Articles filed under Iraq

IPS
WASHINGTON, Jul 5 (IPS) - As U.S. President George W. Bush's military adventure flounders in Iraq, his administration appears to be increasingly depicting the conflict as a struggle between the U.S.-led Coalition forces and the archetypal terrorist threat posed by the shadowy "radicals and extremists" of al Qaeda, often to the exclusion of other political actors in the mainly Sunni insurgency.

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US News & World Report
President Bush reached a new low on Independence Day in an incredible speech to an invitation-only crowd of Air National Guard families in West Virginia. That kind of gathering ensures no protesters inside the hall to disrupt our leader's line of thought.

Bush talked again about victory in Iraq. He meant military, of course, and not a political settlement. He is almost alone in sticking to the military solution. He then went further in declaring that the United States must defeat "al Qaeda in Iraq."

There was almost no al Qaeda influence in Iraq until we invaded that country prematurely without taking care of the Taliban and terrorists in Afghanistan. Any al Qaeda forces have come in later through Afghanistan, Iran, or Syria. But Bush never talks about that in public.

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CounterPunch
A state-of-the-art research study published in October 12, 2006 issue of The Lancet (the most prestigious British medical journal) concluded that--as of a year ago--600,000 Iraqis had died violently due to the war in Iraq. That is, the Iraqi death rate for the first 39 months of the war was just about 15,000 per month.

That wasn't the worst of it, because the death rate was increasing precipitously, and during the first half of 2006 the monthly rate was approximately 30,000 per month, a rate that no doubt has increased further during the ferocious fighting associated with the current American surge.

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The Nation
Sometimes, numbers can strip human beings of just about everything that makes us what we are. Numbers can silence pain, erase love, obliterate emotion, and blur individuality. But sometimes numbers can also tell a necessary story in ways nothing else can.

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MSNBC
BAGHDAD, July 4 - Nearly five months into a security strategy that involves thousands of additional U.S. and Iraqi troops patrolling Baghdad, the number of unidentified bodies found on the streets of the capital was 41 percent higher in June than in January, according to unofficial Health Ministry statistics.

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Washington Post
U.S. diplomats in Iraq, increasingly fearful over their personal safety after recent mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, are pointing to new delays and mistakes in the U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad as signs that their vulnerability could grow in the months ahead.

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UPI
WASHINGTON, July 2 (UPI) -- The Iraqi army remains under-equipped, weak and unreliable, the U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee has been told.

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UPI
WASHINGTON, July 2 (UPI) -- U.S. forces in Baghdad are back on a collision course with pro-Iranian firebrand Moqtada Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia. Worse yet, that conflict could embroil them with the wider Shiite community -- the 60 percent majority in Iraq.

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ICGA
The US is in danger of digging a deeper hole in Iraq. Just when you thought that this Administration’s policy in Iraq could not possibly get more screwed up than it already is, first it announces the building of walls around select neighbourhoods in Baghdad and then it begins to arm Sunni insurgents to fight Al Qaeda! All this comes on the heels of all the other bad decisions of monumental proportions: disbanding the army; purging all civil servants who were members of the Ba’ath party; redefining the new democratic institutions along sectarian lines; eliminating tariffs at the border; underestimating troop requirements, etc. etc. The litany of errors goes on and on.

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Washington Post
Among the political benchmarks the Bush administration has embraced to chart progress in Iraq, approval by the Iraqi parliament of a hydrocarbon law looms large. Oil provides 95 percent of Iraq's national income, making the recovery of the country's oil sector critical to reducing the United States' military and economic burden.

But two recent U.S. government reports show that the much-awaited approval of that law -- which is designed to manage distribution of future oil revenue in Iraq and govern the granting of exploration rights to foreign companies -- would be just the beginning of addressing the nation's oil problems.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD -- On the first floor of a tan building inside Baghdad's Green Zone, the full scope of Iraq's daily carnage is condensed into a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation.

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McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD - Iraqi civilian deaths in Baghdad dropped significantly in June, a possible indication that recent American military operations around the country and raids on car-bomb shops in the "belts" ringing the capital are starting to pay off.

But June also marked the end of the bloodiest quarter for U.S. troops since the war began in March 2003.

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Los Angeles Times
A U.S. search early today for fighters allegedly linked to Iran turned into a raging firefight in which the military claimed it killed 26 militants. The Iraqi government rebuked the Americans for carrying out the raid in a Baghdad slum without its permission, and local leaders said many innocent bystanders had been hurt.

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Los Angeles Times
UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council on Friday shut down the weapons inspection program that was at the heart of the U.N.'s effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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Informed Comment
The USG Open Source Center reports on the hacking of the Sadr Movement's website and its hijacking for anti-Shiite polemics. Cyberwar as part of the Iraq War is nothing new, as I noted in this column last February. The sectarian civil war in Iraq is being fought at every level, from poisoned watermelons and dog-bombs, to decapitated bodies, to DOS attacks and hacking web sites.

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Times
Baghdad was shrouded in a sinister orange glow from a scorching dust storm that had just blown in from the desert and settled over the city. Through the gritty haze a fire burned at the nearby Doura oil refinery. In the distance white flashes marked the detonation of mortars from the latest US offensive against insurgents. Dante’s vision of hell had come alive.

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Guardian
Turkey has prepared a blueprint for the invasion of northern Iraq and will take action if US or Iraqi forces fail to dislodge the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) from their mountain strongholds across the border, Turkey's foreign minister Abdullah Gul has warned.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida "the main enemy" in Iraq, an assertion rejected by his administration's senior intelligence analysts.

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McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD — A call by radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr for thousands of Iraqis to march to a twice-bombed shrine in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Samarra next week has set off alarms among U.S. and Iraqi officials, who fear the demonstration will worsen sectarian tensions and become a bloodbath.

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Anti-War
At least 48 Iraqis were killed or found dead and another 74 were wounded during the latest attacks. Most of today’s victims were civilians caught in bomb or mortar attacks in Baghdad. Also, an American soldier was killed and another wounded during an IED blast in eastern Baghdad. And, three British soldiers lost their lives and another was injured during an IED attack southeast of Basra.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD, June 28 -- A massive car bomb exploded at a street-side bus depot during Baghdad's Thursday morning rush hour, killing at least 22 people and wounding more than 40 others in a tremendous explosion that set fire to scores of vehicles, Iraqi police said.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON — By one benchmark, Iraqis are gaining a better understanding of U.S.-style democracy: The number of lobbyists hired to influence U.S. policy has more than tripled since the war began.

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Lew Rockwell
As Glenn Greenwald, among others, has pointed out, the new Bushist line is that everyone killed by American forces in Iraq is "al Qaeda" – a transparent falsehood belied by the Pentagon's own assessments but now mindlessly adopted by almost every corporate media venue, with the honorable exception (as always) of McClatchy Newspapers. Of course, the Invader-in-Chief and his multitude of bootlickers in traditional media and the blogosphere have always vastly inflated the numbers and importance of those elements in Iraq that are associated with al Qaeda in some way, however tenuous. Indeed, we know, again from the Pentagon itself, that the exaggeration of al Qaeda's influence in Iraq has been part of a deliberate, well-funded "psy-ops" scheme. (See "Hubub in Hibhib: The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi.") But now they have decided to dispense with the subtleties of psy-ops and simply repeat "al Qaeda" with every breath, in an effort to demonize all resistance (both in Iraq and at home, both violent and non-violent) to Bush's murderous boondoggle.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- After spending $19 billion to train and equip 346,500 Iraqi security forces, the Pentagon doesn't know how many of them are on the job or whether their weapons have been stolen or turned against American forces, according to a bipartisan congressional report that was released Wednesday.

