Month: March 2006

*with Isam Rashid BAGHDAD – Talk of withdrawal has been dogging the administrations of the United States and Britain for months. Recently the Sunday Telegraph in Australia and the Daily Mirror in Britain ran reports quoting a senior British official that the two countries will withdraw by 2007. The United States was quick to deny … Continue reading “Withdrawal May Not Mean Liberation”

Three years after Pres. George W. Bush ordered U.S. troops into Iraq, public confidence in the operation is dwindling ever smaller, as is the belief that Bush’s stated reasons for going to war were sincere, according to a new poll released here Wednesday by the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). Only … Continue reading “US Support for Iraq War Down to 28%”

Untitled Document Was Serbia a Practice Run for Iraq?Thank you Mr. Paul Craig Roberts for being a light in the darkness, writing of the American experience for the last 20 years.In my opinion, attacking Serbia and winning the Balkans was an integral part of getting the agenda to run the oil and gas pipeline from … Continue reading “Backtalk, March 16, 2006”

It is fashionable to believe that the intelligence community “failed” on 9/11 and that if it is “fixed,” future terrorist attacks can be prevented – and by implication, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could have been prevented. Such thinking assumes that intelligence can be perfect, but as James W. Harris – former chief of the … Continue reading “Fixing Intelligence”

Slobodan Milosevic, 1941-2006 In the morning hours of March 11, news came from the Scheveningen prison near The Hague: Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, was found dead in his cell. It was the second death in Scheveningen in a week; on March 5, Milan Babic, once a leader of the Serb rebellion … Continue reading “Invictus”

GENEVA – As the United States began making the case in the UN Security Council this week for what its Ambassador John Bolton calls “painful consequences” if Iran continues with its controversial nuclear program, Washington is facing a familiar dilemma: What to do if the rest of the world refuses to go along? Unlike the … Continue reading “US, EU at Odds on Iran Action”

The death of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic is an occasion for all wings of the War Party, no matter what their current squabbles over the war in Iraq, to come together in a bipartisan and trans-ideological show of unity: from the Weekly Standard to the The New Republic, and virtually all points in between, the … Continue reading “Slobodan Milosevic, RIP”

If the medium is the message, then U.S. President George W. Bush’s choice of forum to launch a new public campaign to defend his beleaguered Iraq policy should be troubling to those, particularly in Europe, who had hoped that his administration was moving toward a more evenhanded stance in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The staunchly neoconservative … Continue reading “Bush Reaffirms Ties With Leading Neocons”

Back in September 2004, the Wall Street Journal‘s Farnaz Fassihi, then covering Iraq, wrote an e-mail to friends that began: “Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest.” A year and a half later, it’s still a striking account to read, because the grim news she was delivering … Continue reading “Baghdad’s Besieged Press”

The casus belli against Iran is about to be unveiled. You may call it the modern equivalent of Pearl Harbor, and it has already occurred without you even noticing. Iran is attacking us with air-delivered weapons of mass destruction, and we have no choice but to respond in kind. Unless we act immediately, the next … Continue reading “Iran and Bird Flu: The Perfect Casus Belli?”