Middle East

Clashes between rival militias in the Shiite holy city of Karbala left some 52 dead and 206 wounded on Tuesday, according to late reports from Iraqi security officials. About a million Shiite pilgrims had converged on the city to commemorate the birthday of the Twelfth Imam, the 12th in the line of succession from the […]

My Salon column for Wednesday is now available: “The war against Iraq’s prime minister:” Sens. Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are calling for Nouri al-Maliki’s ouster as a way of attacking Bush’s Iraq policy. But do they understand the consequences?” Excerpt: ‘ In his remarks to the American Legion in Reno, Nev., Bush said that […]

Violence at Karbala, Baghdad, Falluja dogged the al-Maliki government on Monday, while the significance of the agreements reached by the presidential council on national reconciliation remained in doubt. Unless parliament passes them, they remain a dead letter. The Sunni Arabs continued to decline to rejoin al-Maliki’s government. Meanwhile, the public health crisis that is Iraq […]

Glenn Greenwald once remarked that “the highest achievement to which one can aspire in the neocon universe it to be compared to Winston Churchill.” So Churchill would advocate another surge and toughing it out forever in Iraq, right? Here is what he wrote in 1922, a couple of years after Britain was awarded Iraq by […]

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 […]