Middle East

Jordanian Dailies on Cheney’s Middle East Trip The USG Open Source Center paraphrases reports in the Jordanian press on US Vice President Dick Cheney’s current round of diplomacy in the Middle East. Jordanian Dailies Comment on Cheney’s Middle East Tour, ObjectivesJordan — OSC SummaryFriday, May 11, 2007 Jordanian newspapers published on 10 May are observed […]

SCIRI Adopts Sistani, emphasizes Iraqiness Bombings kill 26, wound 60 The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq held its annual party convention on Thursday and Friday and, according to Mariam Karouny of Reuters has decided to make some significant changes. They will drop the part of their party platform where they say that they […]

Congress Passes Short-Leash Bill for Bush 9 Iraqi captives executed Congress passed an appropriations bill that only funded the Iraq War for about three months on Thursday. Bush has said that he will veto it. Senate Dems are working to find 12 moderate Republicans who also want toe war to end. WaPo confirms the report […]

Radical Poem on Sharm el Sheikh The USG Open Source center has paraphrased an ironic poem by a Muslim militant about the Sharm el Sheikh conference on Iraq. The frankly racist remarks about US Secretary of State Condi Rice and the implication that any male Middle Eastern politician who cooperated with her was effeminate and […]

Cheney Greeted by Mortars, Demonstrations: Iraqi Parliament pleads for US withdrawal Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that US Vice President Dick Cheney was greeted, on his surprise visit to Baghdad, by a rain of mortar shells on the Green Zone and by protests in several cities organized by Puritan Shiite followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. One […]

Decoding Iraq Violence US Planes Take out Elementary School, Kill Children Kufa Blast Kills 16: US Blamed Irbil Bombing Kills 12 Violence in Iraq at first seems episodic and hard to decipher. It doesn’t take much speculation, however, to see patterns. For instance, the bombing on Wednesday morning in Irbil, Kurdistan, which killed at least […]

Sunnis Threaten to Pull out of al-Maliki Government, Demand a Unitary Iraq; 65 Killed in Civil War Violence In an interview with Nic Robertson of CNN, Iraq’s Sunni Arab vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, has laid down an ultimatum. He said that he would pull the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalists) out of the al-Maliki “national […]

Petroleum Law not About Fair Distribution of Revenues The Iraqi petroleum bill has run into heavy opposition in parliament from Kurds and other political forces. The Bush administration had made passing it by June 15 one of 4 major “benchmarks” for the progress of the al-Maliki government. Michael Schwartz at Tomdispatch.com covers the main issues […]

8 US Troops Killed; Major bombing at Shiite Market killes 35; Boehner Favores Benchmarks Sunni Arab guerrillas killed nearly 100 persons in Iraq on Sunday in an orgy of civil war violence. The guerrillas in Iraq killed 8 US troops on Sunday, including 6 blown up by a roadside bomb along with an embedded European […]