March 31, 2008

U.S. position in Iraq eroding fast

The L.A. Times has quoted Joost Hiltermann as saying that Moqtada Sadr looks like the emerging political force inside Iraq, while US-installed PM Nouri al-Maliki looks like a lame duck....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:38 PM | Fulltext link (23 comments)

March 29, 2008

Is this what the current fighting in Basra is about?

When the Brits withdrew from Basra city to Basra airport last year, I was intrigued by the strategic implications of this at a number of levels. Most broadly, it seemed...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:36 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

March 18, 2008

The war anniversary: a poignant Iraqi view

McClatchy Baghdad bureau's Correspondent Jenan has blogged what may be the most heart-rending short essay by any Iraqi anywhere on the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. In...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:10 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

Adventures of the neoconquistadores

Last week, the Pentagon contractors at the "Institute for Defense Analyses" published a scrubbed-for-public-view version (here in PDF) of their report on the links between Saddam Hussein's regime and international...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:48 AM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

March 17, 2008

Five years of the US war in Iraq

It is so tragic to realize that just about all the dire predictions I made in 2002 and early 2003 about the consequences of a US invasion of Iraq have...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:43 PM | Fulltext link (12 comments)

March 11, 2008

US war in Iraq: the financial cost to Americans

Nobel Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have recently tallied the overall cost to the US economy of George W. Bush's war in Iraq at $3 trillion....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:10 PM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

February 23, 2008

Nir Rosen's "The Myth of the Surge"

Nir Rosen has produced yet another brilliant piece of reporting, this time about Iraq. His piece, out in Rolling Stone today, is called The Myth of the Surge. He starts...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:25 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

February 02, 2008

Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan: Bushism in disarray

The past few weeks have not been good ones for the Bush administration's project of establishing firm, pro-western beach-heads in a broad swathe of western Asia from Gaza to Afghanistan....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:57 PM | Fulltext link (18 comments)

January 05, 2008

Note on "caucus systems", Iowa and Iraq

The complex system of party caucuses used by the Democratic party in Iowa is very similar to the system that US overlord L. Paul Bremer proposed introducing in Iraq, back...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:49 AM | Fulltext link (2 comments)