By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | — Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister and former foreign minister of Iraq, is dead at 79. He died in prison in the custody of the Shiie-dominated government he tried to forestall. Aziz was born Mikhael Yuhanna (Michael John) into a Chaldean Catholic family. He gravitated to […]
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Iraq War
Washington asks, “Who lost Ramadi?” But Washington never had Ramadi
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | — The inside-the-Beltway debate set off by the fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) on Sunday is, as usual, Dadaistic in its disconnection from reality. Republican talking points blame Barack Obama for withdrawing US troops from Iraq in 2011, as though Daesh suddenly […]
2007: Progress Continues in Ramadi, Mullen Notes During Visit
Just to show Iraq’s ups and downs, here is a celebratory article from the US Department of Defense about the apparent rollback in Ramadi of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (the parent organization of Daesh/ ISIS/ ISIL) from 2007 DoD News By Jim Garamone American Forces Press Service RAMADI, Iraq, Dec. 19, 2007 – Driving through downtown […]
Did Jeb Bush just commit a War Crime in Justifying the Iraq War?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | — Jeb Bush’s people are trying to walk back his disastrous interview with Megyn Kelly in which he said that even if he knew then what we all know now, he would have launched the war on Iraq in 2003. It is true that he doesn’t seem to […]
Bush blames Obama for lack of Wars (‘Follow-Through’ on ‘Threats’)
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – George W. Bush spoke privately this weekend at a Republican Jewish Coalition session hosted by casino sleazeball Sheldon Adelson, who made his pile in a very shady way in China’s Macau and now gets to choose the US president with his ill-gotten gains. What was remarkable was that […]
Rand Paul: GOP Hawks are Obama’s “Lapdogs;” McCain: Paul ‘Worst Candidate’
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 […]
Iraq: Why it doesn’t Matter if Ezzat al-Douri was Killed
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 […]
Iraq: ISIL surrounds 300 Sunni families, Closes in on Ramadi
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 […]
How Iran won Bush’s Iraq War
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 […]
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