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Latest Articles: Bush Wars
How The US Let al-Qaida Get Its Hands On An Iraqi Weapons Factory (then tried to cover it up)
Post Date: 2011-01-07 12:12:28 by Brian S
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In an exclusive extract from his new book, A History of the World since 9/11, Dominic Streatfeild explains how despite expert warnings, the US let al-Qaida buy an arsenal of deadly weapons – then tried to cover it upThe soldier held out his AK-47. "Take it." He indicated the webbing around his waist, stuffed full of charged magazines. "Take them all. I don't want them. But I need a dishdasha or a robe. Anything that isn't a uniform." Then the soldier started to undress.The Mohammeds were indeed good Arabs. They fetched a dishdasha and the man slipped it on. Then, without warning, he flung the ammunition and the rifle down and ran off into the desert. ...
Iraq Wants the U.S. Out; Prime Minister, in Interview, Says Troops Must Leave Next Year as Planned
Post Date: 2010-12-28 19:59:56 by Brian S
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BAGHDAD—Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ruled out the presence of any U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of 2011, saying his new government and the country's security forces were capable of confronting any remaining threats to Iraq's security, sovereignty and unity. Mr. Maliki spoke with The Wall Street Journal in a two-hour interview, his first since Iraq ended nine months of stalemate and seated a new government after an inconclusive election, allowing Mr. Maliki to begin a second term as premier. A majority of Iraqis—and some Iraqi and U.S. officials—have assumed the U.S. troop presence would eventually be extended, especially after the long government limbo. But ...
Christian Exodus From Iraq Gathers Pace
Post Date: 2010-12-24 11:58:28 by Brian S
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Their cathedrals stand silent and their neighbourhoods are rapidly emptying. Now Iraq's Christians face two further unthinkable realities: that Christmas this year is all but cancelled, and that few among them will stay around to celebrate future holy days.It has been the worst of years for the country's Christians, with thousands fleeing in the past month and more leaving the country during 2010 than at any time since the invasion nearly eight years ago. Christian leaders say there have been few more defining years in their 2,000-year history in central Arabia.The latest exodus follows a massacre led by al-Qaida at a Chaldean Catholic church in central Baghdad on 31 October, which ...
More Christians Flee Iraq After New Violence
Post Date: 2010-12-13 12:10:42 by Brian S
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QOSH, Iraq — A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country’s security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them. The flight — involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular — followed an Oct. 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshipers and 2 priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians. This new exodus, which is not the first, highlights the continuing displacement of Iraqis despite improved security over all and the near-resolution of the political impasse that gripped the ...
Iraqi President Says No To Tariq Aziz Death Order
Post Date: 2010-11-17 12:46:50 by Brian S
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BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iraq's president said Wednesday he won't sign off on a death penalty sentence against one of Saddam Hussein's closest confidantes, Tariq Aziz, setting the stage for a possible battle over the fate of the man known as the international face of the dictator's regime. The decision to prosecute and execute members of Saddam's regime is a source of controversy in Iraq where many members of the country's Shiite majority, who suffered under the ousted Sunni-dominated regime, want vengeance for past crimes. Aziz, 74, was Christian and not Sunni, but many in the Sunni community view his conviction and those of others as proof they'll forever be held ...
‘Al-Qaida In Iraq’ Threatens Attacks On Christians
Post Date: 2010-11-03 11:52:24 by Brian S
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Al-Qaida's front group in Iraq has threatened more attacks on Christians after a siege on a Baghdad church that left 58 people dead, linking the warning to claims that Egypt's Coptic Church is holding women captive for converting to Islam. The Islamic State of Iraq, which has already claimed responsibility for Sunday's assault on a Catholic church Mass in downtown Baghdad, said its deadline for Egypt's Copts to release the women had expired. As a result, it said its fighters would attack Christians wherever they can be reached, raising the prospect of violence against Christians across the Middle East. "We will open upon them the doors of destruction and rivers of ...