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Washington Post
The United States has invested $19 billion to train and equip nearly 350,000 Iraqi soldiers and police since toppling Saddam Hussein, but the ability of those forces to provide security remains in doubt, according to the findings of a bipartisan congressional investigation to be released today.

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CQ Politics
Richard G. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for a reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq and fresh diplomatic offensives in the Middle East to salvage what remains of U.S. credibility in that strategic region of the world.

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BBC
An arrest warrant has been issued for Iraq's culture minister on terrorism charges, according to Iraqi state TV and the BBC's Iraqi police sources.

Police raided Asaad Kamal al-Hashemi's house overnight and arrested six or seven of the Sunni politician's guards.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Richard Lugar, a senior Republican and a reliable vote for President Bush on the war, said Monday that Bush's Iraq strategy was not working and that the U.S. should downsize the military's role.

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Time
Suicide bombers in Iraq have staged a deadly surge of their own, striking three targets on Monday — including the highly fortified Mansour Hotel in central Baghdad. Early reports put the combined death toll at 50, and climbing. But how are militant groups sneaking their bombs and bombers past the giant security dragnet around Baghdad? There are over 70,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi policemen spread across the city, conducting house-to-house searches and street patrols, walling off entire neighborhoods and setting up hundreds of checkpoints.

An ongoing TIME investigation has turned up several tactics insurgents use to evade detection and get past the security arrangements.

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Guardian
Iraq can only survive if a functional and legitimate state is rebuilt from the ruins of war and occupation, drawing on the lessons of the collapse of British-ruled Basra, an influential thinktank warns today.

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Reuters
BAQUBA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. troops hoping to directly confront al Qaeda militants in a major offensive in the Iraqi city of Baquba instead found themselves "swimming through a minefield", a senior officer said on Sunday.

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New York Times
BAGHDAD, June 22 — The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004.

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AlterNet
In Washington, lawmakers and military officials say that Iraq's new oil law is vital for the country's future. But, as one reporter learned, most have no idea what they're talking about.

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Anti-War
The major offensive begun earlier this week in Iraq is curious in a number of ways – so curious that it’s tempting to view it as a desperate move calculated to gain some semblance of progress or apparent progress in the face of the disappointing performance (or perhaps downright failure) of the "surge" strategy that was supposed to win the hearts and minds of Baghdad residents while neutralizing insurgencies from various sects, including al-Qaeda. It certainly differs from what is supposed to be our basic strategy in Iraq.

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UPI
NEW YORK, June 22 (UPI) -- Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's trial was filled with legal errors, a U.S. human rights group said Friday.

"The judgment in the Dujail trial of Saddam Hussein reflects serious factual and legal errors made by the Iraqi High Tribunal's Trial Chamber," Human Rights Watch said in a new briefing paper. The group said it had ordered its own translation of the 300-page judgment.

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UPI
WASHINGTON, June 22 (UPI) -- The United States is failing to make significant progress in restoring stability to Iraq, a U.S. military expert said this week.

"The latest Department of Defense report on 'Measuring Stability in Iraq' attempts to put a bad situation in a favorable light," Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a statement.

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Anti-War
President George W. Bush held an hour-long video conference with Iraqi leaders on Monday and pronounced himself "impressed and reassured," announced White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. The president believes that Iraqi "leaders are working together" on important issues.

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Washington Post
The Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that mapped out an alternative U.S. strategy for Iraq last December, may be reconstituted for a sequel.

In a sign of the growing public pressure on Congress, the House voted 355 to 69 yesterday to revive the 10-member panel chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) to again review U.S. policy and offer new recommendations.

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Washington Post
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered this week that U.S. diplomatic positions in Iraq must be filled before any other State Department openings in Washington or overseas are made available, raising the possibility that soon the agency will be forced to order its employees to serve in Iraq.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD, June 20 -- Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a senior Shiite politician often mentioned as a potential prime minister, tendered his resignation last week in a move that reflects deepening frustration inside the Iraqi government with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

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New York Times
DIWANIYA, Iraq — The Shiite heartland of southern Iraq has generally been an oasis of calm in contrast to Baghdad and the central part of the country, but now violence is convulsing this city. Shiites are killing and kidnapping other Shiites, the police force is made up of competing militias and the inner city is a web of impoverished streets where idealized portraits of young men, killed in recent gun battles with Iraqi and American troops, hang from signposts above empty lots.

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Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new think tank run by former U.S. defense officials has published a detailed plan that would have the United States withdraw from Iraq in phases, beginning in 2008 and ending in 2012.

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UPI
WASHINGTON, June 20 (UPI) -- Five months into Gen. David Petraeus' "surge" strategy to tame Baghdad, it seems farther away from succeeding than ever.

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Informed Comment
142 persons were killed or found dead on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning two Sunni mosques in towns south of Baghdad were blown up.

On Tuesday, a huge truck bomb in Baghdad blew up a Shiite mosque dedicated to an important religious figure and killed 87 persons, wounding 214.

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Anti-War
ISTANBUL - Turkey is beefing up military preparedness against Iraq-based Kurdish rebels as a prelude to a possible cross-border incursion that is opposed by the United States, the European Union, and the Iraqi government.

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Huffington Post
Pregnant Iraqi women who have been forced from their homes by worsening violence are obtaining illegal abortions because they are unable to get medical care for themselves and their unborn, according to a new report by a national humanitarian group.

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Guardian
At least 75 people died today when a car bomb exploded near a Shia mosque in a busy commercial district of Baghdad after a period of relative calm in the Iraqi capital.
The explosion, which also injured more than 200 people, sent smoke billowing over central Baghdad. The attack followed a four-day curfew imposed last week in the wake of an attack on a Shia shrine in the city of Samarra.

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USA Today
BAGHDAD (AP) — A car bomb struck near a Shiite mosque in a busy commercial district Tuesday in the capital, killing at least 41 people and wounding dozens, police said.

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San Francisco Chronicle
TALK ABOUT a belated response. The United States and Britain, the two chief partners in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, are finally proposing to "terminate immediately the mandate" of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

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Scotsman
THE Good Morning Iraq presenters chatted in front of a scenic backdrop of Baghdad's Tigris river. Then a body floated into view. Welcome to morning television, Iraq-style.

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Salon
For the past three years, Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace have ranked 177 states in order of their "vulnerability to violent and internal conflict and societal deterioration." The new "Failed States Index" is out, and Sudan takes home first prize. Coming in second: Iraq.

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Time
January's attack on U.S. forces at the Iraqi government complex in Karbala has become a kind of epic unsolved mystery among troops at Forward Operating Base Iskan, where soldiers from the unit involved are based. There is no shortage of theories among the roughly 30 troops who were there as to whom was responsible for the attack. Many soldiers believe the attackers, who appeared wearing U.S. military uniforms and speaking English, were Iranian operatives from the notorious Quds Force. Some think the assault party that entered the complex in a convoy of SUVs was a rogue cell of the Mahdi Army. Still others suspect the hit team was a kind of all-star insurgent squad, with skilled fighters from the Mahdi Army, Iran and the Badr Brigade, another Shi'ite militia.

