Yesterday’s Pentagon briefing featured a telling exchange about Iraq between a reporter (whom I think was McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef) and spokesman Geoff Morrell. If the United States is on pace to withdraw from Iraq, the reporter wanted to know, wasn’t the United States declaring victory? Morrell came up with a More…
Alissa J. Rubin has a great story in The New York Times today about a crucial issue in Iraq (which some wags are starting to call the “Forgotten War”): an upcoming referendum that, if passed, would compel the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraq within a More…
Strange as it sounds, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was a strong proponent of President Obama’s decision to reverse course and argue in court that photographs depicting torture of Iraqis by U.S. troops ought to be kept private, according to McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef:
The official said Maliki warned that
For the past several weeks, the U.S. military command in Iraq has repeatedly floated the prospect of asking the Iraqi government to extend the deadline for ending U.S. combat operations in certain Iraqi cities beyond the June 30 date stipulated in the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement. More…
We’ve gotten word for weeks now that the U.S. military probably planned to request that Mosul be the exception to the July 30 deadline for U.S. combat troops to leave Iraqi cities set by the Status of Forces Agreement. Now that’s definitely the case, with a twist thrown More…
There used to be this line among Iraq war supporters that the “road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad,” meaning that the intractable problems of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict required the invasion of Iraq to be resolved. Or something. And so it’s noteworthy that this is what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri More…
While you were sleeping, the Iraqi security forces and the ex-insurgent militiamen known as the Awakening Councils or the Sons of Iraq skirmished in the Baghdad neighborhood of Fadhil. The Iraqi government appears to have won the battles decisively. In Iraq, though,”decisively” means “for now, while the aggrieved party More…
This is a fantastic story in both senses of the term: elegantly written and reported by The Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid; and substantively a Good Thing. Shadid reports on the emerging political coalitions in Iraq that, for the first time since the invasion, cross sectarian lines. I like this More…
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