Middle East

That’s all we need– Iraqi troops raiding American mercenary units in Iraq. That will really settle things down. Khalaf al-Ulyan, a Sunni fundamentalist member of parliament, condemned PM Nuri al-Maliki as a “dictator” because he unilaterally fired six Sunni Arab cabinet members. The six had tendered their resignations. According to the Iraqi constitution, the Prime […]

14 percent of Iraqis are now displaced from their homes. That would be the equivalent of 42 million Americans forced from their places of residence. I mean, it is a Stephen King-style futuristic apocalypse for Iraq. Only it has just happened, during the past 4 1/2 years. And the American government is responsible for kicking […]

2007 will be the deadliest year yet for US troops in Iraq. Seven American soldiers were killed on Monday alone, bringing this year’s total to 853, more than at any time since 2004 (the year of the Mahdi Army uprising among Shiites and the Salafi Jihadi push on Baghdad). As Michael Munk writes, ‘ US […]

Bush attempted to mollify Turkish Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan at a White House meeting on Monday, but given Erdogan’s belligerent comments afterwards, I’d say he did not succeed. As I’ve noted before, Washington would never have asked Israel to stand by and wring its hands after Hamas blew up dozens of civilians and soldiers […]

Barnett Rubin at our Global Affairs site is live-blogging the state of emergency in Pakistan, declared by Gen Pervez Musharraf. My essay, “Combating Muslim Extremism,” is now online at The Nation. It is a critique of the approach of most of the Republican presidential candidates and contains advice for the Democrats on how to escape […]

The Bush administration is taking a hard line on dragooning civilian Foreign Service Officers into serving in the war zone of Iraq. The article contains a quote by Ambassador Ryan Crocker which says that the FSO’s swear an oath to serve anywhere in the world. This is not true. They swear an oath to uphold […]

It isn’t surprising that Iraqi expatriates like Curveball should be trying to peddle a load of horse manure about Iraqi ‘weapons programs’ in the early zeroes. It is not remarkable that Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and its US enablers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Michael […]

More on the need to pressure Congress to close the US embassy in Baghdad (see below). First, here is some correspondence: ‘As a retired foreign service officer . . . at the State Department in Washington, I would like to add to your rationale for closing the US Embassy in Bagdad to save lives. In […]

I don’t try to start an internet campaign very often, because the blogosphere has its own priorities and logic that are democratic and should not be forced. But here is a plea for everyone in the blogging world to help force congress to save our diplomats. Bush is trying to Shanghai several hundred foreign service […]