As U.S. soldiers continue to die in Iraq, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to Iraq to meet with senior government officials and discuss the possibility of extending troop presence beyond the agreed deadline on Dec. 31. Besides the one U.S. soldier who died in a non-combat incident in Mosul on Tuesday, at least four Iraqis were also killed and 15 more were wounded. So far this month, another four U.S. soldiers have died.
They’re not good, says Philip Giraldi
President Barack Obama has given his approval to a Pentagon plan to station U.S. combat troops in Iraq beyond 2011, provided that Iraqi Premier Nouri al-Maliki officially requests it, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources. But both U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledge that Maliki may now be reluctant to make the official request. Maliki faces …
Continue reading “Maliki’s Doubts Threaten Post-2011 Iraq Troop Presence”
There is a ‘their side of the story,’ says Ray McGovern
In something of a replay of the infighting among Republicans over Washington’s military interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, U.S. involvement in the civil war in Libya is exposing serious splits among self-described conservatives. On the one hand, Republican "realists" in the tradition of President George H.W. Bush – of whom Pentagon chief Robert …
Continue reading “Libya Splitting Republicans in 1990s Redux”
The Libyan war has the French, of all people, in the forefront, with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s smug, self-satisfied face mugging for the camera as French fighter jets scream in the skies over Tripoli. The French, who sat out the Iraq war with haughty disdain, are now even more eager than the Americans to get into …
Continue reading “French Fraud Behind Libya War Drive”
There are many practical reasons why the U.S. military attack on Libya is a bad idea—including that Libya has nothing to do with American vital interests, that helping an unknown opposition is fraught with risks of getting something worse than Moammar Gadhafi, and that the United States was overstretched militarily (already conducting two other wars) …
Continue reading “Libyan Intervention Fraught With Risks”
Israeli leaders have barely hidden their jubilation at an opinion article in last Friday’s Washington Post by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone reconsidering the findings of his United Nations-appointed inquiry into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008. For the past 18 months the Goldstone Report had forced Israel on to the defensive by …
Continue reading “Goldstone’s Rethink”
RAMALLAH – As the international community becomes increasingly critical of Israel’s discriminatory treatment of Israeli-Arabs and the brutal occupation in the Palestinian West Bank, the Israeli authorities are venting their anger against soft targets such as Arab-Israeli parliamentarians and Palestinian and Israeli nonviolent peace activists. The majority of Knesset members recently voted in favor of …
Continue reading “Israel Aiming Punitive Measures at Soft Targets”
At least seven Iraqis were killed and 16 others were wounded on a fairly quiet day. Meanwhile, the environment ministry said Iraq is home to a quarter of Iraq’s landmines, many of them dating to the 1960s. Karbala is just one area that is littered with them.
