Archives for January 2009

The big news in Iraq this week is the provincial elections due to be held on Saturday. These elections will have little direct impact on the Federal parliament or cabinet, since new parliamentary elections won’t be held until December. But they will bolster or weaken existing parties at the center by acting as bellwethers of […]

My column is out in Salon.com: “Obama’s Vietnam? Friday’s airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war. Excerpt: “On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing […]

Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest op-ed for IC: With the change of administration in Washington, the time has come to acknowledge the so-called war on terrorism for what it truly is: the latest reminder of the West’s enduring failure to engage in any meaningful way with the world of Islam. For almost 1,000 years, […]

According to UNICEF, their preliminary estimate of the damage done by the Israeli military to Gaza infrastructure is $1.9 billion. Note that this is Gaza infrastructure, not Hamas infrastructure. So at least the war weakened Hamas’s political control of Gaza, right? Not so much. So then, the Israeli military boasted that it destroyed 60% of […]

Don’t miss Barney Rubin’s long and personal meditation in the Boston Review on his involvement in Afghanistan diplomacy over the past decades. The depth of that involvement in recent years makes all the more poignant his growing suspicion that the situation is past the point where Obama’s 30,000 extra US troops are going to make […]

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Shaikh Najih Ibrahim, the leader of the fundamentalist group al-Gama’a al-Islamiya in Egypt, said Friday that his organization fears that al-Qaeda will launch an attack on the United States shortly, in revenge for Israel’s assault on Gaza, with the aim of turning Barack Obama into “another George W. Bush.” […]

An experienced observer writes with regard to rumors that President Obama may cease supporting Afghan President Hamid Karzai: “I read with interest the story about Afghanistan in today’s Independent by Starkey and Sengupta, to which you provided a link. My suspicion is that it certainly captures the politics of the hour. But it also worries […]

President Barack Obama signalled on several fronts on Thursday that the new president is his own man and is eager to actively reverse Bush administration policies. There will be a lot of dispute among journalists and historians over how much continuity there is between Bush and Obama, and how much of a rupture. These matters […]

The Israeli assault on Gaza has drawn to an end, now that its Great Enabler (W.) is no longer in the cockpit of the Calamity Machine, and its architect, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is the lamest of lame ducks. Those hawks who proclaimed so loudly that Israel had no choice but to just fall […]