Iraq Civil War - #3 (Day 3): Beyond Mickey Mouse
[BAGnewsNotes] Folks, the US has been pulled into a civil war between Shiite factions; fighting is raging in multiple cities;
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Saddam Officials Financed Secret Pre-War Iraq Trip for US Lawmakers
[A NEWT ONE] Congressional Republicans are looking into possible disciplinary measures for Jim McDermott and Jim Thompson, two House Democrats who traveled to Baghdad on the eve of votes in Congress to approve the Iraq War. The third member, David Bonior, has since retired from Congress.
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Posted at 03:32 PM
March 29, 2008
Iraq Civil War - #3 (Day 3): Beyond Mickey Mouse
[BAGnewsNotes] Folks, the US has been pulled into a civil war between Shiite factions; fighting is raging in multiple cities;
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Posted at 03:33 PM
Saddam Officials Financed Secret Pre-War Iraq Trip for US Lawmakers
[A NEWT ONE] Congressional Republicans are looking into possible disciplinary measures for Jim McDermott and Jim Thompson, two House Democrats who traveled to Baghdad on the eve of votes in Congress to approve the Iraq War. The third member, David Bonior, has since retired from Congress.
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Posted at 03:32 PM
March 27, 2008
Saddam Officials Financed Secret Pre-War Iraq Trip for US ...
[New School Politics] An indictment unsealed in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a member of a Michigan nonprofit group, of arranging for the members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam’s regime.
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Posted at 03:34 PM
Saddam Officials Financed Secret Pre-War Iraq Trip for US Democrat ...
[Political Forum] Al-Hanooti worked on and off from 1999 to 2006 as a public relations coordinator for Life for Relief and Development, a Michigan group formed after the first Gulf War to fund humanitarian work in Iraq. FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents raided the charity's headquarters in 2006 but charged nobody and allowed the agency to continue operating.
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Posted at 03:33 PM
March 25, 2008
Moore Calls on Dems to End Iraq War
[Thompson On Hollywood] It would have to happen on Easter Sunday, wouldn't it, that the 4,000th American soldier would die in Iraq. Play me that crazy preacher again, will you, about how maybe God, in all his infinite wisdom, may not exactly be blessing America these days.
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Posted at 03:04 PM
Only Five Years on in Iraq.
[The Elephant Bar] I went browsing throught the Cato website archives, and pulled up a few old predictions from Cato scholars as to what might happen in post-war Iraq. I then found similar predictions from Bush administration officials.
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Posted at 03:03 PM
March 22, 2008
What I Got Wrong About Iraq
[The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan] For most of my adult lifetime, I had heard those on the left decry American military power, constantly warn of quagmires, excuse what I regarded as inexcusable tyrannies and fail to grasp that the nature of certain regimes makes their removal a moral objective. As a child of the Cold War, and a proud Reaganite and Thatcherite, I regarded 1989 as almost eternal proof of the notion that the walls of tyranny could fall if we had the will to bring them down and the gumption to use military power when we could.
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Posted at 03:33 PM
My Iraq War Retrospective
[Balloon Juice] . I was wrong about Scott Ritter and the inspections. I was wrong about the UN involvement in weapons inspections. I was wrong about the containment sanctions. I was wrong about the broader impact of the war on the Middle East. I was wrong about this making us more safe. I was wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq. I was wrong when I stated this administration had a clear plan for the aftermath. I was wrong about securing the ammunition dumps. I was wrong about the ease of bringing democracy to the Middle East. I was wrong about dissolving the Iraqi army. I was wrong about the looting being unimportant. I was wrong that Bush/Cheney were competent. I was wrong that we would be greeted as liberators. I was wrong to make fun of the anti-war protestors. I was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies. [...]
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Posted at 03:32 PM
March 20, 2008
Some numbers from Iraq
[Cobbers] Within hours, or days, the inevitable will happen ”¦ a luckless US military member will be killed and become the 4000th victim of the war in Iraq. It is time to look at the real numbers behind this futile, stupid war, a war launched on .
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Posted at 03:33 PM
Results of US Invasion of Iraq
[Mideast Youth - Thinking Ahead] Stiglitz from the Columbia University, Nobel Prize winner in economics of the year 2001, and Congressman Lee Hamilton, the actual spending for the war in Iraq could reach US $1,000-1,500 billion, accounting for one tenth of the US GDP and ten times higher than the initial estimate. They said that the costs for this war should include all indirect expenses such as health care for war invalids and sick soldiers, compensations for families of dead soldiers, social insurance for all those participating in the war and others.
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Posted at 03:32 PM
March 18, 2008
Tiny Illinois town forever linked to Iraq war.
[Vincent Feli Boy's Blog] They raised their own funds for the plates until the Pentagon, in a mushrooming controversy over troop safety across Iraq, began upgrades itself. By the time the 1544th returned in February 2005, two more soldiers, Sgt.
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Posted at 03:02 PM
The Iraq War Five Years Later
[Wash Park Prophet] Of course, it has been repeatedly confirmed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that there was no link between the Iraqi government or its leaders and terrorist threats to the United States, that the invasion would not be cheap and self-financing, and that we had enough information in hand to know all of those things in 2003 when we started the war. The administration lied to start this war, and failed to engage in even minimal planning to cover post-invasion operations -- a State Department plan to do that sat on a shelf until it was hopelessly out of date, overcome by years of neglect and changing conditions.
