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Turkish aircraft struck at targets inside Iraqi Kurdistan on Tuesday, seeking to inflict damage on the Kurdish Worker Party guerrillas who have crossed over into Iraq in search of safe haven. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars (mostly the Iraq War) have cost the US taxpayer $1.8 trillion, twice what Bush has alleged. Al-Hayat reports in […]

The Pakistani public is generally outraged at the repressive measures implemented by Gen. Musharraf, which now include forbidding the importation of satellite dishes to Pakistan. Musharraf seems to think he is dealing with Uzbekistan or something; Pakistanis are far more sophisticated than that, and Lahore can always get Indian t.v. stations– and the word spreads […]

Opposition politician Benazir Bhutto has called for Gen. Pervez Musharraf to resign as president of Pakistan, and says she will never serve as prime minister under him. He put her back under house arrest on Tuesday. My guess is that Benazir Bhutto will now be deported by Musharraf. He only let her back into the […]

The Turkish Daily News reports the results of a poll of persons living in 14 cities in southeastern Turkey, which has a large Kurdish population. Only 1% of those polled said that they would prefer to live in an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq rather than in Turkey (where they presently live). Ominously, the […]

Gen. Musharraf says he will keep the State of Emergency in place but will dissolve parliament and hold new elections for it before Jan. 9 under a caretaker government. Provincial elections will be held at the same time. The Northwest Frontier Province, which is ethnically mostly Pushtun and some parts of which have become hotbeds […]

Gordon Robison argues that his stance on the Iraq War almost single-handedly explains Rep. Ron Paul’s amazing fundraising ability (which recently outstripped that of Sen. John McCain, the last unreconstructed hawk on the Iraq War.) I’m not sure it is just Iraq that drives Ron Paul’s popularity, though of course that is part of it. […]

The military dictatorship in Pakistan says that it has released Benazir Bhutto from house arrest and that it will end the State of Emergency within one month and go to parliamentary elections in mid-February. Pakistanis have seen military governments make such pledges in the past, only to have them repeatedly broken, with elections postponed for […]

Pakistani dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf has ordered opposition leader Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party placed under house arrest at her residence in Islamabad. Some 5,000 members of the PPP have been rounded up, and 50 close aides of Benazir have been arrested, according to Aljazeera. The moves were aimed at preventing Bhutto from […]

Theater Oobleck presents a conversation with Juan Cole of the “Informed Comment” blog and Chuck Mertz of the This is Hell radio program, to follow our 2pm Sunday performance of Spukt. They will be talking about Juan’s new book, “Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East,” which is indeed the very subject of Oobleck’s new musical […]