Middle East

People are asking me the significance of the fighting going on in Basra and elsewhere. My reading is that the US faced a dilemma in Iraq. It needed to have new provincial elections in an attempt to mollify the Sunni Arabs, especially in Sunni-majority provinces like Diyala, which has nevertheless been ruled by the Shiite […]

There was heavy fighting Wednesday and Thursday morning in the Jumhuriya district of the southern oil port of Basra. That is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, now under assault by the Iraqi military, with rocket propelled grenades, mortars and small arms fire raining down on the civilian neighborhood. Al-Zaman reports […]

I’ll be on the Lehrer News Hour, PBS, Wednesday evening March 26.

Don’t miss part II of Frontline’s (PBS) special on the Iraq War tonight. Part I, aired last night, is or will be available in streaming video, as will the whole thing.

All hell broke loose again in Iraq on Sunday, with political violence killing nearly 60 persons according to official statistics. A roadside bomb killed 4 US troops, bringing the total dead in Iraq on the American side to 4,000. The thing I most mind about the deaths of those brave warriors is that our government […]

Craig Unger’s email, part of an interchange on a private discussion group, is reprinted here with permission: [A critic, let us call him X, objected] to Jim Lobe’s suggestion that Iraqi WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda had nothing to do with starting the Iraq War. But Lobe is right. X is off base when […]

This Easter is an especially sad one for Iraq’s Chaldean Christians. Their archbishop was kidnapped and held for ransom, then killed by guerrillas. His captors had demanded that the Christians support demands that the US withdraw from Iraq and pay $3 mn. [Since Chaldeans are patriotic Iraqis, there was no reason to think they did […]

The USG Open Source Center translates an Arab nationalist call to the southern Shiite province of Maysan, which is ruled by the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, to block Iranian influence. In fact, Maysan, which borders Iran, is negotiating with Iran to receive electricity and other aid. Movement Calls For Efforts To Prevent Iran From […]

A US soldier was killed and four wounded by rocket fire south of Baghdad. Courtesy ABC News The Guardian video does a report, streamed below, on the prospect that some of the 80,000 members of the Awakening Councils or Concerned Local Citizens in Diyala Province and elsewhere are going to go on strike. Many of […]