Bombings, Mortar Strikes Kill 76 Across Baghdad
Post Date: 2010-11-02 17:39:44 by Brian S
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BAGHDAD (AP) -- Rapid-fire bombings and mortar strikes killed 76 people and wounded more than 200 across Baghdad's myriad neighborhoods Tuesday, demonstrating the insurgents' ability to carry out coordinated strikes from one side of the capital to the other. The attack - blasts in at least 13 separate neighborhoods - was clearly designed to hit civilians at restaurants and cafes where many Iraqis were gathered to enjoy the warm evening. The sophistication and the targets - Shiites - suggested that al-Qaida-linked Sunni militants were responsible for the deadliest day in Iraq since May. The strikes, two days after the bloody siege of a downtown church, were stunning in their scope ...
Torture, Killing, Children Shot – And How The US Tried To Keep It All Quiet
Post Date: 2010-10-25 16:45:15 by Brian S
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The largest leak in history reveals the true extent of the bloodshed unleashed by the decision to go to war in Iraq - and adds at least 15,000 to its death toll So now we begin to know the full extent of what Tony Blair called the blood price. A detainee tortured with live electrical wires here, children shot by US troops at a checkpoint there, insurgents using children to carry out suicide bombings somewhere else; on and on, through 391,832 documents. At the Pentagon, these messages were the day-to-day commonplaces of staff inboxes; for Iraqis, they detail, in the emotionless jargon of the US military, nothing less than the hacking open of a nation's veins. Today, seven and a ...
Leaked Docs: War "Even Uglier Than We Thought"
Post Date: 2010-10-23 13:59:42 by Brian S
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(CBS/AP) The anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks has released nearly 400,000 secret military documents pertaining to the war in Iraq, detailing torture, summary executions and other suffering by Iraqi civilians. Although there were no new major revelations in the documents, which were initially reported Friday by The New York Times, The Guardian newspaper of London, German magazine Der Spiegel and French newspaper Le Monde, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin said this morning that the material reveals "the war was even uglier than we thought." These are the same documents - part of the largest publication of secret material in history - that Pentagon ...
As US Presence Wanes, Iraqi Lawmakers Seek Advice From Iran, Others
Post Date: 2010-10-22 16:40:05 by Brian S
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BAGHDAD - American influence has so dwindled in Iraq over the last several months that Iraqi lawmakers and political leaders say they no longer follow Washington's advice for forming a government. Instead, Iraqis are turning to neighboring nations, and especially Iran, for guidance - casting doubt on the future of the American role in this strategic country after a grinding war that killed more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers. "The Iraqi politicians are not responding to the U.S. like before. We don't pay great attention to them," Shiite lawmaker Sami al-Askari, a close ally of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said Thursday. "The weak American role has given the ...
Pentagon Braces For WikiLeaks Release Of Secret Iraq Reports
Post Date: 2010-10-15 18:56:16 by Brian S
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WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is reviewing its war database to prepare for potential fallout from WikiLeak's expected release of secret documents related to the Iraq war, according to NBC News. The release could come as early as Sunday evening. "The problem is we have no idea what WikiLeaks has or is going to release, so we're preparing for the worst," one senior Pentagon official told NBC News on Friday. WikiLeaks, the controversial online organization set up to reveal government secrets, has indicated it would release as many as 400,000 classified logs from Iraq. In July, WikiLeaks released at least 75,000 classified U.S. military documents on the Afghan war, ...
Pentagon Refuses To Clarify Iraqi Death Tally figures
Post Date: 2010-10-14 12:44:01 by Brian S
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New US military tally says 77,000 Iraqi civilians and security troops killed from 2004 to 2008 In its most extensive death tally of the Iraq war, the U.S. military says nearly 77,000 Iraqi civilians and security officials were killed from early 2004 to mid-2008 — a toll that falls well below Iraqi government figures. The military's count, which spans the bloodiest chapter of Iraq's sectarian warfare and the U.S. troop surge to quell it, is short of the 85,694 figure released last year by the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry that covers early 2004 to Oct. 31, 2008. Casualty figures in the U.S.-led war in Iraq have been hotly disputed because of the high political stakes in a conflict ...
