July 12, 2006

Riverbend on death, rape, US soldiers, etc

Tragic Riverbend post, telling us about life in her corner of "liberated" Iraq.. (Thanks to Frank for the tip.)...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:20 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

July 01, 2006

Why the Geneva Conventions are important

In case we needed a reminder of why the Geneva Conventions (which are part of the "laws of war") are important, the most recent (of many now emerging) revelations about...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:42 AM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

Bush's Gitmo woes

Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:55 AM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

June 18, 2006

Khalilzad's report on things falling apart

Is the "Khalilzad Cable", the full text of which was published by the WaPo today, the present war's equivalent of the Vietnam War's "Pentagon Papers"? Back in 1971, when Pentagon...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:08 PM | Fulltext link (14 comments)

June 09, 2006

Federalism, Iraq, Spain, South Africa

Our esteemed colleague Reidar Visser has two good new entries on his website: this on the federalism issue in Iraq, and this on the latest cabinet appointments there. I don't,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:14 PM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

June 08, 2006

Bush's 24 hours of Iraqi sunshine

Two "gains" for the Bush folks' project in Iraq today, that I am sure will get heavily hyped by the administration and all its flaks: The reported killing of Abu...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:09 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

June 07, 2006

CSM column on need for rapid troop withdrawal

Here is my column in Thursday's CSM calling for a rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (I also warn there that various catastrophic scenarios in Iraq are very possible.)...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:59 PM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

'At least a car bomb is indiscriminate'

Immortal quote from Riverbend yesterday: I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:57 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

US commanders understand Iraq mission's failure

This little piece of reporting by Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson looks very significant. (Hat-tip to Juan Cole for flagging it.) Thompson writes: Military commanders in the field in Iraq...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:45 AM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

June 06, 2006

Tuwaitha, June 7, 1981: a short memoir

The Raid on the Osirak / Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre, Sunday 7th June, 1981 The story of the bombed Nuclear Site in Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre (South Baghdad) "Operation Opera...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:37 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

June 04, 2006

Yet more US intervention in Iraqi politics

I'll say this for Condi Rice and Zal Khalilzad, the US viceroy in Baghdad: They sure are tenacious... The kind of tenacious that causes our dog to hang onto an...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:28 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

May 31, 2006

Dozier, Brolan, and Douglas

So our friend Dr. David Steinbruner was actually involved in treating the courageous and smart CBS News correspondent Kimberley Dozier after her near-fatal injury in Iraq Monday. Dozier's colleagues James...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:03 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

May 28, 2006

How will this war be memorialized?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:40 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

Nir Rosen and the omnipresence of fear in Iraq

Nir Rosen has a great piece of reporting/reflection about his most recent trip to Iraq in today's WaPo "Outlook" section. He describes the trip as having taken place "a few...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:49 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

May 27, 2006

Haditha: massacre, cover-up-- and now what?

Last November, there was an incident in the western-Iraq town of Haditha in which one Marine and 24 Iraqi civilians ended up dead. The next day, the New York Times...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:09 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

May 21, 2006

The elephant in the Iraqi chamber

The narrative that the Bush administration and its apologists have been trying to peddle regarding Iraq is that a "sovereign" Iraqi parliament is now in power in Baghdad, and...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:16 AM | Fulltext link (18 comments)

May 20, 2006

Iraq: An empowered government ? (Part 2)

So Iraq has a new government-- sort of. That is, in Baghdad today, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented an intricately negotiated list of 37 government members to the parliament, which...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:07 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

May 19, 2006

Visser on Iraq-splitting plans in 'Open Democracy'

My distinguished colleague Reidar Visser has a great new piece up on the 'Open Democracy' website. It's titled Iraq's partition fantasy. It presents-- in the form of a strong but...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:06 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

Iraq: an empowered government?

I've been a little AWOL here recently in commenting on political developments inside Iraq. I guess once the US machinations against Daawa/Sadr were rebuffed I figured that that was one...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:28 AM | Fulltext link (16 comments)

May 14, 2006

Bushist 'vision' for Iraq:145,000 mercenaries

Ellen Knickmeyer has a piece in today's waPo that I simply have to draw attention to. The article is about a network of ill-supervised forces that together make up the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:35 PM | Fulltext link (13 comments)

May 09, 2006

US mis-steps and Shiite activism in Iraq

I can't decide whether I find it truly pathetic or quite criminal that US commanders in Baghdad are still-- three years after invading Iraq-- being described by reporters as trying...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:46 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

May 04, 2006

150,000 American hostages?

