Category Archives: Iraq War

Killing Time

Gender and Sexuality, Iraq, Iraq War, Journalism and Media


Iraqis with the remains of a minibus hit by a roadside bomb on Monday morning in Baghdad: Joao Silva for The New York Times

There are those decisive moments when something important or historic or even catastrophic happens. These are the things historians chronicle and poets bemoan. Then there is the universal act of killing time, the boring drudgery of day-to-day life but the kind of mundane routine we all long for after the unsought catastrophes. Thomas Friedman in a Saturday op-ed views the current economic crisis as a WMD dug up in our own backyard, a danger so potent that the January inaugural might be best moved up to Thanksgiving, killing two birds (a sacrificial turkey and a lame duck) with one bold act. President-elect Obama is hardly killing time, as his proposed cabinet appointees are press-conferenced to the nation in rapid-fire progression. Time in the larger sense is mercifully short, unless it stops completely in one of those mortality shocks that deadens any sense of time.

Like Monday in Baghdad, where killing time has been the rule both before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Continue reading Killing Time →

An Internationalist President

Election 2008, Iraq War, Terrorism Issue


Professor John Esposito


An internationalist president
by John Esposito, The Immanent Frame, SSRC Blogs, November 7, 2008

Barack Obama’s campaign victory was epic-making in America and across the Muslim world. On November 4, as soon as the election was called for Barack Obama, I began to receive congratulatory emails from friends in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Europe. Some had stayed up through the night to hear the final results. Of course, I wasn’t surprised at the global interest and support, which had been evident on recent visits to Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Wherever I spoke, regardless of the topic, someone in the audience would ask me a question about Obama and his prospects. Privately, it was the topic of conversation. So what will all this mean?

In the Muslim world, as in Europe and much of the world, Obama is welcomed as an internationalist president. His Kenyan father, early schooling in Indonesia, race and name symbolize for many a unique internationalist presidential profile, one that contrasts sharply with his predecessor. Indeed, he is seen as the antithesis of George W. Bush-internationally informed, experienced, aware and sensitive, a measured and articulate statesman-not, as Bush is often regarded, as a swaggering Texas cowboy. Continue reading An Internationalist President →

The Endorsement from Hell

Election 2008, Iraq War, Osama Bin Laden, Somalia, Terrorism Issue

The Endorsement From Hell
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, The New York Times, October 25, 2008

John McCain isn’t boasting about a new endorsement, one of the very, very few he has received from overseas. It came a few days ago:

“Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” read a commentary on a password-protected Islamist Web site that is closely linked to Al Qaeda and often disseminates the group’s propaganda.

The endorsement left the McCain campaign sputtering, and noting helplessly that Hamas appears to prefer Barack Obama. Al Qaeda’s apparent enthusiasm for Mr. McCain is manifestly not reciprocated. Continue reading The Endorsement from Hell →

From the Gates of Hell: Dear John …

Election 2008, Iraq War, Terrorism Issue

On Al-Qaeda Web Sites, Joy Over U.S. Crisis, Support for McCain

By Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Al-Qaeda is watching the U.S. stock market’s downward slide with something akin to jubilation, with its leaders hailing the financial crisis as a vindication of its strategy of crippling America’s economy through endless, costly foreign wars against Islamist insurgents.

And at least some of its supporters think Sen. John McCain is the presidential candidate best suited to continue that trend.

“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.

The Web commentary was one of several posted by Taliban or al-Qaeda-allied groups in recent days that trumpeted the global financial crisis and predicted further decline for the United States and other Western powers. In language that was by turns mocking and ominous, the newest posting credited al-Qaeda with having lured Washington into a trap that had “exhausted its resources and bankrupted its economy.” It further suggested that a terrorist strike might swing the election to McCain and guarantee an expansion of U.S. military commitments in the Islamic world. Continue reading From the Gates of Hell: Dear John … →

