Progress in Iraq? Not unlike Afghanistan, the West has empowered warlords to control the country. “Victory” can be declared (with Iraqi civilians now living under a new kind of Saddam-like hell): Warlords and criminal gangs dominate Basra amid growing concern that British forces have failed to create the conditions needed for political and economic reconstruction,…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
Killing in the name of (money)
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, The American Conservative, November 19: The armed security contractor in Iraq makes an appearance on the collective American radar only when events get so ugly they won’t go away: the charred bodies of four Blackwater guards swinging from a Fallujah bridge in 2004, the 17 civilians reportedly killed by Blackwater men in…
Getting comfortable with occupation
Juan Cole offers some advice to Republican presidential nominee John McCain: McCain also repeated his standard lie that Iraqis would attack the United States if US troops were withdrawn from that country. He contrasted the Vietnamese Communists, who, he said, just wanted to build their workers’ utopia in Vietnam once the US left, with Iraqis,…
We like to remain blind
The US State Department releases a weekly report on “progress” in Iraq. Their primary sources of information? The mainstream media.
Neo-con Ledeen praises Howard as “arguably the greatest Western leader of the past decade”
My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: Michael Ledeen is a key figure in the neo-con firmament, a man whose ideas about the Arab world have been thoroughly proven false time and time again. It therefore makes sense that Australia’s leading Zionist lobby, AIJAC, has invited him here on a speaking tour to…
Killing in the name of what?
A new documentary, Body of War, reveals the human cost of the Iraq war:
Expendable Iraqis
Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch, November 26: Name them. Maim them. Kill them. From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, air strikes and attacks by the U.S. military have only killed “militants,” “criminals,” “suspected insurgents,” “IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emplacers,” “anti-American fighters,” “terrorists,” “military age males,” “armed men,” “extremists,” or “al-Qaeda.” The pattern for reporting…
They’re never leaving
Iraq and America have agreed on… “principles” for a permanent American presence. The never-ending occupation (further evidenced by the grotesque US$600 million US embassy in Baghdad.)
Iraqis hate us
Under the headline, “Foreign Fighter in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of US”, the New York Times shatters more than a few myths with this story: Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came…