On July 8, the editors of the New York Times joined the chorus of Iraq leavers in a very long editorial. It was a reasonable job, yet it left many things to be desired. First, it ignored the growing evidence from Anbar and neighboring provinces that we can work with local Sunni militia in our [...]
Seymour Hersh has long been the conscience of America’s foreign and military policy. It has not earned him much credit with our military. Nor is his reporting always above reproach. But he has played a necessary, perhaps ever more necessary role.
In the June 25 New Yorker, Hersh zeroes in on the efforts of General Taguba [...]
We hear once again of a “mistake” in Afghanistan. In the midst of a battle against the Taliban in an Afghan village, planes were called in. They destroyed the target. Unfortunately, there were children in the target. This has happened again and again in Afghanistan. It happens frequently in Iraq. The American or NATO troops [...]
The last two days bring us reports of the American military in Iraq starting to arm groups of Sunnis to fight other Sunni groups, particularly al-Qaeda in Iraq. Such programs actually started some months ago in Anbar Province. Their success in Anbar has led to them being introduced in other highly contested provinces.
The American military [...]
Despair continues to be the most popular response to the Iraq War. The latest accounting (June 10) for where we are by a reliable Brookings Institute team that has been offering a summary regularly in the New York Times finds a few bright spots, especially in Baghdad and Anbar province. Yet it points out that [...]
Excerpt from http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/070413_iraqfuture.pdf Cordesman’s CSIS report on the future of Iraq, “Iraq’s Troubled Future: The Uncertain Way Ahead”, revised April 13, pages 4-5 PDF document.
Under the heading, “The American Civil-Military Threat to Iraq”, Cordesman makes the following points (quoted verbatim or paraphrased):
1. The US invaded Iraq without a valid understanding of the Iraqi government, [...]
In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Nir Rosen had an excellent piece on Iraqi refugees. There are now about two million outside the country, nearly all in the Middle East, and nearly as many displaced persons still within the country. The largest number is in Syria, and here the refugees have found the most welcoming [...]
Two news items in the last few days have a deep psychological connection. The first tells of a Dutch force in Afghanistan in one of its most dangerous provinces that is trying to win the struggle with the Taliban by concentrating almost entirely on reconstruction projects. They are armed men, but their strategy is to use arms [...]
Rory Stewart, who works out of Kabul, is presently a guest Op-Ed writer for the New York Times. He has been making a concerted effort to tell us, and the West, to “back off”in Afghanistan. This is very counter-intuitive for me. I was one of those who counseled when we went to Afghanistan after 9/11 [...]
Unfortunately, the only good strategy most democrats have for getting out of Iraq is a rewriting of the argument that we shouldn’t have gotten in, and when we got in, we should have done x, y, and z. This is all true, but as David Brooks point out in today’s Op-Ed, it doesn’t add up [...]
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