The Territory with which We Are Threatened

Egypt, Iraq War, Teaching Resources


Whitelaw Reid as a young correspondent

[In 1898 the United States was fresh from its imperialist expansion in the Spanish American War. Ironically, the situation faced by the United States today in Iraq has a parallel with the war in Cuba, as can be readily seen from this essay by the well-known journalist and Republican politician Whitelaw Reid. The irony continues in the example given by Reid of Egypt’s colonial occupation of Egypt. Although written over a century ago in one of America’s most popular periodicals, the sentiments are relevant to the ongoing occupation of Iraq. Whether or not history repeats itself, some historical observations are well worth repeating. Webshaykh]

by Whitelaw Reid

Men are everywhere asking what should be our course about the territory conquered in this war. Some inquire merely if it is good policy for the United States to abandon its continental limitations, and extend its rule over semi-tropical countries with mixed populations. Others ask if it would not be the wisest policy to give them away after conquering them, or abandon them. They say it would be ruinous to admit them as States to equal rights with ourselves, and contrary to the Constitution to hold them permanently as Territories. It would be bad policy, they argue, to lower the standard of our population by taking in hordes of West Indians and Asiatics; bad policy to run any chance of allowing these people to become some day joint arbiters with ourselves of the national destinies; bad policy to abandon the principles of Washington’s Farewell Address, to which we have adhered for a century, and involve ourselves in the Eastern Question, or in the entanglements of European politics. Continue reading The Territory with which We Are Threatened →

The PKK as a burden on Iraqi Kurds

Iraq, Iraq War, Kurds, Turkey


Former PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, pictured in 1992.

The PKK as a burden on Iraqi Kurds

by IHSAN DAÄžI, Today’s Zaman, October 14, 2008

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK) attacks from northern Iraq on Turkish targets have turned the Kurdish region in Iraq into a primary target of Turkey.

It is time for the regional Kurdish administration to stop using the PKK as a bargaining chip against Turkey; it is not a time for the Kurdish people of Iraq to side with the PKK out of Kurdish sentimentality. While the former produces no advantages and incites the animosity of Turkey and pressures of the US, the latter ignores the fact that the PKK threatens to undo the gains Iraqi Kurds have made through their long struggle.

What Iraqi Kurds have today, after decades of struggle, is certainly worth preserving and consolidating, and those gains should not be risked by protecting the PKK. Continue reading The PKK as a burden on Iraqi Kurds →

Surge vs. Splurge

Election 2008, Iraq, Iraq War, Journalism and Media

McCain is deluding himself over the ‘surge’
Johann Hari, The Independent, October 6, 2008

There’s a hole in the US argument, and blood is rushing through

John McCain is desperate to talk about the surge rather than the splurge. His Iraq war is set to cost one trillion dollars, and his deregulation-mania has cost hundreds of billions. So in order to maintain his façade of being “tough on spending”, he needs to shift the subject. That’s why he has tried to shrink the debate about the Iraq War to one small question. Not: did Saddam have Weapons of Mass Destruction? Not: did Saddam have links to 9/11? Not: why do 70 per cent of Iraqis think the presence of US troops make them less safe and they should go home now?

McCain knows he will lose those arguments, so he wants us to talk solely about whether the surge of US troops last year has been successful. But a hole was just blown in that argument – and blood is rushing through.

Those of us who got Iraq wrong have a particular duty to honestly describe what is happening now. Continue reading Surge vs. Splurge →

The surge be praised but pass the ammunition

Afghanistan, Election 2008, Iraq, Iraq War

The potential meltdown of Wall Street has brought the economy front and center as “the” issue in the closing days of the election cycle. Even Friday’s debate, originally planned to focus on foreign policy, started out on the state of the economy and looming bail-out plan in congress. But Iraq is not about to disappear from the news. If the only measure of progress in Iraq is the raw number of U.S. casualties, then the “surge” be praised, but keep passing the ammunition. Darfur is also out of the daily news cycle these days, but the killing there has hardly abated. Afghanistan does make the headlines, in part because U.S. casualties are rising dramatically this year.

So five years and counting after the shock-and-awe sweep through Iraq and the May Day announcement of “Mission Accomplished” by George W. Bush, the mission continues and the death toll keeps rising. Here is yesterday’s count from al-Jazeera:

Deadly car bombs rock Baghdad Continue reading The surge be praised but pass the ammunition →