Middle East

Al-Maliki tells off US pols., threatens journalists with libel lawsuits. A hint to Mr. al-Maliki: This kind of shrillness does not look prime ministerial and just hurts your cause. Muzzling criticism in the press is a contradiction of your claim to legitimacy because of a democratic victory in the polls. Tariq al-Hashimi was in Ankara […]

Who exactly is the US fighting in Iraq? Graphed by self-confessed identity of captives, it is largely Sunni Arab Iraqis, often motivated primarily by the opportunity to earn some money from the resistance leaders. Source: New York Times, 2007/08/25. The second largest group is Salafi Takfiris, i.e. fundamentalists who do not consider Shiites to be […]

The video of my appearance at the New America Foundation is now online. Many thanks again to kind host Steve Clemons. The short version, covering some of the same points, can be read at Tomdispatch.com, which is carrying my essay on Bonaparte and Bush.

The Bush administration talking points on the Iraq War are that the troop escalation has reduced violence and made Iraq safer for Iraqis, that the major threat in Iraq is self-avowed al-Qaeda devotees, and that Iran and the Shiites are just as deadly a threat as the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The facts? The Associated Press […]

Tina Susman of the LAT finds that the privates and specialists among US troops in Iraq are dismissive of the ‘happy talk’ they hear from Bush and some of their commanders about the way the war is going. They see the realities on the ground, they lose friends to roadside bombings, they see evidence that […]

Iranian troops came into the Iraqi territory of Kurdistan, seeking revenge on the PEJAK faction of Kurds that has launched terror attacks on Iranian soil. Senator John Warner called Thursday for Bush to take out 5,000 US troops from Iraq before Christmas Day. Although Warner protrayed the move as symbolic,, insofar as it would signal […]

My piece on “Pitching the Imperial Republic,” comparing Napoleon’s fiasco in Egypt to Bush’s quagmire in Iraq (since he likes historical analogies) is now available at Tomdispatch.com. Please link back to Tom’s site if you reference it.

A rumor is circulating among well-connected and formerly high-level Iraqi bureaucrats in exile in places like Damascus that a military coup is being prepared for Iraq. I received the following from a reliable, knowledgeable contact. There is no certitude that this plan can or will be implemented. That it is being discussed at high levels […]

PM Nuri al-Maliki responded to Senator Carl Levin’s (D-Michigan) call for him to be unseated, and Bush’s failure to support him on Tuesday by unwisely getting hot under the collar and saying he can find other friends in the world to support his endeavor. I predicted that Levin’s unwise and inappropriate comment (in a conference […]