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New Yorker
On the afternoon of May 6 2004, Army Major Genera Antonio M. Taguba was summone to meet, for the first time, wit Secretary of Defense Donal Rumsfeld in his Pentago conference room. Rumsfeld and hi senior staff were to testify the nex day, in televised hearings before th Senate and the House Arme Services Committees, about abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. Th previous week, revelations abou Abu Ghraib, including photograph showing prisoners stripped, abused and sexually humiliated, ha appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

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US News & World Report
For months, U.S. officials have been worried that it might take just one catastrophic event, perhaps a particularly deadly bombing or sectarian massacre, to obliterate any tenuous glimmers of progress in reducing violence in Baghdad. So when the news came in last week about explosions toppling the minarets of Samarra's Askariya shrine—the same holy Shiite site whose bombing in February 2006 plunged Iraq into a frenzy of sectarian violence—the Bush administration was understandably worried. Iraqi and U.S. authorities immediately imposed curfews across the country and a ban on vehicles in Baghdad to prevent a spate of retaliatory attacks.

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IHT
NEW YORK: The Iraqi conflict is going to be with us for years if not decades. The country has become the focus of a crisis of Islamic civilization that is closer to its onset than its conclusion. Violent conflict between the now dominant Shiite community and Sunnis nostalgic for power is but one aspect of this epochal upheaval.

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Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD — Hassan Shimari rarely goes out without his 4-year-old son, not out of fatherly devotion but because he knows there is less chance of being abducted and killed by militiamen if he has the little boy in tow.

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McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - In a rare appearance on state-operated Iraqi television, radical anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Thursday called the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "neglectful" and sectarian and blamed Iraq's problems on the U.S. presence in the country.

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ABC News
Security forces in Baghdad have full control in only 40 percent of the city five months into the pacification campaign, a top American general said Saturday as U.S. troops began an offensive against two al-Qaida strongholds on the capital's southern outskirts.

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Washington Post
Last week's bloodshed in Iraq and the bombing of what remained of the historic Shiite shrine in Samarra were more reminders of a terrible truth: The war in Iraq is lost. The only question that remains -- for our gallant troops and our blinkered policymakers -- is how to manage the inevitable. What the United States needs now is a guide to how to lose -- how to start thinking about minimizing the damage done to American interests, saving lives and ultimately wresting some good from this fiasco.

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Washington Post
The Bush administration is battling on two different fronts in the war on terrorism -- and it may be losing on both. It is trying everything it can think of -- even mobilizing the New York Times -- to prod Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, into action before it is too late. Meantime, it is searching in vain for a legal strategy to stop the federal courts from dismantling its effort to impose indefinite military detention on those it calls "enemy combatants."

On both fronts, time is running out.

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Informed Comment
An important, historic Sunni shrine south of Basra was blown up on Friday, raising fears of further Sunni-Shiite sectarian killings and reprisals, according to Alissa Rubin of the NYT. The town of Zubayr near Basra is largely Sunni, though it is situated in the overwhelmingly Shiite deep south. Iraqi authorities put the large southern port of Basra (pop. 1.3 mn.) under curfew as a result.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD -- Private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in U.S. military and State Department contracts, are fighting insurgents on a widening scale in Iraq, enduring daily attacks, returning fire and taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.

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Financial Times
The US Congress has commissioned a team of retired senior military and police officers to evaluate the Iraqi security forces, in another sign that politicians are unwilling blindly to accept Bush administration assessments of the situation in Iraq.

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Guardian
The US-led administration set up to run Iraq following the invasion in 2003 was a "dysfunctional organisation" which almost completely ignored the British, according to its director of operations.

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Al Jazeera
Iraq's archaeological and artistic culture is in danger of being wiped out due to a lack of protection and targeted assassinations, a group of archaeologists and artists have told Al Jazeera.

According to figures from the ministry of culture, 18 archaeologists and researchers have been killed since late 2005.

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San Francisco Chronicle
When the president first outlined his plan for a surge in U.S. forces in Iraq this past January, he said the purpose was to bring the cycle of violence to an end and give the Iraqi government the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas.

It is now the middle of June, and neither has happened.

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Informed Comment
The Sadr Bloc in parliament [Sawt al- Iraq in Arabic] is threatening to suspend their participation in legislation in protest against the failure to rebuild and protect the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra. Often the Iraqi parliament, many of whose members live abroad, cannot get a quorum without the Sadrists (32 seats), who are more likely to be in Baghdad for votes. The Sadrists are blaming "the hidden hand of the Occupation" for the bombing (i.e. it is Bush's fault.) If they really do suspend participation in parliament, it would probably mean that no benchmark legislation will be passed any time soon-- not the petroleum law, not revision of the laws on de-Baathification, not constitutional amendments. Nada. Zilch.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 13 — Violence increased throughout much of Iraq in recent months, despite a security crackdown in Baghdad that at least temporarily reduced sectarian killings there, according to a quarterly assessment of security conditions issued Wednesday by the Pentagon.

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Workers World
Thousands of Turkish troops crossed the border into Iraq on the morning of June 6 to pursue Kurdish guerrilla fighters (Associated Press). U.S. and Turkish officials deny this report. What is undeniable is a massive Turkish military buildup on the Iraqi border and an escalation of Turkish government attacks against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting for self-determination for Kurds within Turkey.

The big question is: What is the role of the Pentagon?

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Guardian
You think you've reached bottom, then you hear knocking from underneath. As I follow the news from Iraq, and the American debate about it, I fear that the worst is still to come. Here's the latest twist. In desperation, and since the surge is not having the desired effect, the US military is now arming and funding Sunni gangs to help them fight other Sunni gangs linked to al-Qaida. The enemy of my enemy is my friend - even if, until only yesterday, he was the enemy I had claimed to be defeating. But how will the US military know they are not supporting killers who have the blood of American soldiers on their hands? Ah, because they will use biometric tests - retina scans and fingerprinting - on those they are arming. How reassuring.

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Anti-War
Once again the Golden Mosque in Samarra has suffered extensive damage during a bombing in Samarra. Although no casualties were reported during the incident, a bombing at the mosque last year unleashed a wave of sectarian violence that killed hundreds. At least XX Iraqis were killed and SS were wounded in other violence. Also, three American soldiers were killed and two more wounded.

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Telegraph
A further escalation in violence is feared in Iraq after militants attacked a mosque highly-revered by Shia Muslims.

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New York Times
BAGHDAD, June 12 — Iraq’s political leaders have failed to reach agreements on nearly every law that the Americans have demanded as benchmarks, despite heavy pressure from Congress, the White House and top military commanders. With only three months until progress reports are due in Washington, the deadlock has reached a point where many Iraqi and American officials now question whether any substantive laws will pass before the end of the year.

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Lew Rockwell
Looking idly at the front page of last Wednesday's Washington Post Express as I rode the Metro to work, I received a shock. It showed a railroad station in Iraq, recently destroyed by an American air strike. So now we are bombing the railroad stations in a country we occupy? What comes next, bombing Iraq's power plants and oil refineries? How about the Green Zone? If the Iraqi Parliament doesn't pass the legislation we want it to, we can always lay a couple of JDAMs on it.

It turns out the bombed railroad station was no fluke.

