Blogging the democratic revolution
From the time the US and coalition forces deposed Saddam and his Ba’athists, over 25 million newly free Iraqis have had the opportunity to develop a society along a new path; the nature of that path has faced challenges from Iraqi sects, international terrorist groups, and foreign states, and its direction has been hotly debated….
It was not more than a couple of weeks ago that I picked up a copy of Newsweek at the embassy with that same title. It detailed Moqtada al-Sadr’s rise to power; the murders of his Shia rival, the hesitance of American troops to kill or capture him, and his domination of presdent-day Iraqi politics….
After the departure of Donald Rumsfeld, it is no surprise that President Bush would seek to reshuffle the rest of his war cabinet. It leaves a vacancy that begs that such a void be filled wherever possible. According to the latest news, Bush will be sending Negroponte back over to State while appointing a retired…
Amid the recrudescence of Cold War murder from Russia, the specter of strife in Lebanon, and the shadow of tyranny darkening over the defiantly hope-filled streets of Venezuela, there also is great suffering among the people in Iraq, where the recent attacks have been the war’s most violent. Of course it is a civil war….
American military personnel fighting in Iraq Source: Free Republic We don’t see too many American babes, but these girls, busy crushing terrorists and tyrants and bringing democracy to Iraq, will definitely do. Who said liberation had to be ugly? This photo montage came about when people at Free Republic started examining the faces of U.S….
Manfred Nowak, the UN’s chief man on anti-torture, said today that torture in Iraq is worse now than it was under Saddam. “What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand,” Mr Nowak said in Geneva. “The situation is so bad…
While overall the testimony provided by witnesses of Saddam Hussein’s massacres has been damning, the overall “court experience” has been nothing less than a circus. I am not talking about the accusations by human rights groups like Amnesty International which accuse that the trial is well below international standards due to the inherent and legal…
As Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdelaziz es-Saud meets with Turkish leaders this week, the Sunni Arab world’s desperation should be kept in mind. Though economic concerns have been paramount in Turko-Arab relations for many years, and have grown since the election of the Turkish PM Erdogan, the Saudi King made a few remarks indicative of…
There may be an Arabo-Iranian Cold War brewing, if the Arabs make themselves relevant again As the Arabs furiously try to guilt Syria into curbing Hezb Allah????????s activities and ???????rejoining??????? the Arab world, one cannot help but see an almost laughable, but certainly pathetic, last ditch attempt at salvaging what influence the Sunni Arab states…
The New York Times publishes the announcement by Gen. George Casey at a press conference alongside U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Iraqi Prime Minister Jawad al-Maliki: ???????Ladies and Gentlemen, Coalition Forces killed al-Qaida terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and one of his key lieutenants, spiritual advisor Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, yesterday, June 7, at 6:15 p.m. in…
I hate Islamists. You know the deal. But if you don’t, it’s at the end of every news article about Algeria: “Algeria’s civil war between the military and Islamist militas began in 1992 after the military halted elections that the Islamist FIS was poised to win took over 150,000 lives . . . blah blah…
No more than three days ago, I wrote: On the political level, despite all of the killings, things have chugged along slowly but surely. Of these developments, however, the most interesting and perhaps the most important has always been the breakdown of the Shiite alliance as each party pursues its own interests in the new…
The road to forming a new Iraqi government, from the elections in December last year to its actual formation no more than a week ago, splintering between the country’s different ethnic and religious groups has been everyone’s concern. Sunnis attacking Shiites, and vice versa. Even with the end of the insurgency, the development of death…
The Shia-led United Iraqi Alliance, which is the largest bloc in parliament and is therefore constitutionally obligated to nominate for approval the prime minister, has decided within itself to scrap Ibrahim al-Jaafari as its candidate for the post and has instead voted to nominate someone new. His name is Jawad al-Miliki. No comment yet from…
Not that they already weren’t, as Dawa party candidate and current Prime Minister Ibraham al-Jaafari only won by a single vote within the UIA due to backing by the Sadrists, but the barrier for removing him has been broken as several independent politicians have broken with the alliance and said that someone else should be…
I’ll never forget him. Fabrizio Quattrochi, the brave Italian man in Iraq who told his brutish Islamofascist kidnappers at the moment of his murder that he had no intention of dying with a hood on his head and tried to tear it off, saying he would show them ‘how an Italian dies’ struck a fearsome…
DOWN is a good way to put it for today’s world festival of anti-Iraq democracy protests. Because as GatewayPundit has noticed, attendence is down at every single one of these. He’s got a liveblogging roundup of these “antiwar” (who the hell isn’t antiwar?) protests around the world, city by city, showing that this ‘movement’ doesn’t…
A political storm had been heading over Iraq with the bombing of the al-Askariya shrine and the sectarian tensions that rose out of it. The Shia United Iraq Alliance used the occassion to push forward with it’s plan to nominate current Prime Minister Ibraham al-Jaafari for the position again, despite the wishes of every other…
As I’ve been saying all along, the only ones who really stood to benefit, and those who really took advantage of the al-Askariya shrine bombing, is Moqtada al-Sadr and his counterparts in Iran. Now, a preliminary investigation by the deputy governor of Saladin, where the Shia holy city of Samarra and the shrine is located,…
The rising star of Moqtada al-Sadr has been the subject of much recent speculation: how his bloc became the biggest in the Shia UIA alliance, how he controls one of the most extremist militias in the country, and how he has become one of the most important politicians in Iraq’s development toward democracy. And also…
The blogosphere has been abuzz about the bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Iraq, one of holiest shrines in Shia Islam. Of course, news reports always labels shrines as one of the holiest shrines, but it’s definitely true this time. This one is at the top. The attack was so profoundly felt by Shia Muslims…
Finally, investigations are being held into the existence of Shia-led death squads in Iraq. Apparently the U.S. military caught some policemen about to execute a Sunni, and when questioned about it, they admitted it as if nothing were wrong with it. The incident has prompted an official investigation, though that it has not happened yet…
Via Real Clear Politics, Donald Rumsfeld has presented his thinking on the new kinds of challenges the U.S. faces as it fights the long hard war on terror and seeks to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world in spreading the idea of democracy. He lays out all the angles on how this…
The Shia-based United Iraq Alliance finally made its nomination for prime minister evident, voting by an inter-party margin of one vote to choose current Prime Minister Jaafari to lead the country’s first democratically elected government. I think the choice could end up in a stalemate, with a new candidate eventually having to be proposed. Iraq…
Unbelievable. Code Pink, an anti-American, anti-Iraqi-freedom, anti-Iranian-democracy full-Sandalista nuisance group, has taken to photoshopping photographs of Iranian freedom babes brave enough to protest against the monstrous mullahs of Iran, and used their beautiful images as recruiting tools for their own odious, anaphrodisiac cause. This cause just happens to be cut-and-run from Iraq, so that mullahs…