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$3.99
By Allen Barra
$18.45
$24
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By Ellen Goodman — For a long time, John McCain has believed that Vietnam should have, could have had a different ending. So, too, his attention on Iraq has been less on the war’s origin than on some undefined victorious conclusion.
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DoD photo / SSG Lorie Jewell, U.S. Army
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Gen. David Petraeus gave his potential boss, Barack Obama, a helicopter tour of Baghdad on Monday. It’s a technique the general has used in the past to show normal life in Baghdad—from a safe distance. John McCain suggested recently that Petraeus would change Obama’s mind and his plan about withdrawing from Iraq, but that plan has newfound momentum and it could easily be Gen. Petraeus who is asked to carry it out.
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AP photo
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Barack Obama embarked on his international diplomacy tour—a key step in raising his profile on the world stage and demonstrating his readiness to take over the American presidency—with an important first major stop. The Illinois senator landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Saturday as part of congressional delegation surveying the current situation in that troubled nation.
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AP photo / Hadi Mizban
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In what The New York Times is calling a “significant concession,” President Bush allowed the topic of U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq to enter a discussion about America’s long-term strategy in the region. This occurred Thursday during a video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
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army.mil
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Pouncing on the rhetorical success of the U.S. “surge” in Iraq, the U.S. military launched operations Tuesday in the south of Afghanistan as part of a “mini surge” against strongholds of Taliban fighters.
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By Robert Fisk — The president’s twisting of words in an attempt to justify continuing the war has become sickening.
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By Eugene Robinson — No, it’s not your imagination: The “debate” about Iraq, and I use the word loosely, becomes ever more surreal as the occupation drags on.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The problem with the debate over our future course in Iraq is that the two sides are not even talking about the same things.
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abcnews.go.com
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Gen. Colin Powell won’t say who will get his vote this November, but on Thursday’s “Good Morning America,” the former secretary of state put in a good word for all three front-runners, praised Obama’s Rev. Wright speech and worried that the U.S. armed forces are becoming “very, very stretched” by the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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By Joe Conason — Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the American forces in Iraq, is more candid than his publicity agents. Unlike the senators and editorial writers who claim that the glorious “surge” should be hailed as one of the most successful military campaigns in history, he warns that the escalation’s achievements are mixed at best.
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By Eugene Robinson — Quite a “defining moment” in Iraq, wasn’t it? At this rate, John McCain is going to be proved right: The war will last a century.
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AP photo / Sgt. Armando Monroig, U.S. Army
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Americans serving in Iraq will have to wait until the next president takes office before they can expect any substantial changes in troop numbers, if Bush follows the latest recommended plan from Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.
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By Marie Cocco — Back in 2006, the Iraq Study Group said that all U.S. combat brigades in Iraq should be out by now. They also warned that an escalation, or “surge,” “would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq.”
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thewashingtonnote.com
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Five years, nearly 4,000 dead Americans, millions of killed or displaced Iraqi civilians and $500 billion later, George W. Bush still thinks the Iraq war was a good move. In remarks leaked on the eve of his speech marking the anniversary of the war, the president says the high costs “are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq.”
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The Iraq occupation has once again taken a violent turn. Dozens of Iraqis were killed on Tuesday as the average number of Iraqis killed or found dead each day continues to rise. Eight U.S. soldiers died on Monday, the most in one day since last September. U.S. military officials, however, have been anxious to downplay any talk of a trend.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Aaron Glantz — More than any other candidate for president, John McCain should know that peace talks can be stronger and smarter than bombs, that withdrawing American soldiers can be the best way to achieve stability, and that the best way to protect American troops is to bring them home from the war zone.
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AP photo
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By Chris Hedges — There’s an ugly secret behind the “success” of the surge: The United States is paying off Iraqi militants with weapons and cash. It’s a recipe for disaster, one that reminds Chris Hedges of “Yugoslavia before the storm.”
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AP photo / Khalid Mohammed
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By Scott Ritter — The former U.N. weapons inspector examines the president’s claims about the “surge” and says what the media and Congress won’t: It is not a strategy, it is an escalation, one that will not prevent the coming collapse of Iraq. There are no solutions just waiting to be found, and the only sensible thing to do is leave. Now.
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By Marie Cocco — George W. Bush has little, if any, credibility left, but he should be taken seriously as he commits the United States to the long-term occupation of Iraq.
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AP photo / Karim Kadim
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Two separate bomb blasts claimed 64 lives in Baghdad on Friday and injured more than 100 others—a tragic reminder of the serious and ongoing challenge of containing large-scale violence in Iraq’s volatile capital city.