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Telegraph
Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, hinted yesterday that there could be an accelerated withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

He said the Armed Forces were in danger of being significantly "damaged" if they continued to fight in the same numbers abroad.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who's been in charge of training police and soldiers in Iraq for nearly two years, gave no indication at a congressional hearing Tuesday that the Iraqis are performing well enough to start letting some American forces go home.

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San Francisco Chronicle
AS THE saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It may be catchy, but history has shown its peril as foreign policy. It's now the risky strategy U.S. commanders are following in arming Sunni fighters who pledge to hunt down al Qaeda guerrillas in Iraq.

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Informed Comment
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in his quarterly report on Iraq that the "surge" in Iraq is failing. The pdf file of the original document is here. Ban writes,

' 3. Despite the initial success of stepped-up security measures in recent months, the situation in Iraq remains precarious. Insurgent attacks persist and civilian casualties continue to mount.

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Washington Post
UNITED NATIONS, June 11 -- Despite the recent U.S. military buildup in Baghdad, insurgent and militia attacks persist and "civilian casualties continue to mount" in Iraq as a whole, according to a report released Monday by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

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New York Times
BAGHDAD, June 11 — The top American military commander for the Middle East has warned Iraq’s prime minister in a closed-door conversation that the Iraqi government needs to make tangible political progress by next month to counter the growing tide of opposition to the war in Congress.

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Guardian
Gordon Brown was in Iraq yesterday on a "fact-finding mission". It needn't all have looked gloomy for the next prime minister, however - not if he did some fact-finding about Blackwater, a North Carolina company that is now one of the most profitable military contractors operating in Iraq, and proves just what a land of opportunity Iraq really is. Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, acclaimed a "staggering" 600% growth in 2004: "This is a billion-dollar industry," he said, "and Blackwater has only scratched the surface of it." So if Gordon, or any of us, wants to get on this Iraqi gravy train, we could do worse than see how Blackwater goes about it.

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Christian Science Monitor
Washington - This spring's debate over a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq may have implied that the US presence there is likely to wind down soon, but recent comments from both the administration and military officials suggest a different scenario.

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The Nation
The Brookings Institution's Iraq Index provides the most authoritative measure of how much progress is being made in Iraq. Their recent findings? Not much.

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USA Today
MAHMOUDIYA, Iraq (AP) — With a thunderous rumble and cloud of dust and smoke, a suicide car bomb brought down a section of highway bridge south of Baghdad, killing three U.S. soldiers and wounding six from a checkpoint guarding the crossing and blocking traffic on Iraq's main north-south artery.

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Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD — Two U.S. generals gave poor marks Sunday to Iraqi security forces for a lack of readiness, assessments that bode ill for Iraq's ability to fend for itself as pressure builds in Washington to draw down American troops.

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Informed Comment
Remember all that Bush administration bluster against Sudan? Turns out that the CIA is using Sudanese spies against the Iraqi guerrillas. Bush sees no enemies among the oil states, only opportunities to be exploited. Most Americans don't realize that Bush has also de facto deployed Iran-trained Badr Corps fighters against the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, as well. So Iran and Sudan are the great bogeymen in Bush rhetoric, but the pillars of his Iraq policy in reality.

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Washington Post
THE UNITED STATES has traditionally helped the victims of international crises. Yet in the Iraq crisis it helped create, it is failing in this duty.

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USA Today
It is one of the Iraq war's grisliest photo images: the charred bodies of American civilians strung up on a bridge in Fallujah. Four private security contractors had been shot in an ambush in March 2004 and burned in their vehicles by an angry mob.

Three years later, the Fallujah attack is at the center of a legal battle that could prompt more government oversight of security contracting companies and determine the extent of their legal liability in the war zone.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said Sunday he wanted a total withdrawal of U.S. forces in Iraq and that American troops are targets in a civil war.
"I would leave no troops in Iraq whatsoever," Richardson said. "The difference between me and the other candidates is, they would leave troops there indefinitely, and I would not."

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Informed Comment
Police found 24 bodies in Baghdad on Saturday, according to Reuters. 3 soldiers were found shot dead in Kirkuk. A dead policeman was found in the southern Shiite city of Diwaniya. A suicide truck bomber attacked an Iraqi miltiary checkpoint near Iskandariya south of Baghdad, killing 12 soldiers and wounding 30. A US soldier was shot dead in Diyala province. Other major incidents follow. Please note that Iraqis are very touchy about the desecration of religious buildings, and two appear to have been desecrated in as many days.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD -- U.S. military officials here are increasingly envisioning a "post-occupation" troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout, but aims for a smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years.

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New York Times
WHILE the American and Iraqi troops for the so-called surge are nearly all in place, it’s far too early to judge the effect. Still, given America’s waning patience with the war and the bad circumstances that prevailed in Iraq when the surge began, optimism is hard to come by. Our latest chart of leading indicators, based on American and Iraqi government data and news reports, doesn’t brighten the picture much.

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Washington Post
The photographs gathered by The Post each month in a gallery called Faces of the Fallen are haunting. The soldiers are so young, enlisted men and women mostly, usually dressed in the uniforms they wore in Iraq and Afghanistan. What's striking is that most of them were killed by roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

The United States is losing the war in Iraq because it cannot combat these makeshift weapons. An army with unimaginable firepower is being driven out by guerrillas armed with a crude arsenal of explosives and blasting caps, triggered by cellphones and garage-door openers.

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Anti-War
The US Justice Department is actively investigating allegations of forced labor and other abuses by the Kuwaiti contractor now rushing to complete the sprawling 592-million-dollar US embassy project in Baghdad, numerous sources have revealed.

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Guardian
Almost unnoticed, the war in Iraq entered a new phase last week. Laconic statements from the White House and the Pentagon confirmed what had long been suspected - the US is planning a long-term military presence in Iraq. This is a geopolitical development of the first importance. In spite of current difficulties - May was the most lethal month for American soldiers since 2004, with 119 killed - the United States firmly intends to maintain control of Iraq and its vast oil reserves. Iraq's neighbours, and energy-hungry states and oil companies, will take note.

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Guardian
On the banks of the Shatt al-Arab in southern Iraq, a family business is thriving. For the Ashur, a small clan of about 50 families, it's worth several million dollars a week. Costs are steep, especially for security. But profits are tidy and business is booming.

The Ashur smuggle oil.

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Scotsman
EVEN by Baquba's bloody standards, it was a particularly merciless attack on a day of appalling violence across Iraq.

The hooded gunmen swooped before dawn in a convoy of cars, opening fire with rocket-propelled grenades before storming the home of the city's police chief, Colonel Ali Dilayan al-Jurani.

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Time
With most of the U.S. military's surge troops already in place, the numbers are starting to come in on how well it has succeeded in its goal of reducing sectarian violence in Iraq. And they aren't encouraging. Sectarian violence is nearly back to its pre-surge levels in Iraq — and rising. Recent weeks have seen greater murder rates. And the numbers seem unlikely to go down with so much of Baghdad still uncontrolled; U.S. commanders recently acknowledged that two-thirds of the capital remain unsecured.

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CNN
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Nearly 200 people were victims of Baghdad's sectarian violence in the first week of June, with 32 bodies dumped around the capital on Thursday, an Iraq Interior Ministry official said.

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New York Times
Absolutely the last thing Iraq needs right now is to have thousands of Turkish troops pour across the border into the country’s one relatively peaceful region — the Kurdish-administered northeast. Turkey’s government needs to know that it will reap nothing but disaster if that happens.

