I have been away from my computer for the past week and have not been able to keep up with all of the news and opinions already linked to here. If this is a repeat, please forgive. Written by Dan Baum for this week's New Yorker Magazine, its the story of a young man...
Happy talk from Iraqi Shiites is in the news. The "constitution", they say, will be signed on Monday. Some are saying they've struck a deal, but no one is saying who they've struck the deal with, exactly. Others say they're just signing the thing, the heck with Al...
Guardian: Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, who led Britain's forces to war in Iraq last year, has dramatically broken his silence about the legal crisis which engulfed the Government on the eve of battle. In an extraordinary interview which will reignite the controversy...
Tony Karon, Senior Editor for world coverage at TIME.com, in a commentary for The War In Context has an interesting insight on the Shi`a walkout from the "constitution" signing ceremony yesterday in Baghdad. "Both by some of the issues they've raised and by their...
Joshua Micah Marshall, in Talking Points Memo, analyzes the recent headlines indicating that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has been postponed until after the American presidential election in November. Speculation has been widespread as to what Sharon's motives and...
Knight Ridder reports:The scheduled signing of Iraq's interim constitution was indefinitely postponed Friday after five Shiite members of the Governing Council lodged 11th hour objections to some of its key provisions. News that the deal over the document had fallen...
Reuters/ABC The US Army has cancelled a $US327 million contract to equip the Iraqi army, citing technical problems with the bidding process. An Army official told reporters that new proposals for the work would be sought after a review found a huge spread in competing...
"The Saudi Paradox," by Michael Scott Doran, published in the Jan/Feb Foreign Affairs is a good source of background information on the likely motivation for this week’s anti-Shi’ite terrorist attacks (though I don't agree with all of his conclusions): "To better...
From the typewriter of--gasp!-- Bill Buckley himself: It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neocon policies are determined by the advantages they bring, manifest or putative, to the State of Israel. Patrick Buchanan, in the current American Conservative,...
The Passion: Redemption through Pain, Not Anti-SemitismYes, The Passion is a jolting shocker of a movie. And my immediate reaction as a white, middle-class, non-religious American was pretty much that of Tikkun: If Jesus was about love, why focus on the violence and...
