Iraq War

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) The philosophical difference between the Libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and the GOP hawks has burst into open name-calling. First, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that Paul had been more wrong than right, and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) jumped in, calling him “naive.” On Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” on […]

Dissent

Iraq: Why it doesn’t Matter if Ezzat al-Douri was Killed

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – The currently partly unemployed Iraqi governor of Salahuddin Province, displaced from much of his territory by Daesh (ISIS or ISIL), maintains that former Baath vice president of Iraq under Saddan Hussain, Ezzat al-Douri, has been killed by Shiite militias in a firefight north of Tikrit in the Hamrin […]

Featured

Iraq: ISIL surrounds 300 Sunni families, Closes in on Ramadi

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Al-Khaleej (The Gulf) reports that Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) has taken new territory in the western Al-Anbar Province of Iraq and may be on the verge of taking the provincial capital, Ramadi, a week after they were decisively defeated in Tikrit in the south of Salahuddin Province. They were […]

Iran

How Iran won Bush’s Iraq War

contributors

By Peter Van Buren | ( Tomdispatch.com) The U.S. is running around in circles in the Middle East, patching together coalitions here, acquiring strange bedfellows there, and in location after location trying to figure out who the enemy of its enemy actually is. The result is just what you’d expect: chaos further undermining whatever’s left […]

Iraq

Eyewitness: How the Bush invasion of Iraq created the ISIL Threat

contributors

Lindsey Hilsum | (Channel 4 News) – “Learn how the 2003 invasion of Iraq, by the US and its allies, led to sectarian violence, terror and sowed the seeds of the Islamic State. Our International Editor, Lindsey Hilsum, recounts her experiences of Iraq during the first months of conflict and explains how ISIS has grown […]

Health

Worst than ISIL: Iraq’s US-caused Public Health Catastrophe

contributors

By Mozhgan Savabieasfahani | (Informed Comment) The Iraqi people, once the envy of the Arab world for their outstanding educational and health-care systems, have been reduced to a nation of refugees, flung across the Middle East. U.S.-created thugs are axing Iraq’s historical heritage into pieces. The Iraqi health system continues to disintegrate as doctors flee […]

Bush

Williams Affair: Reagan and Bush Lied about Military Records but Get a Pass

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – NBC nightly news anchor Brian Williams is under fire for repeatedly having told an embellished story of being in a Chinook helicopter that took RPG and small arms fire at the beginning of the Iraq War and was forced down. His critics, and military personnel present on the […]

Bush

Is ISIL’s ‘Shock and Awe’ more Awe-ful because One Victim?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – The Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) burning of a captured Jordanian pilot alive produced justified revulsion globally, resulting in the terrorist organization being termed “barbarous” and similar epithets. Why did it behave this way? Because it wants to terrify its opponents into submission and underline that it is too […]

Bashar al-Assad

Paying the Piper: How America’s Iraq War haunts its Failed Syria Policy

contributors

By Michael MacDonald, author of Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq | (Special to Informed Comment | – If recent reports in the New York Times are to be believed, the Obama administration just got serious about the political realities gripping Syria and Iraq. Up to this point, the US has sought, for reasons […]