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Guardian
Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Seen from the base in the desert haze or the sand-filled gloom of dusk, the structure is indistinguishable from the mounds of fuel dumps, stores and hangars. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq's supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument.

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McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - In a rare appearance on state-operated Iraqi television, radical anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Thursday called the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "neglectful" and sectarian and blamed Iraq's problems on the U.S. presence in the country.

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Christian Science Monitor
Washington - President Bush used to be fond of saying that American troops would stay in Iraq as long as needed and not a day longer. He isn't saying that anymore.

The new word from the White House is that American troops would be stationed in Iraq permanently on the "Korean model." The analogy is a little strained. The United States has helped to mend the rift between North and South Korea since 1953. But South Korea has had no internal insurgency to worry about.

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Newsweek
While roaming around Balad Air Base north of Baghdad a year ago, I thought that the most telltale signs of how long George W. Bush intended to stay in Iraq were the cracks. Runway cracks, that is. Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, the base commander and leader of 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, was very worried about them. The Saddam-era concrete was getting pummeled by the constant landings of U.S. F-16s, C-130s and other aircraft that flew in and out so regularly they had turned Balad into the busiest hub in the world outside of Heathrow. So Gorenc was slowly, painstakingly, rebuilding the runways to U.S. specs. No short-term plan, this. When it came to controlling the airspace over Iraq, Gorenc told me, “We will probably be helping the Iraqis with that problem for a very long time."

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McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - An al-Qaida-affiliated insurgent group is giving Christians in Baghdad a stark set of options: Convert to Islam, marry your daughters to our fighters, pay an Islamic tax or leave with only the clothes on your back.

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Guardian
The British and American military presence in Iraq is worsening security across the region and should be withdrawn quickly, the UK's former ambassador to Washington warned yesterday.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD -- Rusty Barber was sitting at his desk in a comfortable if spartan office inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone when the first explosion sounded, close enough to rattle the building and his nerves. He got up from his chair, directly in front of a window, and hurried to the building's more protected central corridor. Then the second mortar shell struck.

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AlterNet
The 50-year Iraq war -- bring it on. Not that the media or the Democrats made much of it, but the White House's admission that President Bush is modeling America's presence in Iraq upon the 54-year-old stationing of U.S. troops in South Korea is as outlandish as it is alarming.

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FPIF
In Iraq, after more than four years, President George W. Bush may be about to get what he has been hoping for: a clear reading on the Iraq situation that is free of U.S. politics.

But he might not like what he gets.

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CBS News
U.S. and Iraqi officials were unable to confirm reports that several thousand Turkish troops had crossed into northern Iraq early Wednesday to chase Kurdish guerrillas who operate from bases there.

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Village Voice
If you ask some of the members of his military unit, Sgt. James McNaughton, the only New York City police officer killed in Iraq, should never have been put on the assignment that ultimately resulted in his death.

Since he was killed in August 2005, McNaughton has become a celebrated, iconic figure in New York.

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AlterNet
While most observers are focused on the U.S. Congress as it continues to issue new rubber stamps to legitimize Bush's permanent designs on Iraq, nationalists in the Iraqi parliament --now representing a majority of the body -- continue to make progress toward bringing an end to their country's occupation.

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AlterNet
GENEVA, June 5 (UNHCR) – The situation in Iraq continues to worsen, with more than 2 million Iraqis now believed to be displaced inside the country and another 2.2 million sheltering in neighbouring states. Calls for increased international support for governments in the region have so far brought few results, and access to social services for Iraqis remains limited. Most of the burden is being carried by Jordan and Syria.

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New York Times
BAGHDAD, June 4 — They started college just before or after the American invasion with dreams of new friends and parties, brilliant teachers and advanced degrees that would lead to stellar jobs, marriage and children. Success seemed well within their grasp.

Four years later, Iraq’s college graduates are ending their studies shattered and eager to leave the country.

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New York Times
BAGHDAD, June 3 — Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

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Independent
Moqtada al-Sadr, the man Washington blames for its failure to gain control in Iraq, has rejected a call to open direct talks with the US military and has accused the Americans of plotting to assassinate him.

The Shia cleric told The Independent on Sunday in an exclusive interview: "The Americans have tried to kill me in the past, but have failed... It is certain that the Americans still want me dead and are still trying to assassinate me.

"I am an Iraqi, I am a Muslim, I am free and I reject all forms of occupation. I want to help the Iraqi people. This is everything the Americans hate."

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New York Times
London

WHEN the populist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr emerged from 14 weeks of invisibility on May 25, it was hard not to focus on his typically passionate anti-Coalition rhetoric: “No, no to America; no, no to occupation,” he thundered from the mosque at Kufa, Iraq, a ragged town a few miles north of rich holy city of Najaf.

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New York Times
BAGHDAD

PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.

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Boston Globe
BAGHDAD --A parked car bomb struck an open-air market northeast of Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 10 people and wounding more than two dozen, police said.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 2 — For the first time, the Bush administration is beginning publicly to discuss basing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades to come, a subject so fraught with political landmines that officials are tiptoeing around the inevitable questions about what the United States’ long-term mission would be there.

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Washington Post
Abu Taha, a portly, smiling man with two young children, lives a couple of blocks from our house in Baghdad. I arrived here to cover the war for ABC News last July, and one of the few pleasures I have found is sitting with him on his flat roof, where he keeps pigeons in a series of coops. In the evening, as the sun glows orange on the buildings, he releases them, and they fly wide spirals over the neighborhood, circling the dome of a mosque, ducking below a brace of Black Hawk helicopters headed for the Green Zone, soaring up over the Tigris River before returning for the handful of seeds that he throws down for them.

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Washington Post
UNITED NATIONS -- More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

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FPIF
Ten thousand doctors have fled the country. Two thousand have been killed. Some hospitals lack the rudimentary elements of care: hygiene, clean water, antibiotics, anesthetics and other basic drugs. Oxygen, gauze, rubber gloves, and diagnostic instruments such as X-rays are absent or rarely evident. This is Iraq today.

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Independent
The raid on the Finance Ministry in Baghdad by 40 policemen in 19 vehicles who calmly cordoned off the street in front of the building before abducting five Britons shows how little has changed in the Iraqi capital despite US reinforcements and a new security plan.

It has always been absurd to speak of men "dressed in police uniforms travelling in police vehicles" as if they were gunmen in disguise. "Of course they have the uniforms and the vehicles, because they are real policemen," said an Iraqi minister after a similar operation in which 150 people were abducted from the Ministry of Higher Education in the capital last year

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Informed Comment
Bush is now talking about a "South Korea" model for Iraq. He likely got this nonsense from John Gaddis at Yale, who I heard talking it last November at the Chicago Humanities Fair.

So what confuses me is the terms of the comparison. Who is playing the role of the Communists and of North Vietnam?

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Informed Comment
As best I can piece it together, Sunni Arab guerrillas in Iraq ran a sophisticated sting on US troops in Diyala province on Memorial Day, killing 8 GIs. First, they shot down a helicopter with small arms fire. Two servicemen died in the crash. The guerrillas knew that a rescue team would come out to the site. So they planted a roadside bomb that killed the rescuers.

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New York Times
MOSUL, Iraq — The letter tossed into Mustafa Abu Bakr Muhammad’s front yard got right to the point.

