Middle East

The police chief of Mosul and two other officers were killed by a suicide bomber when they came to the site of the recent powerful explosion. The death toll from that bomb rose to 40. A bomb lightly wounded Abdul Mahdi Karbala’i, the representative in the holy Shiite city of Karbala of Grand Ayatollah Ali […]

Guerrillas were stockpiling munitions in an unoccupied building in the Zanjabili district near the Houston-sized northern city of Mosul. Someone informed the Iraqi security forces of the stockpile, and apparently the guerrillas had good intelligence on such things, so they blew up the arms warehouse to deny it to their foes. It blasted surrounding apartment […]

The Center for Public Integrity has published a study finding that ‘President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security […]

The USG Open Source Center translates a letter from Kurdistan Regional Authority leader Massoud Barzani slamming the Hawlati newspaper for having published in Kurdish an article by Neoconservative operative Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, which had accused Barzani and Iraqi president Jalal Talabani of embezzling large sums of money. Barzani offers to give […]

On Tuesday morning in Iraq, a suicide bomber walked into a school in downtown Baquba and detonated his payload, killing a guard and wounding 20 students and teachers. Baquba, a city of 200,000, is the capital of the key Diyala Province that lies between Baghdad and Iran. It is a mixed province, some 60% Sunni […]

Iraq as an issue was back front and center in Iraq on Monday in the South Carolina presidential debate among the Democratic candidates. Barack Obama complained that his record of opposing the Iraq War had been distorted by Bill Clinton, who had called the image of steadfast consistency on Obama’s part in that regard a […]

Martin Luther King will be honored today throughout America as a champion of racial justice and racial harmony. That is a pivotal legacy for the United States of America, which for 87 long years was built on the lawful enslavement of one race by another, and for another century practiced the lawful Apartheid of Jim […]

Andrew Bacevich eviscerates the Iraq War party with this passionate and clear-sighted essay on ‘the Surge to Nowhere’ in WaPo. He points out that the real motivation behind last year’s troop escalation was to avoid popular outrage building in the US electorate to the point where the troops were pulled out. He observes that the […]

Another US soldier was killed on Saturday, bringing January’s total to 23 — already as much as in all of December. Street battles and machine gun fire rang out for a second day in Basra and Nasiriya as Iraqi security forces battled Supporters of the Promised One, a Shiite cult that is now reported to […]