Iraq War

Bloomberg “Valerie Plame Wilson, author and former CIA officer, discusses her new book entitled “Burned” and national security in the 21st century with Bloomberg’s Pimm Fox on “Taking Stock.” (Source: Bloomberg)” Channel 4: “Former CIA Agent Valerie Plame Embraces Being ‘Burned’ ”

Bush

For GOP who Question why Iraq didn’t Want US Forces to Stay: “Blackwater Guards Guilty In 2007 Iraq Massacre”

contributors

Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks: “Four former Blackwater security guards were convicted Wednesday in the 2007 shootings of more than 30 Iraqis in Baghdad, an incident that inflamed anti-American sentiment around the globe and was denounced by critics as an illustration of a war gone horribly wrong. The men claimed self-defense, but federal prosecutors argued […]

Featured

Media, Politicians should stop Letting ISIL Manipulate them

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole Ever since George W. Bush invaded Iraq and created the circumstances under which al-Qaeda could take root and flourish there from 2003 forward, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (which later styled itself the “Islamic State of Iraq”) has taken captives and has beheaded them on film. It was doing this in 2004 These acts […]

Iraq

What Drove Iraqi Sunnis to Revolt and ally with ISIS?

contributors

By Charles Recknagel via RFE/RL As Sunni insurgents have swept across northern Iraq, they have sought to win support by portraying themselves as the liberators of the country’s Sunni population. One of their first acts after routing the Iraqi Army from Mosul on June 6-9 was to open up the gates of the city’s prison. […]

Featured

Cons of Going to War against Iraq (Cole, Jan. 2003)

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole From a talk I gave at the University of Michigan in late 2002, publised at the beginning of 2003. It is often alleged by hawks that no one saw these things coming. Some of us did. Costs of War The regional costs of a US war on Iraq are potentially great: The […]

Featured

Who are Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and What did we Do to them?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole The two great branches of Islam coexist in Iraq across linguistic and ethnic groups. There are Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs, Sunni Kurds and (a tiny minority of) Shiite Kurds. Arabs are a linguistic group, speaking a Semitic language. Kurds speak and Indo-European language related to English. Sunnism and Shiism as we […]

Iraq

Absolutely Nothing: A Veteran’s Savage Indictment of the Iraq War

contributors

Tragically, all we’ve fought for in Iraq, all that 4,500 American lives were shed to gain, is on the cusp, potentially, of vanishing. – Mitt Romney, “Ideas Summit,” 6/13/2014 All we fought for in Iraq. All we fought for in Iraq is on the cusp…

Barack Obama

Don’t Trust the Bombers on Iraq: “Shock and Awe” Never Works

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole In March of 2003, we were treated to an intensive bombardment of Iraq, which the Bush White House propagandists termed “Shock and Awe.” As usual, the US Air Force practically promised us that if only they could throw down all their fancy munitions on the target country from the air, why, you […]

Bush

Wikileaks’ Manning says US public was lied to about Iraq from the start

contributors

Manning says US public lied to about Iraq from the start (via AFP) The detained US soldier convicted of leaking a trove of secret documents to WikiLeaks made a rare foray into public life Saturday to warn Americans they were being lied to about Iraq once more. Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year prison sentence […]