Mustafa Abu Bakr Muhammad moved from Mosul to the nearby town of Khabat after receiving a death threat. He lives in a scorpion-infested cinderblock house.
“You will be killed,” it read, for collaborating with the Kurdish militias. Then came the bullet through a window at night.

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Mother Jones
Tom Engelhardt has come across what might be the first public glimpse of the $1.3-billion U.S. embassy under construction in Baghdad. At 104 acres, and with 1,000 staffers, it's going to be America's biggest embassy anywhere. It might as well have a giant "kick me" sign on its front gates—hence the 15-foot-thick walls and who knows how many Marines and Blackwater guys on duty.

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The Nation
Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains.

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Time
The kidnapping of a group of Western advisors from a Finance Ministry office by an unidentified group of Iraqi insurgents on Tuesday is the most brazen such operation in Baghdad since the U.S. military's buildup, or "surge," strategy began earlier this year. Police sources told TIME that "dozens" of kidnappers, dressed in police uniforms, arrived in a large fleet of cars and snatched four Germans and their Iraqi translator.

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New York Times
MARABA, Syria — Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.

But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba’s elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.

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Al Jazeera
At least 19 people have been killed and 46 others wounded by a car bomb that exploded near the Abdul-Qadir al-Gailani mosque, a Sunni shrine that is also revered by Shias, in central Baghdad, police say.

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AlterNet
Remember those photos of Iraqi women triumphantly raising freshly inked fingers for Western cameras after voting in their new "democracy"? They were presented to the world by the U.S. government as an indication of a policy that would liberate Iraqi women and men. Well, it didn't quite work out that way, according to Iraqi women's rights activist Yanar Mohammed, who argues that the situation for women in her country has significantly worsened since the American invasion in 2003.

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Time
The Shi'ite militias who forced Azhour Ali Mohammed from her home in Baghdad's al-Dolai district last month shot her husband Amer dead before her eyes and torched all her worldly possessions. And the fear that the killers may come back for her and her two little children prevented her from mourning her husband. "I could not hold a proper wake for him," says the young widow. "He deserved at least that."

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World Socialist
US President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have all personally warned Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that time is running out. Deadlines have gone or are fast approaching. Still, the Bush administration is no closer to achieving the “benchmarks” it demanded of the Iraqi government on January 10 and linked to the success of its current military “surge”.

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Washington Post
Employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm under contract to the State Department, opened fire on the streets of Baghdad twice in two days last week, and one of the incidents provoked a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

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Telegraph
Dina once worked with American officials in Baghdad to thwart terrorist attacks against US forces, writes Philip Sherwell.

Now, driven from her homeland by death threats, her hopes of refugee status in America are at risk because she provided "material support" to the terrorists she helped fight - in the form of a ransom paid when her son was kidnapped.

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MSNBC
BAGHDAD - A day after radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr resurfaced to end nearly four months in hiding and demand U.S. troops leave Iraq, American forces raided his Sadr City stronghold and killed five suspected militia fighters in air strikes Saturday.

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Informed Comment
Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist cleric, preached openly at Kufa before about 1,000 worshippers for the first time in many months on Friday, AFP reports in Arabic at Sawt al-Iraq He preached in his kafan, or burial shroud, a sign of defiance and willingness to be martyred.

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Al Jazeera
Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric, for the first time since October last year, has delivered an anti American sermon at a local mosque in the Shia city of Kufa.

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Anti-War
While the White House has often denied having a Plan B for Iraq, it turns out that the Pentagon has thought about what to do if Plan A, the "surge" doesn’t work. According to Steve Inskeep and Guy Raz of National Public Radio, plan B would involve maintaining a series of military bases around Iraq with some 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops. That plan would have them stay for decades, under the excuse that they could train the Iraqi troops and deter neighboring countries, such as Iran and Turkey, from sending their own troops into the country.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD, May 24 -- Moqtada al-Sadr, the influential Shiite cleric and militia leader who went into hiding before the launch of a U.S.-Iraqi security offensive in February, is in the southern city of Kufa, senior U.S. military commanders said Thursday.

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Boston Globe
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - At least 27 people were killed and dozens wounded on Thursday when a suicide bomber in a car packed with explosives drove into a crowd of mourners at a funeral in Falluja, west of Baghdad, police said

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD, May 23 -- More than three months into a U.S.-Iraqi security offensive designed to curtail sectarian violence in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, Health Ministry statistics show that such killings are rising again.

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Seattle PI
What is lost in the media attention to the fight between President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over funding the troops in Iraq is the fact that the military occupation of Iraq is illegal. From the early orders of Paul Bremer to the present Bush effort to push an oil law through the Iraqi Parliament, the occupation has attempted to control the political and economic life of Iraq.

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CounterPunch
In Germany, at the age of nine, I saw something on television that horrified me. It was a table lamp with a shade that looked like parchment. It had been made from the skin of a Jewish person. Disturbed by the sight of the lamp I began to wonder: what is it that makes people rob human beings of their skin? Where were the others that could have prevented this? In later years I learned that the German government had done countless other despicable things, and like many members of my age cohort I asked myself what the Nazi experience had to do with my grandparents and what it meant for me. The conclusion I reached was this: A democratic government draws its power from the population it governs, and even a tyrannical government acts in the name of that population.

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Der Spiegel
On an Iraqi refugee's tongue, it's a terrifying word -- one that conjures up the worst images of hostages begging for their lives; of dead bodies found on the streets at dawn; of Baghdad morgues full of unidentified corpses. The word is "list." If your name appears on The List, you can be sure your time is short.

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Harpers
It’s tough being a political leader in Iraq these days. President Jalal Talabani is at the prestigious Mayo Clinic seeking treatment for an array of obesity-related ailments. Vice President Abdul Aziz Hakim was just diagnosed with cancer in Houston, and has opted to undergo a brutal round of chemotherapy in Tehran. Prime Minister al-Maliki is faced with almost daily threats from Americans who intimate that his days are numbered, and that he will soon be assassinated or otherwise swept from the political scene in Baghdad

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Asia Times
BAGHDAD - Killings, crime, lack of medical care, the collapse of education - the list goes on. But with the occupation by US-led forces now into its fifth year, and a supposedly democratic government in place, no one knows whom to hold accountable for all that is going wrong.

It is the occupation forces, particularly the United States and Britain, that must be held accountable, many Iraqis say.

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Anti-War
ARBIL - The working environment for Iraq's journalists is becoming increasingly dangerous and difficult, with 31 killed since the start of this year, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

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Time
(BAGHDAD)—A parked car bomb ripped through a packed outdoor market in southwestern Baghdad on Tuesday morning, killing 25 people and injuring 60 others, despite a 3-month-old security crackdown meant to reduce violence in the capital.

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Informed Comment
Here is a chart of guerrilla attacks in Iraq since 2003 through April 2007. It is from a GAO document on Iraq, "GAO-07-677 Iraq Electricity and Oil," p. 34. The original is in .pdf format here. I think it says it all. Note that all the activity related to the "surge" seems to have gotten the mayhem nearly back down to what it was in . . . July 2006, that veritable paradise of communal harmony.

