Iraq

Despite what the pundits will say, I fear the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the Hill Monday and Tuesday is not a turning point, does not give Bush breathing room, and is largely irrelevant. To any extent that what they do in Iraq ends up making a real positive difference, […]

Everybody’s got a status report on Iraq these days. The consistently best and most clear-eyed wire service on Iraq, whose Pentagon correspondents are pointedly not invited to fly with the Secretary of Defense, is McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder). It has a long article on Sunday on how the security situation is not in fact better in […]

My Texas oil theory of the Cheney wing’s decision to go to war against Iraq got some (admittedly ex post facto) support on Sunday when it was announced that Hunt Oil is doing a deal for petroleum development in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Such Kurdistan deals are not typically being put through the federal government in Baghdad, […]

The Sadr Movement in Basra is warning the US military not to try to come into the province to replace the departing British troops. Suspected Mahdi Army roadside bombs have inflicted unusually high casualties on British troops in the deep south this year. The International Organization for Migration is reporting that its data show that […]

7 US troops were killed 4 of them in al-Anbar profince and the other 3 in Ninevah proince. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Sadrist spokesman Baha’ al-A’raji says that his bloc in parliament is not exploring new alliances with a view to unseating Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. He said such a move would destabilize Iraq […]

Via Fareed Zakaria’s “Foreign Exchange,” an interview with David Enders, a journalist just back from Iraq with an unvarnished view of the situation. As I understand it, this is a 4-minute preview, with the whole interview to be available at Foreignexchange.tv from Saturday forward. Hat tip to the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

With regard to the recent dust-up in the pages of the NYT between Bush and Bremer over the dismantling of the Iraqi Army, Ward Harkavy at the Village Voice reminds us that the mystery has already been solved by former British Home Secretary David Blunkett. He revealed in his memoirs that Cheney and Rumsfeld were […]

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman writes: Perhaps the most telling commentary on the situation today in Iraq is the choice of a remote, heavily fortified US airbase in Anbar province for the President’s third visit to Iraq. He was joined by his senior national security officials, all kinds of four-stars, including General Petreus, and Ambassador Crocker. […]

From Josh Marshall’s Veracifier site, “Iraq by the Numbers”.