Arab World

A huge bomb blast in the northern Turkmen city of Tal Afar killed 21 and wounded 70 on Friday. Tal Afar has been taken over by Shiite Turkmen, after having been dominated in the Saddam period by Sunnis, so there are a lot of Sunnis who want revenge. It also has Turkmen-Kurdish tensions, which are […]

The US has virtually ignored the 4.7 million Iraqis displaced by its illegal war in Iraq and its after-effects. In an honest republic, this issue would be on American television screens every day. We didn’t directly cause all of it. We kicked it off. Some links on the worsening situation for these millions of homeless, […]

US out of Iraq at end of 2010? McClatchy reports that two high Iraqi officials are leaking details of an “almost completed” security agreement between Washington and Baghdad. AP also has some details. It would be unwise to consider it a done deal, but these are the main points: US troops out of Iraqi cities […]

[pdf]: The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has an important new publication: Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedouts: Al-Qa’idah’s Road in and Out of Iraq. If the US were actually serious about the War on Terror, the CTC at West Point would be very well funded instead of struggling year to year with few assurances […]

The Iraqi parliament proved unable to pass a provincial elections law on Wednesday despite a marathon 4-hour extraordinary session. They adjourned for the rest of the month. The sticking point was finding an acceptable formula for holding the elections in the mixed province of Kirkuk, which is being fought over by Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs. […]

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad of the Guardian on Iraq’s killing fields:

The LA Times summarizes the case made by journalist Ron Suskind that the Bush administration orchestrated the forging of a document by Iraqi defector and former intelligence chief Tahir Jalil Habbush. Habbush was allegedly paid $5 million and settled in Jordan because of his cooperation. The document, which alleged that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta received […]

The Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul-Ahad went back to Baghdad to see the effects of last year’s troop escalation (“surge”). He argues that the US military’s blast walls and forcible division of the city into isolated micro-neighborhoods are the cause of the reduction in deaths, not extra troops. The Real News provides a transcript.

For critics of Ron Suskind’s revelations that Bush and Cheney suppressed evidence that Iraq had no WMD, check out the below: Tyler Drumheller from a 2006 “60 Minutes” interview. Or how about the column of Imad Khadduri, an actual, living breathing Iraqi nuclear scientist, who before the war condemned Bush administration charges on WMD as […]