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Now that Afghanistan and Iraq are Barack Obama’s problems, it’s suddenly becoming fashionable for right-wing pundits to call for cutting and running. Days after urging the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Afghanistan, conservative columnist George F. Will is calling on the administration to speed up the planned drawdown ...
Michael Totten continues his must-read series on The Future of Iraq, Part IV. I don’t think many Iraqis today are afraid of the state. But everybody was terrified of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian government. Speaking their minds could get them imprisoned or killed. It could get an entire family dragged ...
Robert Spencer is mixing it up with Michael J. Totten and Mary Madigan at Totten’s pad. Totten asks Spencer a good question about his announced participation in the “Pro-Koln” conference — a question I’ve brought up as well: If the nutjobs in Cologne did nothing but invite Pamela, why ...
Michael J. Totten, Iraq, Journalism, Baghdad, Military, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom
Michael J. Totten answers an attack from anti-Islam zealot Andrew Bostom: Arguing for Uncertainty. Andrew Bostom – pal of Robert Spencer and the deranged Pamela Geller – bizarrely accuses me of being an uninformed dogmatist for publishing a “roseate view” of Iraq, even though my article in question was ...
Michael J. Totten, Iraq, Journalism, Baghdad, Military, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom
Michael J. Totten calls out Robert Spencer for a particularly uninformed comment about Iraq: We Are Not at War with Nouri al-Maliki. Robert Spencer, founder and lead writer for Jihad Watch, has a bit of trouble telling the difference between friend and foe in Iraq and still thinks, despite ...
Michael J. Totten, Iraq, Journalism, Baghdad, Military, Robert Spencer
Part three of Michael Totten’s must-read series on The Future of Iraq: The United States has basically won the war in Iraq. No insurgent or terrorist group can declare victory or claim Americans are evacuating Iraq’s cities because they were beaten. America’s most modest foreign policy objectives there have ...
Lynndie England, the woman seen abusing Iraqi prisoners in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs, is not sorry about anything — and she says she has 800 more pictures from her time in Iraq that would be very damaging to the Army and the White House if released. (She’s selling a ...
Michael J. Totten has posted the second part of his look at The Future of Iraq. A must-read, for the kind of reporting the mainstream media no longer does. The first time I visited Baghdad, I only stayed for a week. The place stressed me out. The surge was ...
Here’s Jerry Weinberger’s Iraq Journal, on a visit to Saddam’s chamber of horrors. There is nothing cold about the faces one sees on the walls of the Red Museum, where from 1979 until the uprising in 1991, Saddam tortured and killed in pursuit of the Kurdish rebels. Though Saddam ...
Michael Totten has posted the first of a four-part series exploring the big issue on everyone’s minds: The Future of Iraq. Iraq has never been successfully governed by anyone but a strongman. You might even say Iraq has never been successfully governed at all. Who today sincerely believes the ...
Another great piece from Iraq by Michael J. Totten: Sadr City After the Fall. The way into Sadr City itself was from Combat Outpost (COP) Ford, a one-company base wedged between Sadr City and the adjacent Beida neighborhood. Captains Todd Looney and A.J. Boyes ran the company, and they ...
Another terrific report from Iraq by Michael J. Totten: Baghdad in Fragments. Many third world cities look better at night than during the day. Darkness hides shabbiness. You have to imagine what the city actually looks like. If you live in a first world city yourself, you might fill ...
The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush has been sentenced to three years in jail, and people who think it’s cool to assault the President of the United States are seething and whining. Chief defense attorney Dhia al-Saadi then demanded that the charge be dismissed, saying ...
Saddam Hussein henchman Tariq Aziz has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for his part in the kangaroo court trial and execution of 42 Baghdad merchants; apparently Aziz still has influence in Iraq, because two of Hussein’s half-brothers are going to be hanged. BAGHDAD, March 11 — An ...
Saddam Hussein henchman Tariq Aziz has been acquitted of mass murder in one of the cases pending against him. BAGHDAD — Iraq’s special criminal court on Monday acquitted Tariq Aziz, the man who once served as the urbane, cigar-smoking public face of Saddam Hussein’s rule, delivering the most significant ...
Michael Yon comments on a New Bid to Eradicate al Qaeda. Iraq continues to progress, but still some fighting. Yet these days, al Qaeda in Iraq is like a piranha fish with no scales; it’s still alive and flopping around on shore, but the dwindling piranha school cannot be ...
I saw this last week, but it slipped through the cracks. A US Army soldier has some ... special instructions for a group of Iraqi police, who apparently haven’t been sufficiently motivated. (You might expect a language warning for something like this, and you’d be right.) [Video]
The Associated Press helpfully informs us that the Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at President Bush was protesting the war. BAGHDAD – The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former President George W. Bush failed to apologize as his trial began Thursday, and instead appealed defiantly to the ...
A mother of six, arrested by Iraqi security forces in January, is revealing the disgusting tactics of Islamic terrorists in Iraq—who use rape as a recruitment tool. BAGHDAD (AP) — A woman accused of helping recruit dozens of female suicide bombers looked into the camera and described the process: ...
Iraq, Terrorism, Militant Islam, Women's Rights, Misogyny, Suicide Bombers
Great photos and reports from military service members on the Iraqi election, at North Shore Journal: Iraqi Provincial Elections Succeed.
Bret Stephens has a good piece in the Wall Street Journal, with a question for Barack Obama: Iraq Is Obama’s Mideast Pillar. So what are you going to do about the one bright spot on your map — an Arab country that is genuinely democratic, increasingly secular and secure, ...
Iraq has truly come a long way from its nightmarish days of dictatorship: Iraq wraps up election with no major violence. BAGHDAD – Iraqis passed through security checkpoints and razor-wire cordons to vote Saturday in provincial elections that are considered a crucial test of the nation’s stability as U.S. ...
A pretty amazing gesture from the Iraqi government to the country’s Christians: For first time, Christmas official holiday in Iraq. BAGHDAD — Iraq’s Christians, a scant minority in this overwhelmingly Muslim country, quietly celebrated Christmas on Thursday with a present from the government, which declared it an official holiday ...
Earlier reports about a “coup attempt” in Iraq may have been false: Iraqi officer arrests related to ‘terror’: general. BAGHDAD (AFP) — A top Iraqi general said on Thursday that security forces reportedly arrested in connection with an attempted coup were actually detained on suspicion of aiding “terrorism.” “The ...