Riverbend had a good new post on her blog Tuesday. In her inimitable way, she sketched some of her memories of the US capture of Baghdad back in early April...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:08 AM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

May 02, 2006

Playing at being Percy

Les Gelb, the former President of the influential, New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, has long been an active supporter of splitting up Iraq into three mini-states. In November 2003,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:03 PM | Fulltext link (22 comments)

L.A. Times's Daragahi got the Sistani story

The L.A. Times's talented Baghdad correspondent Borzou Daragahi wrote me to say it was not true, as I wrote here, that "no-one" in the mainstream media had gotten the story...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:27 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

April 26, 2006

Iraq: Maliki's first days

Zal Khalilzad, the US viceroy in Baghdad, has been putting his own spin on his failure to break the unity of the UIA bloc by speaking to the WaPo's David...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:26 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

April 22, 2006

Reidar Visser's book on failed south-Iraqi separatism

I wanted to wait till I'd read Reidar Visser's book on the pursuit and failure of a project for south-Iraqi separatism in the early 1920s, before I posted a short...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:54 PM | Fulltext link (33 comments)

Iraqi state centralism historically and for Jawad al-Maliki

The excellent and careful Norwegian historian of modern Iraq Reidar Visser has just produced an extremely helpful analysis of the evolution of the concept of the centralized Iraqi state as...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:36 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

Daawa wins

So it is Jawad al-Maliki as UIA nominee. He is a Daawa person. I've been traveling and busy for the past 48 hours. I flew back into Philadelphia yesterday, from...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:07 AM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

April 20, 2006

Daawa-Sadr bloc on brink of victory?

In Iraq, it looks as though the Jaafari-Sadr bloc within the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) now seems poised, fnally, to cement its victory in the political battle against the US...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:20 AM | Fulltext link (13 comments)

April 19, 2006

Analogizing Iraq: not Vietnam, but USSR in Afghanistan?

At the UNU reception here yesterday, my Afghan-Australian colleague Amin Seikal made a comment that I found very thought-provoking though it's probably something other people have thought a lot more...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:19 PM | Fulltext link (25 comments)

April 13, 2006

Israeli asks: What if US fails in Iraq?

This is, of course, the kind of question that few in the US public discourse yet dare to ask... (As for me, I'd put it a little differently. I think...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:40 PM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

April 12, 2006

Iraqi politics-- 17 weeks on

I see from the handy "Democracy denied in Iraqi" counter here that 118 days have now passed since the much-vaunted Iraqi parliamentary election of December 15. It has become clearer...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:28 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

April 11, 2006

Faiza's take on the women's peace conference

Here is Faiza's description of last month's Iraqi-US gathering organized by the Global Peace Initiative of Women-- that same meeting that I described here and here....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:41 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

Window into Israeli ops in Iraq?

... And talking of "leaked Zarqawi letters", here's an interesting story from Sunday's edition of my old rag the London Sunday Times, talking about the anger of "Israeli military intelligence...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:31 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

Window into US 'psyops' in Iraq

Thomas Ricks had an interesting piece in yesterday's WaPo, reporting on some leaks he'd gotten from U.S. Army officers about some PSYOPS (disinformation/ black propagnda) operations that they'd done back...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:18 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

April 10, 2006

Converging with Gerecht on (aspects of) Iraq

Jim Lobe of Inter Press Services did a phone interview with me Friday, about Iraq, and got this story on the topic up onto the wires on Saturday. It quotes...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:38 PM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

April 09, 2006

Three years

Today in Iraq, three years after the US-engineered toppling of the Saddam statue in Firdaws Square, the leaders of the factions in the biggest electoral list, the UIA, all met...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:13 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

April 07, 2006

Bush's project in Iraq: Is the end nigh?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:20 PM | Fulltext link (22 comments)

April 06, 2006

Impasse in Iraq

Just one last thing before I "go" back to Africa today. Global Policy Forum has just-- with my permission-- put up on their website a short text I wrote for...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:17 AM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

Iraq: Kerry, Cole, Ignatius

I've been working on a conference paper on (mainly) African topics these past couple of days. So I failed to produce "instant" commentary re the plan that John Kerry proposed...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:09 AM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

April 05, 2006

Jordan to host religious leaders' gathering on Iraq

AFP is reporting that Jordan will be hosting a gathering of Islamic religious leaders April 22, to discuss reconciliation in Iraq. Actually, I'm going to be in Jordan April 17-21....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:14 PM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

April 04, 2006

... And Adel makes three

Iraqi political chameleon Adel Abdul-Mahdi today joined his UIA colleagues Qasem Daoud and Jalaleddine al-Saghir in calling openly on Ibrahim Jaafari to withdraw his candidacy for the PM post. So...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:41 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

Muqtada Sadr featured in Newsweek

At last an American MSM publication (other than JWN) seems to be starting to find the right way to approach the question of the continuing government-formation impasse in Iraq. Newsweek's...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:14 PM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

April 03, 2006

Rice tries to sell the unsellable

As I noted earlier, these are fateful days in Iraq. Condi Rice, fresh from the embarrassment of the reception she got from the good people of Blackburn, Lancashire, flew to...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:22 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

April 01, 2006

Destabilization in Iraq

Last weekend, Czar George tried to deliver a direct personal veto to Iraq's dominant parliamentary bloc, the UIA, regarding its still-extant nomination of Daawa Party head Ibrahim Jaafari to be...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:59 PM | Fulltext link (26 comments)