Live-Blogging 11:00 am Sorry I’m getting to the Brookings event on blogging, which is being webcast here, a little late this morning. One of the disadvantages of being a professor blogger is that other duties sometimes take precedence. The panelists are discussing whether blogging is journalism, and whether it is an interesting question. I have […]
10 Killed In Iraq Sistani Impatient Ed
10 Killed in Iraq Sistani Impatient Ed Wong does his usual good job of reporting on developments in Iraq. The guerrilla war continued apace, with ten Iraqis killed in separate incidents. Guerrillas in Anbar Province killed a US Marine on Monday, as well. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is expressing impatience with the inability of the […]
Schiavo Case And Islamization of the Republican Party
The Schiavo Case and the Islamization of the Republican Party The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public […]
45 Dead In Continued Guerrilla War
45 Dead in Continued Guerrilla War Baghdad Pitched Battle Kills 24 AFP reports that violence in Iraq on Sunday left 45 dead in separate incidents. The biggest incident involved an ambush about 15 miles from Baghdad. Details are sketchy, but it resulted in a firefight between US troops and local guerrillas, with 24 of the […]
Iraq And Vietnam Although Martin Van
Iraq and Vietnam Although Martin van Creveld in the Boston Review is pushing the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam (with Moshe Dayan in Saigon as an interesting plot device), in fact the conflict does not resemble Vietnam. In Communism, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had a universal ideology with a nationalist subtext that could […]
Iraq Two Years Later Tom Engelhardt
Iraq Two Years Later Tom Engelhardt pulls it all together in his essay on the state of affairs in American Iraq. It is a comprehensive and timely meditation, given that we have just passed the 2-year anniversary of the start of the US invasion. Engelhardt’s clear-eyed deconstruction of the boosterist myths of devotees of neo-Empire […]
Hariri And Al Qaeda Really I Dont Have
Hariri and al-Qaeda? Really? I don’t have a dog in the fight about who killed Rafiq Hariri, but I don’t find the case for the Syrians being behind it is airtight. I worked for Monday Morning Co. in the late 1970s in Beirut as a journalist/translator and the Syrian secret police used sometimes to pull […]
Wave Of Bombings In Middle East
Wave of Bombings in Middle East (Revised). The continued instability in the Middle East yielded on Saturday a harvest of deadly bombings in the region. Qatar was shaken Saturday by a bombing near a theater where British were playing Shakespeare. One British subject was killed, and several people were wounded. The bombing was done by […]
Jaafari Iraq Headed Toward Religious
Jaafari: Iraq headed toward Religious Law On the second anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War, crowds demonstrated throughout the world. Among the larger rallies were those in London (45,000) and Istanbul (15,000). The crowds were smaller than those that demonstrated in late winter 2003 as the war was gearing up. Such relatively large […]
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