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George W. Bush, the president who lied America into a war that will end up costing trillions of dollars, scolded the Democratic-controlled Congress in his final State of the Union address on Monday for undermining “the people’s trust in their government” with too many pet projects. Now that’s chutzpah, coming from a man who never met a spending bill he didn’t like unless it had to do with stem cells and sick children.
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By Joe Conason — As America marks the first anniversary of the troop escalation in Iraq, at least one thing has become clear. Although the “surge” is failing as policy, it seems to be succeeding as propaganda.
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AP photo / Capt. Allie Weiskopf Chase, U.S. Army, HO
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Here’s an interesting idea for dampening insurgent violence in Iraq: Pay the would-be troublemakers to temporarily join America’s side and watch the surge success reports roll in. That’s the tactic the U.S. military has employed with some 70,000 former insurgents, according to this NPR report.
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cnn.com
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The House has followed in the wake of the Senate, saying yes to $70 billion in funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-war Democrats have had little success overcoming Republican filibusters and a publicity blitz meant to sell the “surge.”
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arcent.army.mil
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Despite touting increased stability in the outer provinces as proof of the success of the “surge,” the U.S. military is about to abandon those regions altogether. The Pentagon’s new strategy for dealing with a reduction of forces in Iraq is essentially to pull back to Baghdad and hope for the best.
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In this Politico video news report, a particularly preppy host (all Capitol Hill style, no doubt) delivers the latest about Giuliani’s alleged use of New York taxpayer funds to hook up with his now-wife Judith in the Hamptons—and as it turns out, Rudy apparently hooked Judy up with her own “police driver and city car” before she was officially known as his extramarital side dish.
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The New York Times reports that in certain areas of Baghdad, such as the Dora neighborhood in the south of the city, residents are cautiously returning to their homes and attempting to resume some semblance of normal life by taking advantage of a recent lull in violence. How long it will last, however, remains to be seen.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It’s time that we subject the Iraq war to the same cost-benefit analysis that we are called upon to impose on other government endeavors. We are supposed to repeal or revise domestic programs that don’t work. Shouldn’t a troubled war policy be treated the same way?
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wikipedia.org
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Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, has issued a devastating critique of the “incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders” in planning and executing the Iraq war, which he called a “catastrophic failure.” Sanchez also warned that the president’s “surge” might “stave off defeat” but will not lead to victory.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Astonishingly, 26 Republican senators broke with President Bush’s Iraq policy last week. But you may not have noticed this, and it’s not your fault.
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Harry Harrison, The South China Morning Post —
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“Blackwater” author Jeremy Scahill sounds off on the security firm’s recent rampage and the impunity of America’s private militias.
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By Will Durst — Political comedian Will Durst provides the answers to some frequently asked (and vexing) questions about Gen. David Petraeus’ testimony.
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Retiring Sen. Chuck Hagel tells Bill Maher why the president’s exploitation of Gen. Petraeus is “not only a dirty trick, but it’s dishonest, it’s hypocritical, it’s dangerous and irresponsible. The fact is, this is not Petraeus’ policy, it’s Bush’s policy.”
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Boy, has it ever been a tough week to be Gen. David Petraeus! First he had to face the congressional firing squad with only a flimsy array of stats to substantiate his insistent refrain, delivered in wooden monotone, that the “surge” in Iraq just might, maybe, someday, sort of work.
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The definition of “progress” in Iraq clearly depends upon whom you ask—while the Petraeuses and Crockers of the world are claiming that the U.S. troop “surge” is (slowly) showing signs of success, a BBC/ABC/NHK poll of 2,000 Iraqis suggests quite a different story.
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Opening his testimony before Congress on Monday with the insistence, “I wrote this testimony myself,” and adding that his Iraq progress report hadn’t been vetted in advance, Gen. David Petraeus trotted out figures and charts to argue that “the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met.”
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moveon.org
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In anticipation of Monday’s face-off between Gen. Petraeus and Congress on Iraq, MoveOn.org placed a provocative ad, to say the least, in The New York Times, asking whether the general should be dubbed “General Betray Us” and accusing him of “cooking the books for the White House.”
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AP Photo / Susan Walsh
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It seemed like a case of “hate the war, but hail the general” as the U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, faced criticism and tough questions during his and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s congressional check-in on Monday about the current status and future direction of the Iraq war.
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This week’s highly anticipated Iraq progress report will no doubt be highly predictable, says The New Yorker’s George Packer, who’s more concerned about the longer view than America’s current leadership, whom he considers to be “trapped in the eternal present” in ways that can only spell trouble for Iraqis.
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