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The Nation
Baghdad

Tucked into the corner of Major Ali's mirror is a postcard displaying the handsome, airbrushed visage of Imam Hussein, the venerated Shiite martyr. Ali probably needs no reminder of sacrifice when he sees his tired reflection. His office on the second floor of the Khadimiya Police Station has become his second home. Yellowing papers erupt from their folders, which in turn burst out onto every available inch of space, from the overstuffed filing cabinets to the small cot nearby. Ali handles logistics, finance and personnel for this police station in a famous Shiite neighborhood just west of the Tigris River, centered around one of Iraq's most important Shiite shrines. But despite his own Shiite faith, it's often not safe for him to return home.

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AlterNet
Last week, a majority of Iraqi lawmakers demanded a timetable for U.S. and other foreign troops to leave their country. The very next day, the Al Fadhila party, a Shi'ite party considered moderate by the (often arbitrary) standards of the commercial media, held a press conference, in which they offered a 23-point plan for stabilizing Iraq.

The plan addressed not only the current situation in Iraq -- acknowledging the legitimacy of Iraqi resistance, setting a timetable for a complete withdrawal of occupation troops and rebuilding the Iraqi government and security forces in a non-sectarian fashion -- but also the challenging mission of post-occupation peace-building and national reconciliation.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD The curtain rose on a barren stage. An actor lying with his back to the audience snored loudly. Stage right, a skinny young woman in a floral print dress used her hands to drag her crippled body forward.

"Mother, mother, I am sick," she said in a low, hoarse voice. "Call me the doctor, quickly quick."

A car bomb, the audience would soon discover, had blown her legs to shreds.

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Informed Comment
Al-Qaeda, at least as a vague franchise, still exists, and remains a major threat to the US. That is, however, mostly because opportunistic forces on the American Right would use any further attacks on the US to abrogate more of our constitutional rights. At the moment, al-Qaeda's biggest targets are other Muslims.

Al-Qaeda might well have faded away after Tora Bora. It did not, despite having its command and control deeply disrupted and the capture of many top commanders and hundreds of operatives.

Why?

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Informed Comment
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim has chosen to seek chemotherapy for his lung cancer in Iran rather than in the US. His condition was confirmed during a visit to a hospital in Houston this weekend. He is likely to be absent from Iraq in Iran for several months, and says he is going there so as to be closer to his family than he would be in the US.

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Independent
The US Army tried to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the widely revered Shia cleric, after luring him to peace negotiations at a house in the holy city of Najaf, which it then attacked, according to a senior Iraqi government official.

The revelation of this extraordinary plot, which would probably have provoked an uprising by outraged Shia if it had succeeded, has left a legacy of bitter distrust in the mind of Mr Sadr for which the US and its allies in Iraq may still be paying.

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Washington Post
NAJAF, Iraq -- The movement of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has embarked on one of its most dramatic tactical shifts since the beginning of the war.

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Washington Post
TAJI, Iraq -- America set a long clock ticking when it decided to spend $300 million to rebuild the sprawling military base here as a logistical center for the new Iraqi army. This was to be the soldier's version of nation-building -- maintenance depots, orderly barracks and professional schools for Iraqi officers and NCOs.

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Washington Post
Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.

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New York Times
BAGHDAD, May 19 — Gunmen wearing Iraqi Army uniforms dragged 15 Shiite Kurds into the street in an eastern Iraqi village and shot them dead on Saturday, Iraqi government officials said.

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Los Angeles Times
baghdad — "God knows what will happen tomorrow," I said to my colleagues. I was talking about my day off, a misnomer in Baghdad. There's no such thing as a day off here.

Since I began working for The Times several weeks ago, I've had a few days "off," and each one has turned into a drama, a result of the violence that disrupts everything from family reunions to funerals.

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Informed Comment
Incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will remove all British troops from Iraq within two years (before the next election) as a way of gaining back the trust of Labour voters, according to The Scotsman.

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McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Supporters of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said Thursday that they'd gathered enough support in Iraq's parliament to pass a bill requiring a timetable for U.S. forces to pull out.

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Boston Globe
BAGHDAD --Iraq's parliament has been making headlines -- for all the wrong reasons.

Voted into office as a symbol of a new, democratic Iraq, the 275-seat legislature is increasingly being viewed as irrelevant and ineffective by many Iraqis for its inability to tackle sectarian violence, soaring crime and a failing economy.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD, May 18 -- Five U.S. soldiers were killed and nine wounded in separate attacks in Baghdad and the restive province of Diyala northeast of the capital, the U.S. military said Friday, and ABC News reported that two Iraqi journalists working for the network's Baghdad bureau were killed by gunmen while on their way home from work Thursday night.

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CBS News
Abdullah Jassim expected ambulances and security forces to arrive first after a blast last month near his clothing shop. Instead, it was thieves.

"I saw them with my own eyes," said Jassim, who has survived a string of suicide bombings in Baghdad's well-known Shurja market. "Young men between 20 and 30 years old stole mobile phones, money and wrist watches from the dead and badly hurt."

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The Nation
Three months into the job, General David Petraeus says it is difficult to predict, before the full number of troops arrive, if the surge in Baghdad will succeed. And he now says he will not have a definitive answer about prospects for progress by September, when he is to report back to Congress.

But how to define "progress"in Iraq? (And why should the US have the right to decide what progress in Iraq means? Shouldn't we, instead, be given the task of measuring the destruction we have caused and held to account for repairing the human and physical destruction we have helped cause?)

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Editor & Publisher
NEW YORK For several weeks, we have been featuring the postings of McClatchy's Iraqi staffers and correspondents in its Baghdad bureau, from the blog Inside Iraq. The writers' full names are not given for security reasons.

Here is the latest from one of the regular posters, "Dulaimy." It is a message to Americans titled simply "Leave." It concludes: "We had enough, let our country go free. By staying, you are forcing people to join Al Qaeda and militias."

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New York Times
RUSHDIMULLAH, Iraq, May 17 — The stories have come in by the dozens.

One man swore that he had personally buried two Americans. As soldiers quickly began digging, another man came up and asked why they were unearthing his cousin.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD, May 17 -- More than 60 people were killed and dozens wounded in mortar strikes, drive-by shootings, roadside explosions, suicide bombings and other violent attacks in Iraq on Thursday, as a new study warned that the country was close to becoming a "failed state."

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Salon
I'm a political scientist, and I've spent many hours rooting through documents to study the bureaucracies that once, not so long ago, ran various British colonial outposts in the Middle East. Back in the days when occupation governments dealt in paper, there was always a chance that you'd find a surprise in these cobwebbed mountains of folders, ledgers and official reports. There were sometimes notes scribbled in pencil in the margins of books, and it was not unheard of to open a dusty old volume and have a personal letter fall out. Through such fortunate mistakes researchers could piece together the unofficial, off-the-record history of empire.

When I started studying the massive archive of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government that ruled Iraq from April 21, 2003, to June 28, 2004, I expected my experience to be different. I didn't think any letters would fall in my lap, because the archive is paperless. The first archive of occupation created during the IT era, the CPA's virtual history can be found online at www.cpa-iraq.org, on thousands of pages that each begin "Long live the new Iraq!"

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Time
It took quite a while, but it appears that the Bush Administration has finally gotten around to acknowledging that Iraq has an oil problem. The Government Accountability Office is about to release a report that estimates 100,000 to 300,000 barrels of oil goes missing every month. According to the New York Times, the GAO will not offer a conclusion about what specifically is happening to the missing oil, other than it is probably lost to corruption, smuggling or just bad accounting.

