Middle East

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told Bush Friday by video conference that the US could not use Iraqi territory or airspace to attack neighboring Iran. He basically told Bush to suck it up and negotiate with Ahmadinejad. It is amazing what $70 billion a year in petroleum revenue will do for a prime minister’s self-esteem. […]

Your Fourth of July is blood for oil. My Fourth of July is the pure sunbeam of peace. Yours is the imperial presidency and “so what?” to public opinion. Mine is “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” Yours is profiling and discrimination. Mine is “all men are endowed by their Creator […]

The Sadr Movement is forging ahead with plans to create an elite special operations corps within the Mahdi Army, with the mission of hitting US troops. Iraq has convinced the United States to drop the demand that private American security guards operating in Iraq be granted immunity from prosecution for wrongdoing in Iraqi courts. Such […]

A guerrilla group launched a campaign of assassination against judges in Baghdad on Monday, setting off five bombs, each targeting a judge in a different part of the city; they missed four of the judges but injured the fifth. Details below. A bomb was set off in downtown Mosul to the north, killing 1 and […]

Aljazeera English reports on the deals the oil majors are doing in Iraq: And, Tom Engelhardt reviews the troop escalation or “surge” in Iraq and offers some unconventional wisdom.

Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih said that the al-Maliki government is beginning to think about the “time horizon” of the US troop presence in Iraq. That terminology is awfully close to a request for a timetable for troop withdrawal. PM al-Maliki has repeatedly said that Iraqi militias and army can handle the security problems themselves […]

Ooops. A US military operation in Karbala province at Janaja resulted in the arrest of one Iraqi and the killing of another. The dead Iraqi is said to be a relative of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The governor of Karbala province, Uqail al-Khazali, complained that the US military had acted unilaterally and had not coordinated […]

Big bombs in Mosul and in Karma, al-Anbar. Questions are being raised about whether the Iraqi army can hold Mosul. DPA reports that two major bombings in Sunni Arab areas of Iraq on Thursday killed over 40 persons and left over 70 wounded. In al-Anbar province at Karma 50 km west of Baghdad, a meeting […]

Headlines you never want to see: “Family wiped out by US.” A US air strike on suspected insurgents at Tikrit went terribly wrong Wednesday, when an American missile instead killed a family of 6, including four children aged 4 to 11. Iraqis allege that the man had come out of his house and fired a […]