Sounds of silence You may not support the Bush plan to invade Iraq, but here is how he has helpeed bring democractic values to a country run by a tyrant.
posted by Postroad
on Jul 2, 2004 -
9 comments
The battle the US wants to provoke Make no mistake: this is not the "civil war" that Washington has been predicting will break out between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Rather, it is a war provoked by the US occupation authority and waged by its forces against the growing number of Shia who support Moqtada al-Sadr (by Naomi Klein in Baghdad).
posted by acrobat
on Apr 6, 2004 -
49 comments
Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's heartthrob and the State Department's and CIA's heartbreak, has taken the lead in a yearlong political marathon. Temporary constitutional arrangements are structured to give the future prime minister more power than the president... Chalabi holds the ultimate weapons -- several dozen tons of documents and individual files seized by his Iraqi National Congress from Saddam Hussein's secret security apparatus. Coupled with his position as head of the de-Baathification commission, Chalabi, barely a year since he returned to his homeland after 45 years of exile, has emerged as the power behind a vacant throne... All the bases are loaded for a home run by MVP Chalabi. If successful, it will be an additional campaign issue president Bush could have done without. Saddam was good riddance. But was Chalabi a worthy democratic trade?
posted by y2karl
on Mar 29, 2004 -
18 comments
Bounding the Global War on TerrorismOf particular concern, has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war a against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault from an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the Global War On Terrorism but rather a detour from it. Full text:
HTML or
PDF See also
War College Study Calls Iraq a 'Detour'
posted by y2karl
on Jan 12, 2004 -
74 comments
Breaking the silence Last night ITV1 in the UK ran a documentary that is unlikely to be shown in the USA. It is by a respected journalist called John Pilger and amongst other tidbits it shows Colin Powell saying in 1991 that Iraq poses no threat and also Condoleeza Rice confirming the same thing. It also quotes some US officials that the current bunch who seem to be running US foreign policy were known during the administration of Bush senior as "the crazies". Plus much more.
posted by donfactor
on Sep 23, 2003 -
101 comments
Insiders suggest Condoleezza Rice could leave As White House officials try to control the latest fallout over President Bush's flawed suggestion in the State of the Union address that Iraq was buying nuclear bomb materials, there's growing talk by insiders that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice may take the blame and resign.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly
on Jul 26, 2003 -
63 comments
Dr David Kelly the
alleged 'mole' in the WMD row
apparently found dead. He was at the centre of the UK Government's row with the BBC over
reporter's claim that the Prime Minister's special adviser, Alistair Campbell,
sexed up a dossier on Iraqi WMDs by adding a claim that they could be launched in 45 minutes. The Government says there will be an independent judicial review of the WMD affair if the body is Dr Kelly.
posted by brettski
on Jul 18, 2003 -
52 comments
Did America Walk Into A Trap? In stories reported
by Newsweek and Fox News it appears possible that the armed resistance now being encountered by US/British forces was part of Saddam Hussein's plan all along. The documents that have been found essentially say that should Baghdad fall, the Baath party loyalists should fade into society and extract vengeance on the occupying soldiers bit by bit. The nightmare scenario before the war was urban combat,
Mogadishu style. But now it appears that Hussein may have upped the ante with this
"guerrilla-type campaign".
posted by owillis
on Jul 16, 2003 -
65 comments
Rumsfeld's personal spy ring The defense secretary couldn't count on the CIA or the State Department to provide a pretext for war in Iraq. So he created a new agency that would tell him what he wanted to hear. Today,
Salon also looks into the role played by
John Bolton. Is investigative journalism now just relegated to the web? [you have to look at an ad, I believe]
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly
on Jul 15, 2003 -
26 comments
wolfowitz spills the beans "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." - is telling the truth a new policy of the current administration?
posted by specialk420
on Jun 4, 2003 -
40 comments
Operation: Cover George's butt? As the backpeddling and
fingerpointing over "cakewalk" predictions continues, Talking Points Memo notes a recent
article in the Charlotte Observer that quotes "senior administration officials" in saying that "dissenting views [about the war plan]' were not fully or energetically communicated to the president.'" Sounds like someones taking out an insurance policy, don't it?
posted by Gilbert
on Mar 31, 2003 -
15 comments
At what point does a government have to stop and wonder if it's judged the mood correctly?
The UK government manages to
bribe a rebel with a cushy job, but not
one, not
two, but
three other MPs walk away from the government in one day.
