Map of Sadr City: Green lines indicate completed sections of wall, red is uncompleted wall. Blue diamonds are joint security stations (forts). Yellow symbols are checkpoints sealing off the area of operations, where more than two million people live.
From Bill Roggio on The Long War Journal:
US and Iraqi forces continue to strike […]
Via The Washington Independent we learn that Helen Thomas went to Tuesday’s White House press briefing with Dana Perino and asked the questions few dare to ask, even of the most unpopular administration ever:
THOMAS: Yesterday, according to The New York Times, we dropped a bomb on a home in Sadr City and burned alive a […]
Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity.
– General George S. Patton, Jr.
U.S. Army soldiers from 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division guard construction of a concrete wall running through the Shiite enclave of Sadr City, Baghdad, on Sunday, May 4, 2008.
Why is the U.S. Army building […]
Postcard from the Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq
The best thing about blogging is it takes no imagination, which is good because I would never be able to make this stuff up myself. Via Think Progress:
The AP reports that the Pentagon is backing a $5 billion dollar plan to “transform the U.S.-protected Green Zone” into a […]
MoveOn.org has come up with the best way to commemorate five years of mission accomplishment in Iraq. Heckuva job. If you can’t see YouTube, it’s a “Mission Accomplished” birthday cake… and the five candles keep multiplying until there are a hundred.
Think back to when President Bush and the neocons wanted to justify the invasion of Iraq. We heard the same words over and over. The Iraqis were “terrorized, tortured, and brutalized” by Saddam Hussein. Saddam “used weapons against his own people.” After it was clear that Iraq did not possess any […]
I’ve just heard the finest sermon or speech I’ve ever heard in my life, given by The Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I’m old enough to have heard great speakers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt after a shaky start in that venue; Hugh B. Brown, Harry Truman standing on the platform of the caboose in […]
The propagandistic name of Operation Iraqi Freedom must seem like a cruel joke to people trying to live in Iraq amid the chaos of the occupation and resistance. From Reuters:
Um Aziz is an elderly woman whose three daughters and a son were killed when the roof of her house collapsed because of the force […]
The news media often uncritically report federal government national economic indicators, without explaining how they are calculated. Well, it seems Mark Twain was right when he noted (quoting Benjamin Disraeli), “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The unsurprising truth, according to John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics (SGS): […]
Let me simply say that we are now exactly in a perfect storm, where United States v. Reynolds meet Loving v. Virginia meet Lawrence v. Texas meet “Sarah” v. …well, we’re not quite sure who. Sarah v. Texas? Sarah v. United States? If Lawrence is to gay and lesbian brothers and sisters; […]
Today our friend and fellow blogger Frank Staheli, with a little help from HBO, reminded me of something important– what used to be the foundation stone of American foreign policy, in fact. Frank coined a term, “the Radical Islamic Monster,” in an attempt to somehow explain who our nation is supposed to be fighting […]
Members of the military can now show how many tours of duty they’ve had in Iraq when they wear their Class A uniforms. The Department of Defense has announced that campaign stars are authorized for the Iraq Campaign Medal (ICM), also for the Afghanistan Campaign Medal (ACM).
Service members who have qualified for the medals […]
The news from Iraq in recent days has gone from bad, to very bad, to extremely bad. Now it’s unbelievably bad. Here’s the headline: Secretary of State Rice Mocks Muslim Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr as a Coward. American diplomacy at work, as 107mm rockets and mortar shells rain down on the Green Zone.
“I […]
While John McCain travels the campaign trail talking happily about how “al Qaeda is on the run,” Iraq is on the verge of a total breakdown. Americans are not even fighting al Qaeda in Iraq or anywhere else thanks to the incompetence of the Bush administration.
Anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr gave a final warning […]
The lowest point of the abysmal ABC debate, hosted by George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, came when they inserted a patriotism smear against Barack Obama. Because the smear would have sounded petty and stupid if asked by the moderators, it came instead in the form of a short video featuring Nash McCabe, a Pennsylvania […]
Today, we learned about a new report on the Iraq fiasco, Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath (PDF) from the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University. The author is Joseph Collins, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations.
Here are the first two paragraphs of […]
A thrilling aspect of this election cycle is that practically every day I get email from either Bill or Hillary Clinton.
Never before have I had this sort of intimacy with an American President and an international celebrity.
Just this afternoon Bill took time out from the campaign to send me the following note:
The Government Accountability Office released a report (PDF) today concluding that the United States has no plan to combat al Qaeda and other terrorist threats in Pakistan. The GAO found that “[t]errorists are still operating freely in Pakistan along the country’s Afghanistan border, despite the U.S. giving Pakistan more than $10.5 billion in military and […]
The massive raid upon a polygamist compound in Texas is one of the major violations of human rights in this country. This atrocity, shocking in its initial sweep, hugely over-broad , of children and their parents, gets worse day by day. Now, the pitiful last means of parents to communicate with their […]
A gaffe happens when a politician, accidentally or on purpose, speaks the truth in public. That’s what Barack Obama got caught doing.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has something to say about the “bitter” so-called controversy that’s been heavily promoted by the Clinton campaign and the media all weekend.
Male hourly wages began to drop […]
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US Soldiers in Iraq killed wounded |
