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The great scholar-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted correctly that ethnicity was too powerful a centrifugal force for even the Soviet Union to contain. Similar perspicacity is nowhere in evidence in all the recent predictions about the emergence of an Iran-Iraq Kingdom of Greater Shi’a. The U.S. media bears part of the blame for consistently getting [...]
Archive for the ‘Iraq’ Category
November 1st, 2011
October 22nd, 2011
Category: Iraq, Mitt Romney
If you had been President, would you have caved in to the Iraqi government’s demand that U.S. servicepeople in Iraq be subject to the jurisdiction of Iraqi criminal courts?
May 4th, 2011
Category: Iraq, Personal moment
The Washington Post today covers the continued assasinations of Iraqi government officials. Driving is a particularly dangerous time for officials: An IED can be planted on their route and detonated by cell phone when they pass, a motorcyclist can race by and plant a sticky bomb on a vehicle in the convoy, or gunmen can [...]
October 16th, 2010
Category: Foreign Policy, Iraq
As we seem to be going through a slow spot in postings, I feel comfortable re-cycling here at RBC my observations on the state of Iraqi Kurdistan, which were originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle but now reside on the regional government’s website. As Salaam Alaikum
May 16th, 2010
Category: Iraq, Spirituality and Religion
Christianity is being eradicated from Iraq.
July 12th, 2007
Category: Iraq
David Brooks’ column [$] proposes the interesting idea that we are paralyzed in Iraq because we can’t agree how to leave. I think he’s on to something. But first, the column has a couple of specifics that bear note. “Senior GOP officials have told President Bush that they are unwilling to see their party destroyed [...]
January 10th, 2007
Category: Iraq
The shocking moment of the evening was John Thune (R-SD) on NPR’s post-mortem, looking as though he’d lost his best friend, beginning his reaction with a motto proud and bold, a ringing, confident endorsement of his chief: “well, we have to try it” …and losing enthusiasm from that point on. Is that the odds Republicans [...]
January 7th, 2007
Category: Iraq
Mark reasonably hesitates to give up on the prospect that some sort of force surge might ameliorate a ghastly future in Iraq. One’s view on this turns on what, in his phrase, “reasonable doubt” means. I think he’s wrong; escalation isn’t drawing to an inside straight, it’s betting the Jack of Diamonds will jump out [...]
January 3rd, 2007
Category: Iraq
Apparently President Bush is going to couch his escalation in Iraq as an appeal to “sacrifice.” Olbermann has already ridiculed the notion, but the best retort does not come from an American. Bush’s rhetoric recalls another incompetent war leader whom he greatly resembles: Neville Chamberlain. Like Chamberlain, Bush comes from a prominent political family and [...]
November 17th, 2006
Bush has been reflecting on lessons the war in Vietnam could offer, apparently an analogy so obscure and arcane that he couldn’t see it until he actually went to Vietnam. The result of this reflection is giving me a headache: “We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task [...]