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Posted at 03:01 PM
March 15, 2008
SXSW Movie Review: Body of War
[/Film] Case Directed by Ellen Spiro, a professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, and Phil Donahue, the former television host whose last television program was cancelled by MSNBC (ostensibly for low ratings, but probably for his liberal-progressive views), Body of War, a deeply moving, ultimately heart-wrenching documentary, follows Tomas Young, an Iraq War veteran injured in 2005 during an assault on convoy, his arduous rehab, physical setbacks, his marriage, and his political activism as a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). Bright, articulate, and passionate, Young found purpose and meaning by becoming a vocal advocate against the war.
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Posted at 03:32 PM
COUNTING THE UNCOUNTABLE:The Human and Economic Costs
[LEFT OF DAYTON] The economic cost of the Iraq war is far greater than most people imagine, with more than $1 trillion tax dollars spent in the first five years of the war ”” which translates to $720 million a day or $500,000 per minute. This figure is based upon the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Business School professor Linda Bilmes.
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Posted at 03:31 PM
March 13, 2008
The Iraq War And The 2008 Election
[Below The Beltway] According to late February polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 53 percent of Americans ”” a slim majority ”” now believe “the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” in Iraq. That figure is up from 42 percent in September 2007.
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Posted at 04:19 PM
Congress calls truce to mark Iraq War's 5th year
[The Swamp] On Tuesday, the Pentagon reported that eight U.S. servicemembers in Iraq were killed on Monday, the wost single day of fatalities for U.S. forces in months.
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Posted at 03:50 PM
March 11, 2008
How to Make the Iraq War “Green”
[Green Is The New Red.com] My favorite line from this Onion clip:. “The hoods for the prisoners should be made of organic hemp.” In The Know: How Can We Make The War In Iraq More Eco-Friendly?
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Posted at 03:03 PM
Guest Editorial: Polk: The Iraq War and the Presidential Election
[Informed Comment] Here I will just mention two features: first, it provides for a replacement for our troops by a “multinational stability force” that the Iraqis could and would accept and, second, if the plan is followed it would save the lives of perhaps a thousand Americans, about $350 billion in direct costs and perhaps $1 trillion in indirect costs. More important, perhaps, it would staunch the hemorrhaging of good will for America throughout the world and, even more important to us, it would reduce the danger of terrorist attacks on us here at home.
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Posted at 03:02 PM
March 08, 2008
Benjamin Percy, “Refresh, Refresh,” and Iraq war fiction
[A Practical Policy] What escapes Percy’s regard here (and Boyle’s and Saunders’, etc) is the power and vitality, the value and art, of partisan fiction. Percy makes no note, and seems to imply the opposite, that “strong political feelings” can be expessed as overt partisan fiction in very accomplished and highly aesthetic ways far from “a ready-made message shoved down [a reader’s] throat.”
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Posted at 03:32 PM
Burying Iraq
[SICKOFITRADLZ] The report informs that in 2004, 90.6 percent of Iraqi women surveyed were "optimistic about the future" and that, in 2007, the number stating they were optimistic fell to 26.9 percent. 88 percent of respondents "expressed a great deal of concern that they or someone living in their households would become a victim of violence." In addition, the number stating that the presence of US forces and British forces were making things worse was 65.3 percent and 67.9 percent "stated that their ability to walk down the street as they please has gotten worse since the U.S. invasion." As the illegal war hits the fifth year mark this year, things are not improving, they are only getting worse.
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Posted at 03:32 PM
March 06, 2008
Winning the Battle Losing the War: A NYT Op-ed from James Willbanks
[Columbia University Press] David Petraeus, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, is a student of the Vietnam War whose doctoral dissertation at Princeton was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.” Clearly, he internalized those lessons, because in discussing the surge and the progress of the war in Iraq he has studiously avoided building undue expectations and has repeatedly said that there will be tough times ahead. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was likewise careful in his recent comments about re-evaluating troop reduction plans this summer.
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Posted at 03:32 PM
Graham Questions Clinton over ”˜Ending’ the War in Iraq While ...
[SCHotline Press Releases] “Senator Clinton made an interesting statement last night. She said, “We’re ready to end the war in Iraq and win the war in Afghanistan.” No one doubts we must win in Afghanistan, the country that gave rise to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But Senator Clinton’s Iraq statement about “ending” the Iraq war was quite troubling.
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Posted at 03:31 PM
March 04, 2008
Northern California Meeting on the Iraq War, the Peace Movement ...
[California Progress Report] The Presidential election will be fought out over the Iraq war -- and unless we work hard and smart, the antiwar movement will have very little to do with how the debate happens and the outcome. In fact, on November 5, the peace movement could find itself confused and directionless, despite having seen its activists throw themselves into electing a Democratic President.
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Posted at 03:04 PM
Part II-War, National Interest, and Iraq
[Dry Fly Politics] This brings me to the hypocricy of those that make comments like this. There are two hypocricies herein. First, they imply the argument that that we should leave Iraq to go stop a genocide in Africa, they try to come across as so compassionate and caring about human rights, yet they they either fail to realize or blatantly ignore the fact that if we leave Iraq too soon, we would inevitably have a human rights crisis created in Iraq. All of these people who say we need to get out of Iraq also claim to care about freedom and human life, yet are ok with us pulling out to make a political point and indicting Bush, all the while creating a major humanitarian crisis. Fixing one humanitarian crisis while creating another one does not sound like a productive move to me.
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Posted at 03:02 PM
