|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 . '/' . substr('9780812977288',-6,3) . '/' . '9780812977288' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Gay Talese
By Steve Knopper
$19.76
$18
|
|
|
|
AP / Susan Walsh
|
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has thrown a high-level wrench into President Obama’s plans to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Pelosi said Thursday that she sees little support in Congress for new deployments, an observation that comes at a time of rising casualties and strife in Afghanistan.
|
U.S. Army / Sgt. Zach Otto
|
After an initial bulk-up in the number of troops in Afghanistan earlier this year, the commander of NATO forces in that country is preparing to ask for 20,000 more international troops as part of the ongoing war against the perpetually resurgent Taliban.
|
DoD
|
While affirming the Dec. 31, 2011, date for the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did mention in a speech to a Washington think tank the possibility of extending that deadline if Iraqi forces still required “further training and further support.”
|
DoD / R. D. Ward
|
Those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking their toll. To cope with rising demand, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he will increase the size of the Army by 22,000 troops for a period of three years. That means there will be 569,000 active-duty soldiers, bringing America’s active-duty armed forces close to 1.5 million.
|
|
Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune —
|
U.S. Army / Sgt. 1st Class Alex Licea
|
The Iraqi capital threw a party Monday as U.S. troops began pulling out of Iraqi cities. It’s the first step in the military’s withdrawal plan, which promises to bring U.S. forces home by 2011. But it will be some time before many of the 131,000 troops return to the U.S., and there’s virtually no accounting of the thousands of private contractors and mercenaries.
|
arcent.army.mil
|
Six years after the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Britain’s armed forces have formally ended their combat mission in the war-torn country. Believing that their role is finished, U.K. government officials handed over control of their base to the U.S.—not Iraqi—military.
|
|
President Obama’s NATO allies may have responded favorably to his call to ramp up the war effort in Afghanistan, but anti-war demonstrators near the French-German border made their opinions known with protests following the photo ops in Strasbourg, France, on Saturday.
|
|
With military personnel deployed in 150 countries, Bill Maher says bringing the troops home from Iraq is only the tip of the iceberg. “Can you imagine if there were 20,000 armed Guatemalans on a base in San Bernardino right now? Lou Dobbs would become a suicide bomber.”
|
U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Adam Mancini
|
President Obama is expected to order 4,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 17,000 previously announced and 38,000 already there. This latest batch of personnel is reported to be departing in June with a mission to train Afghan forces.
|
|
President Obama personally conducted a tour of the White House for “60 Minutes” and in the Sunday broadcast defended his embattled treasury secretary, said sending more troops to Afghanistan was his toughest decision yet, and refused to grant a look at his wife’s vegetable garden. The president also took the opportunity to unload on Dick Cheney, who recently suggested we are less safe without torture.
|
AP photo / Hatem Omar
|
Hot on the heels of a damning U.N. report, Israeli soldiers have offered personal accounts of atrocities committed in Gaza, including the murder of unarmed women, children and the elderly. As one soldier put it, “... the lives of Palestinians, let’s say, are much, much less important than the lives of our soldiers.”
|
U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Curt Cashour
|
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he doesn’t expect the Iraqi government to ask U.S. troops to remain beyond the 2011 deadline. “I think that the Iraq leadership is focused on that this ends in 2011,” Odierno told the Associated Press. If security allows, the number of U.S. troops to be withdrawn this year will increase 3,500 (one brigade) over the number of 12,000 previously announced, the general said.
|
U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Adam Mancini
|
The president will withdraw 12,000 troops from Iraq over the next six months, but where will he send them? Back to America? Ski trip to Aspen? Or perhaps he’ll just airlift the veterans to Afghanistan, where a similar number of reinforcements has been promised over a similar period.
|
csmonitor.com
|
The confrontation between the Mexican state and violent drug gangs is escalating, with the Mexican government moving to stomp out the bloody drug-related conflict in the border town of Ciudad Juarez. The first of some 7,000 troops have moved in to try to take control of the city.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — President Barack Obama met recently with the prime ministers of Canada and Britain, two NATO allies looking for a way out of Afghanistan even as the U.S. is talking escalation.
