Iraq

Secretary of State John Kerry just made trips to Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration’s two trophy states, in an attempt to shore up rapidly declining American influence in the two. In Afghanistan, the mood is turning against a US troop presence after 2014. In the last couple of weeks, President Hamid Karzai successfully insisted […]

Iraq

Iraq 10 Years Later: The Bitter Days Continue because Policy didn’t put People First (Al-Sheemary)

Juan Cole

Banen Al-Sheemary ( @balsheem), a young Iraqi-American woman and activist, writes in a guest column for Informed Comment Ten years today, I remember sitting in front of the television and watching the sky turn bright yellow because of the massive blasts. Silent, I turned away from the screen to see my parents’ reaction. Absolute silence. […]

Iraq War

Phil Donohue Recalls how he Was Fired From MSNBC for Being anti-war (Goodman Interview)

Juan Cole

At Democracy Now! Phil Donohue recalls how then General Electric-owned NBC fired him from his popular and top-rated talk show on MSNBC in spring of 2003 because it feared his voice in opposition to the Iraq War. It is great to have the whole story from Donohue. Here is what I wrote at this blog […]

Iran

As Israelis Press Obama on Iran, Let’s Remember they Urged Iraq War, Too

Juan Cole

The Israeli leadership, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, will attempt to strong-arm President Barack Obama, during his visit to Israel, into attacking Iran. (In part this noise about Iran is to deflect attention from the vast Israeli land grab in the Palestinian West Bank). It is now often forgotten, and even denied, that the then […]

Iraq

What we Did to Iraq

Juan Cole

Sunni radicals hit Baghdad Tuesday morning on the anniversary of the beginning of the US war on Iraq, killing over 50 people in attacks on soft targets (shopkeepers, pedestrians) in Shiite areas of the capital. They were signaling their continued die-hard opposition to the new Iraq, which is dominated by Shiite political parties, in which […]

Iraq

What we Lost: Top Ten Ways the Iraq War Harmed the US

Juan Cole

As the tenth anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War approaches, I’ll be making some comments about the episode at this blog, which for the years 2003-2010 intensively covered events in Iraq. A decade is long enough for some things to become clear. The first set of issues I want to discuss has to […]

Iraq

Iraq’s Teens Drowning in Hopelessness (Arwa Damon)

Juan Cole

CNN’s Arwa Damon reports from Baghdad on the sense of hopelessness among even upper-class Iraqi teens today. AFP gives support to Ms. Damon’s findings: a 2011 poll of Iraqi men under 30 found that 89% of them wanted to emigrate from the country. A more upbeat treatment by the Associated Press turns out to depend […]

Iraq War

Falsity of Nuclear Accusation against Iraq Was Known before Bush’s Invasion

Juan Cole

As we approach the ten year anniversary of the launching of George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, it is worth my pointing out that I concluded even before the war began that the main rationale then given for it, Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program, was a fiction. I was following the inspectors which Bush had […]

Iraq

Mission Accomplished: Iraq as America’s biggest Blunder (Van Buren)

Juan Cole

Peter van Buren writes at Tomdispatch.com I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness — and oh yes, it was […]