Are things going wrong in the UK?
posted by twine42
on Mar 18, 2003 -
63 comments
The Liberaral Quandry on Iraq [nytimes reg req'd]. [warning : iraq political story]. As a "liberal hawk", I have had some issues regarding whether to support a war with Iraq or not. In this article, George Packer talks to four liberals (David Rieff, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Walzer and Paul Berman) about what they think, and presents a sort of top ten list of reasons for or not. After reading the article, I'm a little less confused about where I stand, and a little closer to coming to grips with it
posted by rshah21
on Dec 9, 2002 -
29 comments
Bush is soft on tobacco Just say No! Unless you are in cahoots with Big Tobacco. On issues such as this, I do not hold Bush or his party solely guilty but instead view it as The American Way--lobby groups, gifts, elections handouts--all of which blur party lines.
posted by Postroad
on Nov 27, 2002 -
15 comments
President Bush is pressuring Iraq because
he says that they support terror (there is
some evidence of that). So
what about Saudi Arabia? "Sources familiar with the evidence say the payments—amounting to about $3,500 a month—came from an account at Washington’s Riggs Bank in the name of Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and the daughter of the late Saudi King Faisal." And why were CIA/FBI investigations of the Saudi connection
reigned in? When Bush
met that very same Prince Bandar in August, somehow the issue never came up. Don't want to step
on Dad's toes, you know.
posted by owillis
on Nov 23, 2002 -
18 comments
The Push For War (by Anatol Lieven). "The most surprising thing about the Bush Administration's plan to invade Iraq is not that it is destructive of international order; or wicked, when we consider the role the US (and Britain) have played, and continue to play, in the Middle East; or opposed by the great majority of the international community; or seemingly contrary to some of the basic needs of the war against terrorism. It is all of these things, but they are of no great concern to the hardline nationalists in the Administration....The most surprising thing about the push for war is that it is so profoundly reckless....What we see now is the tragedy of a great country, with noble impulses, successful institutions, magnificent historical achievements and immense energies, which has become a menace to itself and to mankind."
Excecutive summary:
Lord Acton foretold all fruit of "military superiority".
posted by fold_and_mutilate
on Oct 4, 2002 -
44 comments
'The guy who tried to kill my dad.' Setting aside partisan bickering, this description of Saddam Hussein by George W. Bush today sent my mind reeling. Is this in reference to something published in the past that is just escaping my mind? The
Reuters version of the story adds that it is reference to "an Iraqi plot to kill former President George Bush after the 1991 Gulf War." Anyone have a link to that older story?
posted by bclark
on Sep 27, 2002 -
36 comments
Is Germany next on the list? Well, no, but the way the Bush administration approaches diplomacy needs some work. Is a war in Iraq worth "poisoning" America's relationship with the international community?
posted by elwoodwiles
on Sep 23, 2002 -
30 comments
The grayest of gray Republican eminences weigh in on the Iraq Debate. Brent Scowcroft, an ex-general with the prejudices and proclivities of his scholarly peers --the nattering nabobs of negativism-- proposes that the United States forget about invading Iraq.
Henry Kissinger, one of the great American opportunists, has positioned himself as a kind of stealth critic, a loyal oppositionist who is doing his darnedest to nudge Bush in a multilateral direction.
James Baker, who is intimately tied to a wide range of allegedly satanic forces and has an incredibly long and distinguished record of public service, to chasten George W. Bush's hawkish impulses on Iraq, proposes that the administration sponsor "a simple and straightforward resolution requiring that Iraq submit to intrusive inspections anytime, anywhere, with no exceptions, and authorizing all necessary means to enforce it."
posted by semmi
on Sep 19, 2002 -
11 comments
Administration Says It Can Attack Iraq without Congressional Approval Not a new story, per se, but this Post article lays out pretty well the arguments behind the administration's case, one being simply Bush's role as commander-in-chief. It's strange how closely this issue reflects earlier attempts by the administration to avoid Congressional and/or public scrutiny (Cheney's Enron meetings, for example). Why this aversion, and why fight so hard? And I have a sneaking fear that Bush will seek Congressional approval only after invading, and he will bully votes by claiming that reps have a patriotic duty to support a president in a time of war.
posted by risenc
on Aug 26, 2002 -
65 comments
Does invading Iraq require more than declaring Saddam Hussein "evil"? The New York Times reports public opposition from people not easily labeled Brie-sucking scared-of-war libyerals -- people like Henry "Bombs Away" Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. Meanwhile, hawks argue that
not attacking after all Bush's rhetoric would "produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism."
[registration required]
posted by sacre_bleu
on Aug 15, 2002 -
62 comments
Middle East war predictions "..what we are witnessing looks like joint preparations by the Palestinian Authority, Syria, its Lebanese client, Iraq, and Iran, for war on a regional scale, against both Israel and U.S. interests. I fear we may face a major, sudden, external assault on Israel, meant to precede U.S. action against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, and indeed prevent the U.S. from going there by enmiring it in the defence of Israel. [From The Ottowa Citizen, lead link in today's Wall Street Journal Best of the Web]
posted by Voyageman
on Mar 27, 2002 -
14 comments