|
|
Since he was elected president, Barack Obama has said he plans to withdraw most of the U.S. troops stationed in Iraq by August 2010. That’s a little more time than he said he’d take to do the job before he was voted into office. Does this constitute a major violation of his pre-election pledge?
|
|
Speaking before the big game, the president pledged to bring a substantial number of troops home in time for the next Super Bowl. On the economic front, he warned that “It’s going to take a number of months before we stop falling ... .” He also managed to predict the outcome of the game.
|
news.sky.com
|
Adding to the solemn string of record-breaking statistics, new figures show that the suicide rate among U.S. Army members has hit its highest level in three decades. Last year, over 128 soldiers took their own lives, a telling sign of our military and political climate.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The military is far too accustomed to getting its way, so it was refreshing to see Barack Obama reject the Pentagon’s sluggish withdrawal plan. But will he stand up to Israel, whose Prime Minister Olmert recently bragged about pulling the American president’s puppet strings?
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. The outcome of this year’s election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.
|
AP photo / Musa Khan
|
In a rebuke to U.S. interests in the region and amid growing tensions between two nuclear powers, Pakistan is moving its forces from its border with Afghanistan—where Pakistani troops are fighting against the Taliban—and restricting soldiers from going on leave, as fears of conflict with India continue to grow.
|
USAF / Michael B. Keller
|
By Scott Ritter — Iraq is not Vietnam, yet there are parallels between the two wars. The American military dominated the battlefield in both conflicts, and yet America the nation emerged the loser in each. A “decent interval” is now needed for American troops to withdraw.
|
|
One of JFK’s “best and brightest” died wondering how the Vietnam War could have gone so wrong. Now, in an important new book, we have some answers.
|
AP photo / Mahmoud Badri
|
The UK’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a surprise trip to Iraq on Wednesday, followed by the announcement that British troops will begin pulling out of Iraq at the end of this coming May.
|
americaslibrary.gov
|
The British Defense Ministry has leaked news that it will begin a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq. The drawdown will bring to an end a torrid, near-six-year love affair with the U.S. that began with coordinated intelligence failures and eventually led to jointly invading a sovereign country under cover of a “war on terror.”
|
|
By William Pfaff — Why are the allies waging war against the largest of the native ethnic groups in Afghanistan? The NATO answer is that the allies didn’t set out to fight a war against the Pashtuns. It just happened that way.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — The federal manslaughter indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards for the horrific massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad may look like an exercise in accountability, but it’s probably the exact opposite.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — President-elect Barack Obama introduced his principal national security Cabinet selections to the world Monday and left no doubt that he intends to start his administration on a war footing. It is revealing that his choice for national security adviser is a director of Boeing, a weapons manufacturer, and Chevron, an oil giant.
|
AP file photo
|
By Chris Hedges — The world is far more complex than our childish vision of good and evil. We as a nation and a culture have no monopoly on virtue. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when viewed from the receiving end, are state-sponsored acts of terrorism.
|
USAF / Airman 1st Class Jason Epley
|
What is George W. Bush thankful for? The Iraqi parliament voted Thursday to approve an agreement outlining the terms of U.S. military operations in the country. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki described the deal, negotiated over a year, as “an agreement for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq.”
|
USAF / Staff Sgt. Samuel Rogers
|
By William Pfaff — Barack Obama has no choice but to accept responsibility for America’s foreign policy crises. But why should he accept them on the distorted and even hysterical terms by which the Bush administration has defined world affairs since 2001?
|
AP photo / Hadi Mizban
|
Nothing says “go home” like 10,000 people yelling at you in a language you don’t quite understand. And nothing says “go home” with more irony than an effigy of your president hanging at the very spot where a statue of Saddam was famously toppled after the fall of Baghdad in 2003.
|
|
By Joe Conason — If the prospect of appointing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state irritates the Obama base, what will they make of keeping the man who has executed President Bush’s policies at the Pentagon?
