Between 70,000 and 100,000 members of the Sadrist Shiite political bloc rallied in Baghdad on Thursday, demanding that the some 47,000 US troops still in Iraq leave altogether. Sadrist leader Muqtada al-Sadr says that if the troops remain, he will reactivate his Mahdi Army militia. It is a powerful threat. But in some ways, his […]
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Iraq
Selective Outrage about War
This poster at reddit.com compares the various costs of Bush’s illegal war in Iraq to those of the UN /NATO intervention in Libya (which is not illegal in internationaL law) and asks you to guess which one Republicans are angry about.
Why was Strauss-Kahn Arrested but W. & Cheney went Free?
What is it about the United States that makes for harsh prosecutions over sex crimes but lets leaders off the hook when it comes to war crimes? New York police rushed to arrest Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the head of the international Monetary Fund, on Saturday on learning of charges against him by a hotel maid […]
Stewart Skewers Bushies for claiming Bin Laden Credit
Jon Stewart of the Daily Show makes fun of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Doug Feith and other figures from the Bush administration to take credit for the demise of Usama Bin Laden. In fact, of course, they ran off to illegally invade and ruin Iraq and invested hundreds of billions of dollars in […]
Obama and the End of Al-Qaeda
An American president, himself the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, has taken down notorious terrorist Usama Bin Laden. Despite being a Christian, Obama, it seems to me, had a personal stake in destroying someone who had defamed the religion of his birth father and his relatives. His 2007-2008 presidential campaign was […]
Top Ten Arab Spring Advances this Week
With the horrid crackdowns on dissent in Syria and Bahrain and the vicious shelling by Qaddafi brigades of the port of Misrata in Libya on Tuesday, it would be easy to concentrate solely on the negative news. But the Arab Spring is still producing some positive reforms and questioning of past corrupt practices, and even […]
Bush’s Pre-War Iraq Oil Deals Alarmed BP
George W. Bush was quietly approaching US petroleum corporations and trying to do deals with the French and Russian governments and their energy companies regarding Iraqi petroleum fields in fall of 2002, according to British government documents. BP learned of these secret negotiations, and arranged for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Trade Minister, Lady Elizabeth Symons, […]
Arab Spring Protests Continue
1. Syria: In the biggest day of protests in Syria so far, tens of thousands of Syrians demonstrated against the Baathist state of Bashar al-Asad on Friday. Large crowds came out in the Douma suburb of Damascus, but were prevented by the tear-gas and the batons of the Syrian police from reaching the center of […]
Al-Sadr Threatens Mahdi Army Revival if US Troops Stay
Al-Hayat writing in Arabic reports that nationalist Shiite clergyman Muqtada al-Sadr threatened on Saturday to revive his Mahdi Army militia if US troops tried to stay in Iraq past December 31, 2011. He said his fighters would return to carrying arms. Tens of thousands of Iraqi protesters, mainly his supporters, gathered beginning early in the […]