June 26, 2008

The 'Necessary Steps' recommendations, annotated

I've now taken the chance to examine the Executive Summary of the "Necessary Steps" report issued yesterday by the Task Force for a Responsible Withdrawal from Iraq. From a quick...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:56 PM | Fulltext link (30 comments)

June 25, 2008

Searching for a brother's body in Iraq

Read this, from McClatchy's Baghdad correspondent Laith, and think about how the violence and social collapse set in motion in Iraq by President Bush's decision to invade the country has...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:14 AM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

June 22, 2008

78 years later... The Anglo-Iraq Treaty of 1930

Thanks to Glen Rangwala of Cambridge and Jonathan Schwarz of Democrats.com who have found the definitive UN-archived version (PDF) of the 1930 treaty between Britain and Iraq. Here is an...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:31 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

63 months of American "Freedom" in Iraq

Juan Cole has a brilliant post today in which he soberly assesses and presents the data on the excess deaths suffered by Iraqis as a result of George W. Bush's...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:12 PM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

June 20, 2008

Hamas's Bardawil on the tahdi'eh, etc.

Kudos to Haaretz's Avi Issacharoff who yesterday conducted a phone interview with Hamas legislator and Gaza Strip spokesman Salah Bardawil about the thadi'eh. Issacharoff asked what Hamas would do to...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:24 AM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

June 18, 2008

Memo to Sen. Obama on Iraq

Mr. Obama, I am not privy to the whole of the conversation you recently had with Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister in every Iraqi government since the US installed its...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:50 PM | Fulltext link (20 comments)

June 14, 2008

Washington: Concealing SOFA plans since November 2003

The National Security Archive at George Washington University has succeeded in winning declassification of some intriguing-- though heavily "redacted"-- documents dating back to Nobember 2003 that detail the Pentagon's longstanding...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:47 PM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

Obama, Iraq, and Washington's unilateralist echo-chamber

So if Barack Obama wins the presidential election, what will his policy toward Iraq actually be in 2009? The answer to this question is extremely important to our country and...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:51 PM | Fulltext link (16 comments)

June 12, 2008

'American University in Iraq': another Bushist fiasco

The American University of Iraq, which boasts Zal Khalilzad as a Regent and Fouad Ajami as a Trustee, has run into a serious difficulty. Dr Owen Cargol, who was hired...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:43 AM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

June 11, 2008

G.W. Bush: democracy = 'Noise in the System'

GWB was asked in Germany today about the "increasing controversy in Iraq over the security agreement that's being negotiated... Does this concern you that the direction of those negotiations are...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:32 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

June 10, 2008

Secrecy vs. democracy in an increasingly transparent world

Kudos to McClatchy Newspapers for once again, as so often, getting out of the Washington media-power-elite echo chamber and doing some good, solid reporting on the politics inside both Iraq...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:33 AM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

Iraq signs military agreement-- with Iran

The Bush administration has been working with PM Nouri al-Maliki's government in Iraq since at least November to try to win the Iraqi government's agreement to both a Status of...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:16 AM | Fulltext link (13 comments)

June 09, 2008

Joost Hiltermann on Iraq's Kurds

Joost Hiltermann has just published what has to be the very best assessment in the English language of the situation of Iraq's Kurdish minority. Joost has followed Iraqi-Kurdish developments very...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:51 PM | Fulltext link (13 comments)

June 08, 2008

Bush SOFA push collapsing

The attempt by the Bush administration to impose an extremely unfair SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) onto the Iraqi government before July 31 now seems clearly destined for failure, if...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:06 PM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

June 07, 2008

Iraq roundup: SOFA, Maliki in Iran, etc

So Maliki's party has now split. (Also, see here.) One delicious aspect of this development-- from the anti-occupation point of view-- is that it's former US puppet-in-chief Ibrahim Jaafari who...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:40 AM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

June 06, 2008

Iraqi MPs in Washington: No to Bush's SOFA, yes to Arab League mediation

Speaking to a civil-society audience of 60 people here in Washington DC today, Iraqi MPs Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulayyan (National Dialogue Council) and Dr. Nadim al-Jaberi (al-Fadhila) both roundly rejected the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:31 PM | Fulltext link (18 comments)

May 10, 2008

Intra-Iraqi ceasefire met with escalated US bombardments

So in Iraq, earlier today, the (Shiite-dominated) Iraqi government concluded a ceasefire agreement with the Sadr movement... and just hours later the US military started an aerial bombardment of Sadr...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:18 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

RIP Sarwa (and so many others)

The L.A. Times's Tina Susman has a wrenchingly sad post on their blog today, writing about the May 4 killing in Mosul of Iraqi journalist Sarwa Abdul-Wahhab. Susman writes: [Sarwa...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:31 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

May 09, 2008

Oops! Another US accusation proves ill-founded

Remember all the 'WMD programs' the Bushites told us there were in Iraq, pre-2003? So more recently, they've been telling us about the "Iranian arms" that have been flowing in...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:57 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

May 03, 2008

The Dahiyya, Gaza, Sadr City... the march of destruction continues

Attentive Middle East watchers have remarked since 2003 on the similarities between Israel's various military actions against its neighbors and those of the US in Iraq. The bottom line in...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:48 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

April 24, 2008

Petraeus's nomination to Centcom: Not all bad?

The news that Pres. Bush has nominated Gen. Petraeus to be head of Centcom raises some interesting possibilities. Petraeus is best known for three things: For having kowtowed in a...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:24 AM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

April 12, 2008

Iraq: A sinkhole, not a quagmire

Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:30 PM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

April 08, 2008

Memo to Prez and everyone else: How to organize a US pullout from Iraq

In this evening's t.v. news show on the ABC network, the "political analyst" and former high-level aide to Pres. Clinton George Stephanopoulos said that a Democratic president would face a...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:01 PM | Fulltext link (15 comments)