Ex-Top Soldier(Gen. Hugh Shelton): Iraq War ‘Fiasco’ Due To Rumsfeld’s ‘Lies’
Post Date: 2010-10-14 12:40:04 by Brian S
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Rumsfeld had 'worst style of leadership I witnessed in 38 years of service' The US had no reason to invade Iraq in 2003, and only did so because of "a series of lies" told to the American people by the Bush administration, says Gen. Hugh Shelton, who served for four years as the US's top military officer. Shelton, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001, makes the comment in Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, a soon-to-be-published memoir reviewed at Foreign Policy by Thomas E. Ricks. "President Bush and his team got us enmeshed in Iraq based on extraordinarily poor intelligence and a series of lies purporting that ...
Judge Bars Major Witness From Terrorism Trial
Post Date: 2010-10-07 07:47:31 by war
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A federal judge barred prosecutors on Wednesday from using a crucial witness in the first trial of a former Guantánamo detainee, adding to the fierce debate over whether the government can successfully prosecute terrorist detainees in civilian court. The trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who faces charges in the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa, has been seen as a test of President Obama’s goal of moving many other detainees, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, into federal court and, ultimately, closing Guantánamo. In the months since Mr. Ghailani was brought to New York from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States ...
US-Iraqi raid on Fallujah kills at least 6
Post Date: 2010-09-15 19:16:45 by Brian S
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BAGHDAD (AP) -- For the second time in less than a week, U.S. forces were drawn into deadly fighting against insurgents - a reminder of the ongoing dangers American forces face well after President Barack Obama declared a formal end to combat. With a persistent insurgency, ongoing sectarian tensions and no agreement on a new government after six months of wrangling, stabilizing Iraq before all American forces leave still seems a distant dream. Wednesday's raid, in which at least six people were killed, was in the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah - highlighting the persistent danger that al-Qaida-linked militants still pose despite years of efforts by both Iraqi and U.S. forces ...
US Watchdogs Say Iraq Has Own Money For Security
Post Date: 2010-09-14 13:00:42 by Brian S
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional investigators estimate that Iraq has about $11.8 billion in surplus money available to use for its own security. The Government Accountability Office report comes as U.S. lawmakers consider an administration proposal to spend $2 billion for Iraqi security forces in the upcoming budget year. The Pentagon, State Department and U.S. Treasury are questioning the estimate in the new report. They say that because Iraq's income is vulnerable to the ups and down of the oil market, the Baghdad government needs to keep enough money in reserve to cover salaries and other expenses. --- Online: GAO report gao.gov/products/GAO-10-304
The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond
Post Date: 2010-09-07 16:42:40 by go65
29 Comments
Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war. But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected. Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the ...
Analysts: Iraq War ‘Partly To Blame’ For Financial Crisis
Post Date: 2010-09-05 18:43:53 by Brian S
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Stiglitz and Bilmes: Recession will be longer because of war The financial crisis that rocked the world in 2008 and still reverberates today was "due at least in part" to the Iraq war, which also made it more difficult for the government to react when economic problems happened, argue two prominent policy makers. In an article in Sunday's Washington Post, former Clinton-era economic adviser Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes say that the Iraq war forced the US to take on more debt than it had to, and caused in part the rising oil prices that resulted in large amounts of money flowing out of the US economy. To counter the effects of ...
Blair reveals Syria’s fears were well-founded (Cheney wanted to invade)
Post Date: 2010-09-05 13:19:48 by Skip Intro
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Blair reveals Syria’s fears were well-founded DAMASCUS // Syria always feared that the White House of George W Bush and Dick Cheney would invade Damascus once it had dispatched with Baghdad in 2003 and, in his newly released memoirs, the former British prime minister Tony Blair confirmed those fears were well founded. Describing the former US vice president as an advocate of “hard, hard power”, Mr Blair said Damascus was next on Mr Cheney’s hit list. “He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hizbollah, Hamas, etc,” Mr Blair wrote in his autobiography, A Journey. “In ...
