Iraq
The Iraq malaise
A reader named Gary has inquired about my position on troop withdrawal, “redeployment,” what have you. Yes, I support a troop withdrawal. The U.S. mission in Iraq is riddled with internal contradictions. American troops are shoring up a Shia-dominated regime that they’re simultaneously doing battle against, in various ways. The Maliki government wants the U.S. out, so it can turn
Oil for Blood
In this post from June of last year, I remarked on how oil smuggling finances the Iraq insurgency. Journalist Lisa Margonelli has started a new NY Times blog called “Pipeline,” focusing on oil and politics. If you have access to Times Select, it’s worth reading. Here she riffs on the popular movie “Blood Diamond” and shows that “conflict oil” wreaks
Troop surge: the devil in the details
This coming week, President Bush will announce his plan for a “surge” of some 20,000 U.S. troops in Iraq — an absolutely futile, last-ditch attempt to secure order in the country. Prime Minister Maliki is expected to match the U.S. troop increase, but here’s a little-noted point: [U.S. officials] said two-thirds of the promised Iraqi force would consist of Kurdish
The Saddam hanging
I’m late in commenting, but wanted to note I found it interesting that Saddam Hussein should be put to death at the very moment when the state of New Jersey began seriously to consider abolishing the death penalty as contrary to “evolving standards of decency.” I’ve long based my opposition to capital punishment on the argument that no government in
On “insubordination”
Michael Crowley of The New Republic frets over a remark by Pres. Bush during today’s press conference, in response to a question on whether ordering a troop “surge” in Baghdad may go against the wishes of top military brass. Bush called this “a dangerous hypothetical.” Crowley wonders: “When was the last time even the whiff of military insubordination was in
Iraq’s “ancient hatreds”
As Mideast scholar Fred Halliday teaches, the term “ancient hatreds” should always be viewed with suspicion. Making the case for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, Oregon GOP Senator Gordon Smith told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: You know, this is a fight, when you get right down to the root of it, between Sunnis and Shias — it goes back a millennia
Saddam postscript
In my posts here and here, I took issue with the increasingly popular notion that Saddam Hussein, to coin a phrase, was a uniter not a divider — i.e., that his brutal repression was the only thing that could hold Iraq’s volatile opposing sects together. In this piece for openDemocracy, the Kurdish writer Dlawer Ala’Aldeen rebuts the argument far more
“Only liberty”
David Cox’s distasteful “tribute” (yes, tribute) to Saddam Hussein is not without a kernel of truth: that life for the average Iraqi is in fact more dangerous today than it was under the dictatorship, and that Bush’s war has created more problems than it has solved (to say nothing of the injustice it has entailed). But Cox’s cavalier account of