A new estimate reveals vast new reserves, enough to make Iraq the world's second-largest producer. And much of the oil lies, unexpectedly, in Sunni territory
Iraqis oil traders, on the other hand, tell me they think they know exactly where the stolen oil is going — the militias appropriate it to arm and feed the rank and file.

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CounterPunch
Even by Iraqi standards Youssufiyah is a violent place. At first sight the well-watered farmland and groves of date palms look attractively green but then you notice the bullet-riddled hulks of cars. Iraqi soldiers and police appear more than usually frightened. The streets of the ramshackle and grimy town conveys a sense of menace.

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BBC
Twenty people have been killed and 50 injured in a suspected chlorine bomb in Iraq's Diyala province, police say.

The attack happened in an open-air market in the village of Abu Sayda at about 2000 (1600 GMT) on Tuesday.

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Informed Comment
Serious fighting broke out Wednesday morning in the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah, between local police and the miltiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Most local police forces are heavily infiltrated by the Badr Corps of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, so that such struggles are actually for control of the city between al-Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the SIIC leader. Early reports speak of gunfire throughout the city and burned cars, as well as of many persons killed. Sawt al-Iraq writes in Arabic that the fighting was set off when local authorities incarcerated a Mahdi Army militiaman at the villag of Ghuraf.

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Washington Post
For all those who keep whining about how the government can't do anything right, we're happy to report that the massive New Embassy Compound in Baghdad, the biggest U.S. embassy on earth, is going to be completed pretty much as scheduled in August.

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Huffington Post
Remember how many members of Congress actually read the WTO agreement before it was first passed?

One.

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Editor & Publisher
NEW YORK As rocket and mortar attacks on the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad injure more and more people, McClatchy reporter Leila Fadel reports today that U.S. Embassy employees "are growing increasingly angry over what they say are inadequate security precautions."

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MSNBC
BAGHDAD - The capture of thousands of new suspects under the three-month-old Baghdad security plan has overwhelmed the Iraqi government's detention system, forcing hundreds of people into overcrowded facilities, according to Iraqi and Western officials.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD -- The streets are nearly deserted in the Sunni neighborhoods northwest of Baghdad as the Black Hawk helicopter skims over the city. U.S. military commanders say the residents are hiding indoors or have fled their homes to escape the sectarian violence that has been devouring many of Baghdad's neighborhoods.

Driving into the city from the airport, what you see in the faces of the few Iraqis out on the roads is a hollowed-out look of fear.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Four months after President Bush launched his new Iraq strategy, the U.S. troop buildup there is proceeding apace, but feuding among Iraqi politicians and power brokers threatens to block the political reforms on which the success of the plan depends.

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Informed Comment
In a tidal wave of violence, 137 persons were killed or found dead in Iraq on Sunday.

Thousands of US troops searched south of Baghdad for 3 captured GIs. The Islamic State of Iraq (a guerrilla group) claimed to have been behind the ambush of two humvees full of US soldiers, which killed 5 of them and a translator. Three troops remain unaccounted for. US military personnel are systematically searching houses in Mahmudiya and elsewhere, which will have the unfortunate effect of further alienating the local population.

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Daily Star
BAGHDAD: Iraq's Interior Ministry has decided to bar news photographers and cameramen from the scenes of bomb attacks, operations director Brigadier General Abdel-Karim Khalaf said on Sunday. His announcement was the latest in a series of attempts to curtail press coverage of the conflict, which has already attracted criticism from international human rights bodies.

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McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - When her heart is heaviest, Sahira Kereem tries to think of the little things her husband did that annoyed her. She remembers times when she suggested they visit her parents, and he just rolled his eyes.

The mental trick rarely brings her comfort. The fact remains that Riyadh Juma Saleh, her husband of nearly 15 years, went missing one day nearly three years ago and Kareem has no idea what became of him.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Now that moderate Republicans have told President Bush that time is running out on his Iraq policy, he'll have to demonstrate real progress in a matter of months or face choices that range from the highly unpleasant to the nearly unthinkable.

September, only four months away, is increasingly looking like a deadline.

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Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD — It has not even reached parliament, but the oil law that U.S. officials call vital to ending Iraq's civil war is in serious trouble among Iraqi lawmakers, many of whom see it as a sloppy document rushed forward to satisfy Washington's clock.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD -- A few dozen members of this city's privileged classes chatted on fraying armchairs at the Alwiyah Club on a recent Saturday, waiting for the weekly bingo game to start. The caller usually responsible for yelling out English letters and Arabic numbers -- "B-sabaa!" for B7 -- had not shown up since his sister was abducted and slain a few weeks before. But at this colonial-era social club, one of the last oases for the Baghdad elite, bingo is never canceled.

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People's Daily
Iraq's parliament Saturday passed a resolution against the construction of a separation wall in Baghdad and summoned Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to address the nation's security issues.

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Washington Post
BAGHDAD, May 11 -- Truck bombs detonated on three bridges around Baghdad on Friday, killing 25 people and injuring 69 in the latest assault on commercial arteries in defiance of a three-month-old U.S. and Iraqi security offensive.

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Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Billions of dollars' worth of Iraq's declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for, possibly having been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling, The New York Times said on Saturday.

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New York Times
BAGHDAD, May 11 — A majority of Iraq’s Parliament members have signed a petition for a timetable governing a withdrawal of American troops, several legislators said Friday.

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Guardian
The Americans didn't attempt to patrol the so-called "triangle of death" around the town of Yusifiyah, about 25 miles south-west of Baghdad, until last year. Before that it was a no-go area, ruled by tribal chiefs. Even now, when you move through the area, it reminds you of John Boorman's film Deliverance; you never know what will be around the next corner.

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McClatchy Newspapers
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Supporters of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said Thursday that they'd gathered enough support in Iraq's parliament to pass a bill requiring a timetable for U.S. forces to pull out.

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Informed Comment
Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that US Vice President Dick Cheney was greeted, on his surprise visit to Baghdad, by a rain of mortar shells on the Green Zone and by protests in several cities organized by Puritan Shiite followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. One could have added the bombing in Irbil, the seat of close US ally Massoud Barzani, the Kurdistan leader.

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ABC News
A sharp increase in mortar attacks on the Green Zone the one-time oasis of security in Iraq's turbulent capital has prompted the U.S. Embassy to issue a strict new order telling all employees to wear flak vests and helmets while in unprotected buildings or whenever they are outside.

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Informed Comment
Violence in Iraq at first seems episodic and hard to decipher. It doesn't take much speculation, however, to see patterns. For instance, the bombing on Wednesday morning in Irbil, Kurdistan, which killed at least 12 and wounded 40. This strike was likely the work of Sunni Arab guerrillas along with maybe some Kurdish Salafi Jihadis. They were probably replying to the deployment of several thousand Kurdish Peshmerga troops in Baghdad as part of the surge. The Peshmerga have been fighting Sunni Arab guerrillas on behalf of the Americans and the Shiite government of Nuri al-Maliki. The bombing may also be related to competition for the oil city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds intend to claim for their provincial confederacy.

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AlterNet
On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.

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AlterNet
BAGHDAD, 8 May 2007 (IRIN) - The River Tigris has long been a symbol of prosperity in Iraq but since the US-led invasion in 2003, this amazing watercourse has turned into a graveyard of bodies. In addition, the water level is decreasing as pollution increases, say environmentalists.

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