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[Martini Republic] Morning shorts: -Bush’s war on terror has been so successful that Bin Laden has had to ratchet it up a bit to compete with other terrorist leaders for top dog rights. -The Senate just split the immigration baby in half, limiting debate on a bill proposing to grant amnestia to half and deportation to half.

[My Buffalo River Home] Middle Class Leaving Iraq Without Stopping In to... : First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a subcontractor of Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown and Root, was granted the $592 million construction contract. By December it had already been paid about $483 million.

 [Hootsbuddy's Place] Law and Disorder -- "Misjudgments" about an... : The police, initially envisioned by the Bush administration as a cornerstone in a new democracy, have instead become part of Iraq's grim constellation of shadowy commandos, ruthless political militias and other armed groups. Iraq's new prime minister and senior American officials now say the country's future ”” and the ability of America to withdraw its troops ”” rests in large measure on whether the police can be reformed and rogue groups reined in.

[ Informed Comment] Maliki Elected Prime Minister 56 Dead in Civil... : These appear mostly to have belonged to the largely ex-Baathist National Dialogue Front of Salih Mutlak, which has 11 seats in parliament, though some of those who walked out belonged to the Sunni religious coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front. Among the latter was Shaikh Khalaf al-Ulyan.

 [ReBelle Nation] Law and Disorder Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans... : Like so much that has defined the course of the war, the realities on the ground in Iraq did not match the planning in Washington. An examination of the American effort to train a police force in Iraq, drawn from interviews with several dozen American and Iraqi officials, internal police reports and visits to Iraqi police stations and training camps, reveals a cascading series of misjudgments by White House and Pentagon officials, who repeatedly underestimated the role the United States would need to play in rebuilding the police and generally maintaining order.

[Tribuna Libre] We have no reason to stay in Basra and ought to... : By Jonathan Steele (THE GUARDIAN, 19/05/06): Tony Blair’s folly in taking Britain to war in Iraq is blood under the bridge, a blunder that cannot be reversed. But Blair made a second mistake that is less often discussed.

 [Riverbendblog.blogspot.com] Baghdad Burning: Iraqi engineers had to rebuild Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991 when the ”˜Coalition of the Willing’ was composed of over 30 countries actively participating in bombing Baghdad beyond recognition. They had to cope with rebuilding bridges and buildings that were originally built by foreign companies, they had to get around a lack of raw materials that we used to import from abroad, they had to work around a vicious blockade designed to damage whatever infrastructure was left after the war”¦ they truly had to rebuild Iraq.

[Soapblox.net] SoapBlox/Chicago :: A progressive Blog on Chicago & the Midwest: The 3rd anniversary of the Iraq invasion finds an interesting situation brewing: returning veterans coping with posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD] are no longer being hidden away from our view. Rather, the media is beginning ever-so-slightly to lift the veil on this nerve disorder affecting at least 16,000+ of our troops who've served in Afghanistan and/or Iraq.

 [News.bbc.co.uk] BBC NEWS | In Depth | Reporters' Log: War in Iraq: Now walking into the city alongside a road on which there are hundreds of cars pouring in with Kurdish people waving green flags, American flags, there's a great Volvo truck coming now with about 40 people on it, all waving, all absolutely delighted.

[Radicalleft.net] Radical Left :: Iranian-Backed Militias Run Iraq: Meanwhile, the new puppets (simply a rotation of the same OLD puppets), after taking several months to finally decide who gets to play the role of prime minister, are now wrangling and wrestling over the ”˜major’ ministries and which political party should receive what ministry.

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Iraq, Iraq Reviews