On Day Iraq Combat Mission Ends, Obama Phones Bush
Post Date: 2010-08-31 12:32:40 by Brian S
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ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE -- As he prepares to herald the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, President Barack Obama has spoken by phone to former President George W. Bush. Aides say Obama placed the call from Air Force One Tuesday as he flew to Fort Bliss in Texas to speak to U.S. troops. Obama is scheduled to address the nation on Iraq from the Oval Office at 8 p.m. EST. Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the call to Bush lasted a few minutes. But neither he nor others would relate what was said. Republicans have criticized Obama for opposing both the war and Bush's troop surge plan while preparing to note with fanfare the successful handover of control to Iraqi forces. ...
Obama To Honor Troops As Iraq Combat Mission Ends
Post Date: 2010-08-31 11:30:39 by Brian S
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- As President Barack Obama prepares to officially end the lengthy and divisive U.S. combat operation in Iraq, he'll personally thank some of the soldiers who fought there for their service to a mission he forcefully opposed from the start. Many of those soldiers deployed from Fort Bliss, the sprawling Army base in El Paso, Texas, that Obama will visit Tuesday. After speaking with the troops, Obama will return to Washington to address the nation and formally end a combat mission in Iraq that lasted more than seven years, leaving more than 4,400 U.S. troops dead and thousands more wounded. Obama was an early critic of the war, speaking out against it during the U.S. ...
U.S. Plants In Iraq Violence, Division, Not Freedom, Democracy
Post Date: 2010-08-29 18:50:10 by Brian S
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A fresh wave of coordinated bombings swept across Iraq's major cities on Wednesday, only one day after the United States downsized its troops below 50,000, some Iraqi experts said that after more than seven years of military occupation, violence is one of the few U.S. legacies left in Iraq. "Now the Americans are leaving, the clearest fingerprints they left on Iraq that any Iraqi can perceive are torture, corruption and civil war," Nuri Hadi, an Iraqi political analyst told Xinhua in a recent interview. Hadi said the United States, which was striding for changing the governance of Iraq, made mistakes due to a lack of understanding towards the country's history, nature, ...
US Wasted Billions In Rebuilding Iraq
Post Date: 2010-08-29 14:02:36 by Brian S
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KHAN BANI SAAD, Iraq (AP) -- A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted - more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency. That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by ...
Coordinated Attacks Strike 13 Towns and Cities in Iraq [Full Thread]
Post Date: 2010-08-25 13:46:09 by war
79 Comments
BAGHDAD — In one of the broadest assaults on Iraq’s security forces, insurgents unleashed a wave of roadside mines and a more than a dozen car bombings across Iraq on Wednesday, killing dozens, toppling a police station in the capital and sowing chaos and confusion among the soldiers and police officers who responded.
The withering two-hour assault in 13 towns and cities, from southernmost Basra to restive Mosul in the north, was as symbolic as it was deadly, coming a week before the United States declares the end of combat operations here. Wednesday was seemingly the insurgents’ reply: Despite suggestions otherwise, they proved their ability to launch coordinated attacks virtually ...
Baghdad suicide bomb hits army recruits, kills 61
Post Date: 2010-08-17 12:37:50 by Brian S
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BAGHDAD (AP) -- A suicide bomber sat for hours Tuesday among hundreds of unprotected army recruits before detonating nail-packed explosives strapped to his body, killing 61 people and casting new doubt on the ability of Iraqi forces as U.S. troops head home. Bodies of bloodied young men, some still clutching job applications in their hands, were scattered on the ground outside the military headquarters in central Baghdad. Some of the estimated 1,000 men who had gathered there before dawn for a good spot in line were so desperate for work they returned hours after being treated at hospitals for injuries in the attack. Though Iraq's military and police recruiting centers have been ...
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