Events of the last week offer a metaphorical glimpse at the delusion pervading President George W. Bush's White House and other enclaves of Iraq supporters in Washington. Bush and the First Lady spent last Monday clowning with the Easter Bunny (White House counsel...
In an echo of Warren Harding's "A Return to Normalcy" speech of 1920, George Bush last week declared, "Normalcy is returning back to Iraq." The term seemed a mite ironic. For, as Bush spoke, Iraqis were dying in the hundreds in the bloodiest fighting in months in...
As it became clear last week that the Operation Knights Assault in Basra was in serious trouble, the George W. Bush administration began to claim in off-the-record statements to journalists that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had launched the operation without...
Updated at 7:30 p.m. EDT, Apr. 1, 2008Despite what appeared to international eyes as a massive political loss for Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister called his failed Basra security operation a success. Also, U.K. Defense Minister Des Brown warned that the...
Some things never change. In a continuation of the Bush administration's Orwellian doublespeak on the Iraq War, President Bush recently gave an upbeat speech in Dayton, Ohio, extolling the progress in Iraq and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's military offensive...
We at TomDispatch love anniversaries. So how could we have forgotten DARPA's for so many months? This very year, the Pentagon's research outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), turns 50 years old. Happy birthday, DARPA! You were born as a...
It was shocking, hearing CIA director Michael Hayden tell Tim Russert on Sunday morning that we're wide open to another 9/11-style terrorist attack. Al-Qaeda, he said, is turning to operatives who "look Western" and "wouldn't attract your attention if they were going...
Updated at 12:20 a.m. EDT, Apr. 1, 2008Relative calm has returned to most of Iraq today as Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's truce with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government seems to be holding. New violence left at least 50 Iraqis killed and another 45 wounded....
Updated at 12:10 a.m. EDT, Mar. 31, 2008After almost a week of heavy fighting throughout the southern provinces and Baghdad, clashes between the Mahdi Army and Iraqi security forces may be drawing to and end. Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has offered a truce as he...
As Anna's King of Siam might have put it: "Is a puzzlement." As the grim milestones of five years of U.S. involvement in war and insurgency and possible civil war in Iraq and 4,000 U.S. deaths (and more than 29,000 wounded, but who's counted) occurred only a...
