Iraq

The Hill reports that Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee as one of its “young guns,” has come to some conclusions about the meaning of Maj. Hasan’s murders at Ft. Hood:
“This enemy preys on downtrodden soldiers and teaches them extremism will lift them up,” West said in [...]

Say this for the insurgents in Afghanistan: they evidently have a good lesson-learning process. As I wondered after gunmen stormed a U.N. safe house last week, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan will follow the a similar script as after the 2003 bombing of its compound in Iraq. It’s withdrawing hundreds of employees from Kabul until [...]

A draft report proposes fundamental changes to military-civilian relationships during complex wars.

Back in January, TWI’s Spencer Ackerman singled out former Prime Minister Tony Blair as one of the world leaders most damaged by his alliance with former President George W. Bush. According to this fascinating tidbit from the Financial Times, Blair hasn’t recovered yet. Blair, seen just weeks ago as the likely first president of the [...]

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has put a provision into the next year’s defense authorization — which President Obama will sign today — that gives a thumbs-up to creating a pot of money for distribution to Afghan fighters who renounce the insurgency. It’s a reconciliation measure that Levin [...]

In August 2003, insurgents in Iraq, as part of a strategy of isolating the United States from the international community, bombed the United Nations compound in Baghdad, killing 19, including the legendary chief of U.N. operations in Iraq. It was a very successful attack: the U.N. quickly left Iraq, taking away a symbol of international [...]

I spent most of my day at the J Street conference, but took a few breaks for recreation — in this case two impromptu roundtables with prominent aides to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who happened to be in town. This is a delicate moment in Iraqi politics: in addition to the most destructive bombings [...]

T. Boone Pickens, today:
“They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it,” Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. “Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars.”
Osama bin Laden, 2007:

David C. Gompert, a former RAND Corporation vice president and longtime nonpartisan State and National Security Council official (Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder), has been nominated to be the principal deputy to Adm. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence. He’s testifying before the Senate intelligence committee right now, and in pre-written answers to [...]

So reports The Associated Press. The commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia was diagnosed in February and has undergone two months of radiation treatment, which the Pentagon reportedly calls “successful.” Petraeus certainly did not seem out of sorts two weeks ago, when he delivered an address to a Marine [...]