Archives for February 2010

Iraqis go to the voting booth a week from today, on Sunday, March 7, to elect the second full-term parliament (4 years) since the fall of the one-party Baath regime in 2003. Given the turmoil surrounding last summer’s elections in Iran and Afghanistan, with massive vote fraud and stolen elections being alleged in both, many […]

Climate Scientists continue to see persuasive evidence of global warming and climate change when they speak at academic conferences, even though, as Andrew Sullivan rightly put it, the science is being ‘swift-boated before our eyes.’ (See also Bill McKibben at Tomdispatch.com on Climate Change’s OJ Simpson moment). This article at mongabay.com includes some hand-wringing from […]

I saw Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN Friday afternoon. Oren said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had called for the annihilation of Israel, and was therefore speaking of genocide. It is dreary to see this constant drumbeat of dishonest propaganda. Whatever one thinks of Ahmadinejad or the Iranian regime, one […]

The Afghan capital was struck by three suicide bombings early Friday morning, beginning at 6:30 am local time. Radio Azadi reports that there were five attackers, who struck in the area near the entrance of the Hotel Safi Landmark. The first bomb damaged the hotel. Two of these bombings, Aljazeera Arabic says, targeted guest houses […]

Al-Hayat [Life] reports via AFP Arabic on the poll just released by the National Media Center, which reports to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office. According to this sounding, the major coalitions will perform thusly in the March 7 parliamentary elections (rounding up to the nearest whole number): State of Law (Nuri al-Maliki): 30%Iraqi National Movement […]

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decries Europe for general anti-war sentiment, unwillingness to beggar itself with expenditures on war. But as far as I can tell, Europe is the world’s largest economy and got there without any recent substantial wars except those the US dragged it into. Moreover, the fastest-growing economy for the past […]

Pajhwok News Agency reports that on Tuesday, the Afghanistan senate deplored the foreign airstrikes that killed 21 innocent civilians in the province of Daikundi on Sunday, and demanded that NATO avoid any repetition of this sort of error. But some senators went farther, demanding that NATO or US military men responsible for the deaths be […]

Martin Kramer revealed his true colors at the Herzliya Conference, wherein he blamed political violence in the Muslim world on population growth, called for that growth to be restrained, and praised the illegal and unconscionable Israeli blockade of civilian Gazans for its effect on reducing the number of Gazans. M. J. Rosenberg argued that Kramer’s […]

Operation Enduring Freedom is now responsible for the deaths of 1,000 US troops, the bulk of them in Afghanistan. It has now also gone on longer than the Revolutionary War. You have to wonder how many of those troops would be alive if the Bush-Cheney administration had not taken its eye off the ball and […]