Monthly Archives: March 2008

The $2 Trillion Nightmare

Iraq War, Journalism and Media

By BOB HERBERT, The New York Times, March 4, 2008

We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. Continue reading The $2 Trillion Nightmare →

The Letters of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab: #16

Iraq, Literature, Poetry


The Iraqi Poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

[Note: This is the 16th in a series of translations of selected letters of the noted Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. For more information on the poet, click here.]

Letter #16

al-Ma’qil 3/ 29/1962

My Dear Brother Mr. Jabra (Ibrahim Jabra),

Is it possible for any Iraqi to visit the beautiful Baghdad and to intentionally leave it? I will certainly try to arrange for “many visits” there in the summer beginning in June, God willing. However, this letter is devoted to business, to the story of Oxford that is long overdue, and not for chatting. The important thing is that I have a lot of new poetry that I will recite to you when we meet.

The following are my responses to the questions of Professor Hurani. I write it in Arabic so you may translate it according to how you see fit. You have the absolute right in responding as you wish:

1- Yes. I wish to study at any university other than Oxford, on the condition that I obtain an acceptance through the mediation of professor Hurani.
2- I was supposed to begin last academic year, but I postponed it until next year (next October), and I believe that it is difficult to postpone it a second time.
3- I prefer to write a thesis in the field of Arabic Studies or in Comparative Literature between Arabic and English Literature. Continue reading The Letters of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab: #16 →

How Do You Prove You’re a Jew?

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Israel


Illustration by Elisabeth Moch for the New York Times

By GERSHOM GORENBERG, the New York Times, March 2, 2008

One day last fall, a young Israeli woman named Sharon went with her fiancé to the Tel Aviv Rabbinate to register to marry. They are not religious, but there is no civil marriage in Israel. The rabbinate, a government bureaucracy, has a monopoly on tying the knot between Jews. The last thing Sharon expected to be told that morning was that she would have to prove — before a rabbinic court, no less — that she was Jewish. It made as much sense as someone doubting she was Sharon, telling her that the name written in her blue government-issue ID card was irrelevant, asking her to prove that she was she. Continue reading How Do You Prove You’re a Jew? →

An Iranian Laptop Dance

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Iran, Terrorism Issue

Iran Nuke Laptop Data Came from Terror Group

by Gareth Porter, from IPS

WASHINGTON, Feb 29 (IPS) – The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the “laptop documents” — 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop — as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme. But those documents have long been regarded with great suspicion by U.S. and foreign analysts. German officials have identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation.

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad. Continue reading An Iranian Laptop Dance →