It was quite an experience to be on the same panel on Tuesday with Richard Perle and Toby Dodge, before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Perle wasn't added until the last minute, and it is mysterious why he was there, since ours was supposed to be an...
Testimony before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, April 20, 2004 This brief addresses three areas. First, what mistakes have been made in the Coalition administration of Iraq, and why? Second, what is the current situation? Third, what steps can be taken to...
AP reported that the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) issued a demand early on Saturday that the US cease its military action against Fallujah and stop employing "collective punishment." Not only has what many Iraqis call "the puppet council" taken a stand...
The always tense relationship between the Sadrist movement among Iraqi Shiites and the US and its Coalition partners has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Perhaps a third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to the radical, Khomeini-like ideology of Sadrism, and some...
Al-Hayat reports that the Interim Governing Council (IGC) is rejecting any role for the United Nations in overseeing Iraqi elections save that of "help and consultation). Iraqi National Congress spokesman Intifadh Qanbar said that the UN delegation was told by the IGC...
Dick Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission turned into a political ping pong match, with John Lehman, former secretary of the navy, insisting that Clarke has a "real credibility problem." I read Clarke's book while traveling the past couple of days, and found...
David R. Sands makes excellent points about the connection between Ariel Sharon's murder of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin on Monday and the security of Americans in Iraq and elsewhere. (I use the word "murder" to refer to extra-judicial killing outside the framework of...
This silly question is being asked by billionnaire Rupert Murdoch's and Conrad Black's media outlets all over the world in blazing headlines. For some strange reason, the billionnaires aren't happy that the Socialist Workers' Party won the elections in Spain, and are...
The Baghdad/London daily az-Zaman reports that there were widespread demonstrations on Tuesday by women against the order decreeing abolition of Iraq's uniform civil codes in favor of religious law, which they say "repeals women's rights" in Iraq. This story appears...
Because the southern Iraqi city of Basra (1.3 million) is under British military occupation rather than American, it is little covered in the US press (does anybody else think this is odd?) There have been several British and Arab reports about the situation there...
