Kudos to Yankeedoodle and Juan Cole!
I'm coming up to my First Blogiversary February 6, so I can tell y'all that now, nearly one year into the project, I know that trying to keep a good, lively blog up on the web is a heck of a lot of work!
So hats off to Yankeedoodle and Juan Cole who work tirelessly nearly every darn' day of the year (barring snowstorms, Yankee) to bring us all the best, most relevant, liveliest, most pertinent news there is on the ongoing US imbroglio in Iraq.
Yankee's blog, "Today in Iraq" keeps a person just about totally up-to-date with all the breaking developments on the US/'coalition' side of things, with a minimum of commentary from YD (but that little, totally on-the-mark imho.)
Juan's blog, "Informed Comment" gives us that erudite, wise professor's up-to-theminute interpretation of what's happening on the Iraqi side. Juan evidently gives the Arabic-language media a good reader every morning before he blogs. The rest of us are truly privileged to be able to read his presentation and interpretation of it.
I long ago came to the conclusion that unless I want this blog to take over my whole life, which I certainly don't (despite what some of my family members occasionally say about me)... well, there is NO WAY I could even think of competing with YD or Juan in what either of them does.
Does that mean that I stop writing about Iraq? No, ma'am. Not at all.
But it does mean that I don't see the need or the point in rehashing things that by now I fairly certainly know I can rely on one or the other of them to cover. Sometimes I'll respond to things they've written or referred to. (Yankee had a thought-provoking reference yesterday to continued talk among some DOD officials about an imminent possibility of launching offensive operations against Syria... Definitely something I should follow up, sometime.)
Anyway, what I will be doing is continuing more or less what I have been doing: writing about whatever I want to in world affairs, which right now happens to include a strong concentration on the US-Iraq war.
In other areas of my life, however, I continue to be closely interested in justice issues around dealing with the legacies of past atrocities, in Israel-Palestine, and in all the other kinds of topics you can see in my list of Categories. So I'll definitely be continuing to write about those here on the blog.
Actually, in my "day job" as a writer on global affairs, right now I'm writing intensively about the war the civil war in Mozambique was ended in 1992. I think that has huge lessons for people who want to escape from cycles of violence everywhere. So you might see a few musings along those lines here in days ahead...
But I haven't made it to the Blogiversary yet. Onward, to Feb 7!