Middle East

courtesy al-Sharq al-Awsat The misery of the some 2 million widows in Iraq has security implications. Ma’d Fayyad reports in Arabic that fundamentalist Sunni guerrillas in Iraq are increasingly deploying widows as suicide bombers. Two major bombings this week, at Baladruz and Karbala, appear to have been undertaken by women. Fayyad says that one change […]

The USG Open Source Center translates Iraqi television reactions to the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq Iraqi TV Channels Carry Reactions to Fifth War AnniversaryIraq — OSC SummaryThursday, March 20, 2008 . . . Al-Rafidayn [Sunni fundamentalist, affiliated with the Association of Muslim Scholars] Harith al-Dari Within its 0700 GMT newscast, the […]

The below is part of an anti-war “opera” sung by the most famous of the Arab videoclip stars (Nancy Ajram and Cheb Khalid are featured here). The whole is very long. The Zoom videoclip satellite channel is playing it repeatedly this week, apparently to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War. It begins with […]

My fortnightly column for Salon.com is now up, commemorating the 5th anniversary of Bush’s invasion of Iraq: “Five years of Iraq lies:” How President Bush and his advisors have spent each year of the war peddling mendacious tales about a mission accomplished. I posit that each year of the war has been characterized by a […]

A massive bomb in the Shiite holy city of Karbala killed 52 persons and wounded 75 on Monday according to AFP. Shiites’ feelings are raw over the attack, threatening further civil war violence. (Courtesy Jafariyanews.com). Sawt al-Iraq/ AFP report in Arabic that the explosion occurred only 100 meters from the shrine of Imam Husayn, among […]

See my discussion at bloggingheads.tv of contemporary Middle East issues with Steve Clemons of the Washington Note blog.

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 […]