Scott Ritter, The Guardian, December 16: It would be very difficult for anyone to articulate that life today is better in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra or any non-Kurdish city than it was under Saddam. Ask the average Iraqi adult female if she is better off today than she was under Saddam, and outside of a few…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
How should we feel about Obama?
The recently released Verso book, A Time to Speak Out, in which I contribute a chapter about progressive Jewish thought, has just launched a blog. My first post is the following: As one of the contributors to this important new book, currently in Sydney, Australia, the issue of Jewish identity in the 21st century is…
How to ruin a nation over and over again
An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society…
The West has no memory
A British diplomat in Baghdad: We are in the thick of violent agitation and we feel anxious”¦ the underlying thought is out with the infidel. The country between Diwaniyah and Samawah is abandoned to disorder. We haven’t troops enough to tackle it at present. There’s no getting out of the conclusion that we have made…
Working for the enemy
Wikileaks releases yet another essential document from the “war on terror.” The Human Terrain Team Handbook is used by the US military to allegedly intergrate into various foreign lands: According to the handbook, HTTs [Human Terrain Teams] are 5-9 person intelligence teams made up of serving military, contractors and “academicians”. The teams are designed to…
Read the fine print
Is the recent security agreement between the US and Iraq a “total defeat” for Washington?
President Bush’s legacy of torture will outlive him
My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: Antony Loewenstein, on a US book tour, writes from New York: Outgoing US President George W Bush has a few regrets. “The fight in Iraq has been longer and more costly than expected”, he said last week. But he has never apologised for his administration’s use…
How to define a robust Jewish chat
After a wonderful day in upstate New York with leading American Jewish dissident writer and blogger Phil Weiss – a generous, warm-hearted, critical yet optimistic man – I left feeling strangely empowered. Despite all the attempts by the Zionist lobby and its courtiers, the horrendous reality in Palestine is becoming clearer to the world by…
Keeping Tehran happy
Why are the Iranians seemingly pleased with the passage of the Security Agreement between Iraq and the US by the Iraqi parliament?