In February when I was there, I wanted to buy a music cassette, but I couldn’t find one. I ended up with three religious cassettes praising Moktada al-Sadr.
This time, just for fun, I went to a guy selling cassettes in a gas station and asked him if he had songs praising Moktada. He took two steps back and said, “I swear to God I don’t have any.” He was terrified, because the Mahdi Army is now being hunted, and considered lawless.
But if the army suddenly leaves, definitely the Mahdi Army will return because they must be waiting for a chance.
Weapons or money won’t be a problem for them — they are just across the border. It will be very quick and fast. This is not just my feeling, this is the feeling of Basra. I spoke to people.
Even some militia members here in Baghdad told me: “It is lies that the Mahdi Army have been eliminated in Basra. They are still there and they are waiting for the chance to return.”
But Will the Mahdi Army Return? - Baghdad Bureau
This entry was posted on Wed, 05/28/2008 - 11:37 and is filed under .
A Kuwaiti man who complained about maltreatment during a three-year stay in the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was involved in a deadly suicide bombing in northern Iraq last month, the U.S. military confirmed yesterday.
Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack - washingtonpost.com
This entry was posted on Thu, 05/08/2008 - 19:15 and is filed under .
Ironically, the day after the gloomy appraisal of the war in Iraq by General Petraeus was the fifth anniversary of the toppling to the statue of Saddam. I have yet to listen to all of the testimony, which extended into the evening—nice to see our congress working as hard as the American public--but my initial impression is that nothing has fundamentally changed: we find ourselves in a situation with no good options.
That is why this debate is going to be such a difficult one. Either way, we lose. Perhaps the statue that has really been toppled is the one we have erected to ourselves.
This entry was posted on Fri, 04/11/2008 - 20:07 and is filed under .
The Iraq War is taking centerstage in the Presidential campaign this week. All three remaining candidates suspend their stumping to stake their positions on the war through carefully crafted queries to General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, in their highly charged testimony to Congress on the state of the war. It is political theater at its highest, and, of course something of a farce, made even more so by the political elbowing of the candidates. But these hearings have the virtue of returning the focus on matters of war and peace.
For many the primary issue of the 2008 elections will be the economy. From my perspective, this is indicative of what is wrong with this country. Our priorities are wrong. We are sending our young people to kill and be killed, and voting our pocketbooks? There is no higher priority than war.
I wonder, though, if many analysts have misread American's engagement in the war. There has been a bemoaning of the lack of coverage of the war which, the media argues, is driven by a lack of interest. The American public has even been accused of an ostrich mentality, and while this is probably true, I'm not so sure the interpretation is accurate. Personally I was relatively engaged leading up to the last Congressional hearings on the war issue. Patraeus and the administration laid out a strategy and asked for time.
I consented to give that time. In the first place, I realized I really didn't have any choice anyway. They were going to do what they were going to do. I also recognized that situation would not hold true when the time was up and the next report was due, in the middle of a Presidential campaign. My vote will be cast based on the war. I haven't made up my mind yet. I want to hear all sides make their case as fully and vigorously as possible. These are serious matters that require serious attention.
This entry was posted on Tue, 04/08/2008 - 12:57 and is filed under .
So this is where this latest defining moment in Iraq leaves us: with victories for Iran and Mr. Sadr, and with Iraqi forces that still can’t stand up (training cost to American taxpayers so far: $22 billion) so we can stand down. The Baghdad Green Zone, pummeled with lethal mortar fire, proved vulnerable once again. Basra remains so perilous that Britain has had to suddenly halt its planned troop withdrawals. Tony Blair had ordered the drawdown a year ago, after declaring that “the next chapter in Basra’s history will be written by the Iraqis.”
The surge is a success in exactly one way: American forces, by putting their lives on the line and benefiting from a now-defunct Sadr cease-fire, have reduced violence in Baghdad (though only to early 2005 levels). But as the Middle East scholar Juan Cole has written, “the ‘surge’ was never meant to be the objective but rather the means.”
This entry was posted on Mon, 04/07/2008 - 12:19 and is filed under .
This points out a marvelous irony:
WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
The Audacity of Hopelessness - New York Times
This entry was posted on Tue, 02/26/2008 - 22:39 and is filed under .
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