|
U.S. Army / Spc. Richard DelVecchio
|
To the great relief of U.S. military commanders, Iraq’s cabinet approved an agreement that would provide a legal basis for the occupation beyond Dec. 31. The deal, which still must clear a vote in parliament, maintains partial immunity for U.S. soldiers and calls for the withdrawal of American forces by 2011. Update
|
AP photo / Allauddin Khan
|
The legacy of George Bush’s two “wars of liberation” may already be judged as foreign policy blunders, but the real costs of war remain even after the truism of failed empire. In Afghanistan, acid attacks on at least 15 female students mark a worrisome trend in women’s rights there. And in Iraq, an Iraqi soldier opened fire on a patrol of U.S. troops, killing two.
|
Flickr / James Gordon
|
Here’s one way to get U.S. troops out of Iraq: The tediously negotiated status-of-forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraq has met yet another snag. The current legal justification for the occupation of Iraq is about to expire, and the U.S. is eager to pass new guidelines, but the Iraqi Cabinet is hitting the brakes.
|
whitehouse.gov
|
We tearfully regret to inform you that an agreement that would legally extend the U.S. imperial occupation of Iraq is at risk of falling apart, as Iraqi officials continue to make the audacious demand that U.S. soldiers and mercenaries be subject to Iraqi law for crimes committed outside the scope of military operations.
|
guardian.co.uk
|
A secret executive order signed by President Bush grants U.S. military forces “carte blanche” to launch counterterrorist operations inside Pakistan. An attack last week under the auspices of the unprecedented July order is raising concerns: Pakistani officials declared the operation illegal, and international analysts fear an escalating conflict could start a regionwide war.
|
White House / Eric Draper
|
Here’s one way to tell the difference between a war and an occupation: In response to the “success” of the surge and the undefined “victory” that lies just around the corner in Iraq, the president on Tuesday will pledge to maybe reduce troop levels by about 5 percent six months from now after he’s left office. How can John McCain win this argument with Barack Obama?
|
AP photo / Musa Sadulayev
|
Russia announced Wednesday its willingness to withdraw its remaining troops from Georgia if, and only if, some conditions were met: one, bring international peacekeepers in to replace Russian soldiers and, two, Georgia must sign nonaggression pacts with South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
|
boston.com
|
Georgia announced Friday that it will withdraw all Georgian diplomats from its embassy in Moscow in protest of Russian soldiers’ presence in the country. Russia is expected to pull its own diplomats from its embassy in Tbilisi, but of course its troops will still be stationed in Georgian territory if Georgia really needs to talk.
|
arcent.army.mil
|
Despite criticisms of the efficacy of the “surge” in Iraq, a U.S. commander in Afghanistan has dared to say that a planned “surge” in Afghanistan would in fact not help U.S. interests in the country. The commander did make sure not to completely deweaponize the Bush administration’s rhetoric, suggesting instead that a different type of surge is needed.
|
commons.wikimedia.org
|
Remember how Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki endorsed Obama’s plan for U.S. withdrawal from the country? And then remember how the endorsement suddenly became a question of “translation”? Well, it ends up that it wasn’t a botched translation at all, and that Maliki’s office personally reviewed the final interview before it was published.
|
Flickr / soldiersmediacenter
|
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, eager to sell his colleagues on a status-of-forces agreement with the U.S., has suggested the possibility of a built-in troop withdrawal timetable. The Pentagon isn’t impressed. “Timelines tend to be artificial in nature,” cautioned a U.S. military spokesman.
|
|
Now that the presumptive nominees are getting ready to do battle for the presidency, their wives are also subject to increasing scrutiny by the press and public. Here, Cindy McCain takes a moment to endure the (soft focus) glare of ABC News cameras and answer softball questions about her husband’s stance on women’s rights and whether she’d feel safe with Barack Obama as president.
|
View older articles:
< 1 2 3 >
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
A Cooler Century? Wait and See
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
