Iraq: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

As the U.S. military continues to clash with Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army in the holy city Najaf, the mid-day call to prayer sounds in the poor, Shia neighborhood Showle in Baghdad. A group of residents crowd around a cigarette stand to explain to the US...

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Mission Not Accomplished

A year ago, the President of the United States harkened back to his days as an aviator for the Texas Air National Guard to deliver a dramatic, made-for-television speech. Eager to experience the thrill of a carrier landing, the President donned a flight suit, strapped...

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Lots of Mistakes

President George W. Bush has said he hasn't made any mistakes. I can think of lots of mistakes he's made. He failed to prevent the attacks on Sept. 11. Say what you will, those attacks occurred on his watch and are his responsibility. The Aug. 6 memo the CIA prepared...

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Iraq Prisoners Are at Least Survivors

The treatment of Iraqi prisoners apparent from the CBS pictures is not the American way of doing things, US President George W. Bush declared Friday. But the indications on the ground in Iraq are that such treatment may not be the exception. Bush said he will "take...

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Heavy-Handed Baghdad Raid Backfires

The 26 April explosions at a chemical warehouse being raided by the U.S. military constitute yet another example of heavy-handed tactics gone awry. US officials say they had reason to believe the facility was being used to manufacture chemical munitions. Rather than...

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Iraqis Say: ‘US Out Now!’

From March 22 to April 2, 60 trained Iraqi pollsters interviewed 3,444 randomly selected Iraqis for USA Today. This is one of the first polls in Iraq that seems to me well weighted statistically, though to be sure we'd have to know more than USA Today told us. The...

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Annan: Never a UN Force in Iraq

As violence continues to escalate in Iraq, killing dozens of soldiers and hundreds of civilians, the United Nations remains ambivalent about its own ability to help salvage a country on the brink of disaster. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been dragging his feet...

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US, Iraqi Views of Occupation Converging

One year after President George W Bush declared an end to "major hostilities" in Iraq, public opinion there and in the United States is beginning to converge, as people in both countries increasingly agree that the US invasion and occupation might not have been such a...

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Depravity as ‘Liberation’

The Abu Ghraib prison was a symbol of Saddam's horrific tyranny: electrodes hanging out of the walls, floors stained with the blood of god-knows-how-many victims, bodies dangling from meat-hooks, like in some cheap Grade-B horror flick. So when the Americans came and...

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