barrage, Israeli troops moved into the northern part of the Gaza strip on Saturday. This land operation raises the same question Jonathan Freedland asked about the whole Gaza War, which is whether it is wise and how it will end with any lasting advantage to Israel. Me, I can’t see it. […]

Thousands of Afghans rallied on Friday against the Israeli attack on Gaza Three thousand protesters in Kabul burned Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush in effigy, chanted death to Israel and death to infidels, and demanded that the 30,000 US troops in Afghanistan depart. That is what the US really needed at this juncture, was […]

A suicide belt bomber killed his own clansmen at a tribal reconciliation meeting at Yusufiya just south of Baghdad, killing at least 30 and wounding 110. It was the first big suicide bombing of 2009.i There was also a bombing each in Baghdad and Mosul that left 6 civilians wounded. Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic […]

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases articles in the Jordanian press on the Israeli attack on Gaza. Jordan is one of only two Arab states to have a formal peace treaty with Israel, and its intellectuals clearly want the government to abrogate it. Worse, they have been driven by the images of dead children dug […]

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced Thursday that Iraq had “regained its national sovereignty”. It could in fact be argued that for the first time since the end of the Gulf War, Iraq is again for most purposes an independent country in international law. It was put under Chapter 7 of the United Nations charter […]

The news keeps reporting that the Israeli air force bombed refugee camps in Gaza. Did you ever wonder how those refugee camps got to be in Gaza? Cont’d . . .I mean, where are they refugees from? There didn’t used to be refugees in Gaza, before 1948, after all. The grandparents of today’s refugees were […]