Arab World

I can still remember, as a child, the other children on the playground boasting that the US was the greatest country in the world, and the pride we all took from that. Predictably, George H. W. Bush’s cokehead son has managed to reduce the US to the second largest economy after the eurozone. Bush was […]

General David Petraeus is quoted in WaPo as saying that no one, American or Iraqi, thinks that there has been sufficient political progress in light of the reduction of civilian deaths since last fall. The US troop escalation, the strategy of paying Sunni guerrillas to join pro-US Awakening Councils, and the cease-fire with the Mahdi […]

A suicide bomber in a BMW killed 18 Iraqis in Baghdad on Thursday and wounded 64. With regard to yet another tragedy on Thursday, The Guardian writes, ‘ Iraq’s unending violence claimed one of its most high-profile victims yesterday when a Catholic archbishop abducted last month was found dead. It was not clear if Paulos […]

Aljazeera English on the $3 Trillion War in Iraq, as argued by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and his co-author Linda J. Bilmes. Note to US corporate media: Notice how the discussion includes a Republican spokesman, a left intellectual, and an Iraqi voice. Why don’t we hear Iraqi voices about Iraq on US t.v.? […]

Guerrillas fired rockets at a US base south of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 3 US soldiers and wounding 2. An Iraqi civilian was also wounded. A US soldier was killed and another wounded at Diwaniya on Tuesday by a roadside bomb (that is Shiite territory). So the death toll for Monday through Wednesday was fifteen […]

AP reports that political violence left 42 dead across Iraq on Tuesday, including the bombing of a bus near Nasiriya in the south. Actually, McClatchy reports 62 dead if you count the 20 bodies found in a mass grave near Samarra. The wave of violence (see McClatchy below) came a day after guerrillas killed 8 […]

Sunni Arab Iraqi guerrillas launched a four-pronged attack on their enemies on Monday. They killed eight US troops in two separate bombings, one in the al-Mansur district of Baghdad and one in the small town of Baladruz east of the capital in Diyala Province. They set off two bombs targeting Shiites in east Baghdad, taunting […]

William R. Polk With all eyes fixed on the forthcoming election, we must consider the issues that will face whomever becomes our next president for these are issues that we – and perhaps even our grandchildren will have to cope. The urgent issue before our country in this time of great danger is the health […]

Some 5,000 protesters rallied in downtown Basra to protest the horrible security situation on Saturday. AP notes, ‘Many carried banners, decrying the killing of women, workers, academics and scientists. Dozens of women were slain in Basra by religious extremists last year because of how they dressed, their mutilated bodies found with notes warning against “violating […]