Iraq

Unlike SCOTUS, Iraqi Kurds are Rethinking Lax Gun Laws after Shootings; Will even Iraq be Safer than the US?

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Other countries can just adopt rational policies to deal with severe social problems. The United States is locked into various weird metaphysical dogmas that make reasoning about such issues difficult. The second amendment, for instance, has nothing to do with universal gun ownership, whatever ideologues on the Right assert. The […]

Afghanistan

War as Terrorism: Conflicts We Can’t Win, Suffering We Don’t See

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com) – Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures — those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn’t […]

Featured

In Final Slap to Bush-Era Neoconservatives, Iraq Criminalizes Contacts with Israel

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Neoconservatives who pushed for the Bush-Cheney war on Iraq in 2003 hoped that by toppling the Arab nationalist dictator Saddam Hussein they could recreate Iraq as a country friendly to US interests and regional allies like Israel. I was told by one military officer that he was in the […]

Bush

George W. Bush denounces “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, Ukraine”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Michael Williams at the Dallas Morning News reports on George W. Bush’s speech at his presidential center at Southern Methodist University, during which the former president made what MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan called “one of the biggest Freudian slips of all time.” Bush denounced the rigged elections that produced the dictatorship […]

Afghanistan

Our Compassion for Ukrainian Victims of War was not on Offer to Iraqis or Afghans when We Invaded

Tomdispatch

By Nan Levinson | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – I’ve been watching this country at war for many years now and, after 9/11, began spending time with American veterans who came to disdain and actively oppose the very conflicts they were sent to fight. The paths they followed to get there and the courage it […]

Climate Crisis

The Iraqi Dust Bowl: The US Invaded for its Oil, but now Climate Change from burning Fossil Fuels is Smothering the Country

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Some Middle East countries profit off oil and gas, but the very source of their prosperity is threatening their future, since burning these fossil fuels causes global heating, and you wouldn’t want the Middle East to be hotter than it already is. But it will be. The very oil that […]

Iraq War

From Mosul to Raqqa to Mariupol, Killing Civilians is a Crime no Matter Who Does it

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J.S. Davies

( Code Pink ) – Americans have been shocked by the death and destruction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the street. But the United States and its allies have waged war in country after country for decades, carving swathes of destruction through cities, towns […]

Agriculture

More Heat, Less Water: Climate Emergency Pushes Iraq’s Farmers off Land as Drought cripples Crops

Middle East Monitor

( Middle East Monitor ) – Until a few years ago, farming in southern Iraq was “as lucrative as oil”, Qasim Abdul Wahad remembers, and his one-hectare farm plot in the Governorate of Basra produced enough to feed his family of eight. Now dust kicks up under his feet as he walks through his land, […]

Featured

Zelensky says Russia is the new ISIL: Top 3 Ways he may be Right

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In an address on Tuesday to the United Nations Security Council, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky compared Russia to the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) terrorist group that took over eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq 2014-2018. His immediate comparison was of the brutality of Russian troops toward the civilian population in Bucha and […]