Patrick Cockburn in the Independent: Life in Iraq is getting better. Take one example: two or three years ago, tattoo artists in Baghdad were working overtime giving distinctive tattoos to men who feared they would be killed in the Sunni-Shia sectarian slaughter. Aware that the faces of so many who died were being mutilated, potential…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
Iraq will chase these criminals to their grave
Code Pink show Donald Rumsfeld the welcome he deserves:
A perfect way to launch a war against Islam
I’ve written many times about the military contractor Blackwater (now known as Xe Services). Their connection to the Bush administration was deep and utterly lacking in transparency. American journalist Jeremy Scahill has led the charge. Scahill’s latest article in the Nation is devastating: A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as…
The price for Western crimes always ignored
I concur with leading Australia international relations expert Scott Burchill: Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, one of the men charged this week [in Australia] with preparing a terrorist act, told the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday he was not a terrorist and accused Australian troops of killing innocent people overseas. “You call me a terrorist but I’ve…
Being for or against war is a matter of opinion
Leading historian Gabriel Kolko reminds us how the American elite system works: In April 2008 the National Defense University report on the Iraq War, which called it “a major debacle,” was written by men who had originally fully supported the war in order to advance their careers, realizing later that it was essential to turn…
Evil gone, reports serious journalist
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who has spent the last while hanging out with Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concludes the following: After spending a week traveling the frontline of the “war on terrorism” — from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan in the seas off Iran, to…
More than two sides in the global arena
Tony Karon writes in The National about the dangerous tendency of many in the political and media establishment to frame everything in terms of simple terms and good versus bad: Last summer it was so much easier for Americans: “Today we are all Georgians,” John McCain declared at the height of the Russian offensive provoked…
The war on terror started well before 9/11
Jeremy Scahill reminds us that illegality crosses both sides of the US political divide: Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the “secret” CIA assassination program that former vice president Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. But this program — and the media descriptions of it — sounds a lot like the assassination policy…
The gift the US gave to Iraq
The Angry Arab: Thomas Friedman is embedded in Iraq. He sums up the American legacy in Iraq: “we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together.” Million acts? That must be an estimate of the Iraqi dead.
Being grateful to the US in Iraq still many years away
Years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, a soccer match in Baghdad signifies a sense of normality for a nation still reeling from chaos. The New York Times reports: The score did not matter so much — well, it mattered some. More important was that Iraq’s itinerant national soccer team, displaced for years by war,…