Middle East

Regular readers will know that I rarely write about politics. But this post is an exception, as it is written in memory of my father, who died on this day 7 years ago. That's my father on the left, with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who died almost exactly four years later. Some 14 months after Arafat's death, in January 2006, the Palestinians elected as their leaders the Islamist group Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement). The election was democratic, in the real sense of the word. Unfortunately, however, the Palestinians elected the…
The WarDefense Department claims that 'only' 30,000 U.S. servicemen have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that number is a gross underestimate: On Veterans Day, politicians will praise the 30,000 troops "officially wounded" in action in Iraq and Afghanistan as if this "statistic" were some kind of "fact." In doing so, they'll harm the men and women who carry the burden of our nation's defense in today's very dangerous world. That 30,000 number is a fantasy. Here's the truth about the human cost borne by the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as shown by data from the U.S. Department…
As if outing Valerie Plame, whose primary task was to monitor and contain WMD proliferation in the Middle East--including Iran, wasn't bad enough, the Bush Administration destroyed another intelligence gathering operation for political gain (italics mine): A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had…
The vilification of Arabs in American popular culture serves an ideological purpose: the dehumanization of America's "enemy" in the "clash of civilisations". (Via Woman of Color Blog)
What's one more criminal in the mix, anyway? So what if a government contractor supplied weapons to Liberia's Charles Taylor and the Taliban (italics mine): Viktor Bout, was paid tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars while illegally flying transport missions for the United States in Iraq. Bout is the notorious Russian weapons merchant whose fleet of aging Soviet aircraft rivals that of some NATO countries in its size and capacity. By marrying his access to Soviet bloc weapons with his airlift capacity, Bout established himself as the world's premiere purveyor of illicit weapons to the…
According to Pullitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the answer is yes.
That's the cost of war in Iraq, according to a new analysis by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Public Policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes. The money spent on one day of war in Iraq ($720 million) could provide healthcare for more than 420,000 American children or buy homes for 6,500 families. And let's not forget the cost of war for Iraq itself: up to 1.2 million civilians killed, and the destruction of the country's priceless heritage.
More on the cultural destruction of Iraq, or, as Robert Fisk calls it in this article from The Independent, the death of history.
A new survey, released today by the ORB polling agency, suggests that around 1.2 million Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. That's more than 4% of the country's population.
On March 4th 1991, four days after the end of the Persian Gulf War, ground troops from the U.S. 37th Engineering Battalion destroyed large caches of weapons found at the Khamisiyah Ammunitions Storage Facility, a site approximately 25 square kilometres in size, located some 350km south east of Baghdad. The U.S. Department of Defense initially denied that its troops may have been exposed to nerve agents during the demolitions at Khamisiyah, but following an inspection of the site by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1997, it emerged that the munitions destroyed on that day…
This quote from Fred Kaplan's Slate article has left me gobsmacked: At the same time, nearly all politicians, including most Democrats, have come out against a total withdrawal and have recognized that we will have some military presence in Iraq for a long time to come. Hold that thought, because I want to remind you of some polling data I discussed a couple of weeks ago: From Strategic Vision, a Republican polling firm: 4. Do you favor a withdrawal of all United States military from Iraq within the next six months? (Republicans Only) Yes 51% No 39% Undecided 10% Not beginning a withdrawal…
...attack Iran. Bartcop describes his correspondence with a U.S. naval officer (via maha--thanks...; italics mine): I have a friend who is an LSO on a carrier attack group that is planning and staging a strike group deployment into the Gulf of Hormuz. (LSO: Landing Signal Officer- she directs carrier aircraft while landing) She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth.... Always…
Erasing Memory: The Cultural Destruction of Iraq is a 28-minute film from the Archaeology Channel which documents the plundering of Iraqi archaeological sites and looting and destruction of priceless artifacts. This destruction of Iraq's heritage has been going on since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003, and continues to this day. The looting of artifacts from the Iraq museum in Baghdad, which took place soon after the U.S. began its military action, was widely publicized, but the mass media now makes no mention of the subject. In the last few years, many objects looted from various…
Abdel Monim Mahmoud, an Egyptian journalist and blogger, has identified (in Arabic and English) a prison officer who allegedly tortured him for 13 days at a state security headquarters back in 2003.  27-year-old Mahmoud is a member of Ikhwan Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood, MB). The MB is the world's first Islamist movement - it was founded in 1928 - and its early ideology is what inspires most of today's Islamists, including al-Qa'eda. The MB has always been, and remains, Egypt's biggest and most popular opposition party. It is officially illegal, but is tolerated by Egyptian president…
A caricature of me, aged about 4, by Bahgat Osman (1931-2001). Osman was Egypt's most prominent political cartoonist during the 1960s and '70s. He was a close friend of my father's, and I have vivid memories of him from my early childhood in Cairo. I even vaguely remember posing for this portrait, which was completed in a matter of minutes. Both my father and Osman were members of the diaspora of Egyptian intellectuals. My father was imprisoned and tortured under Gamal Abdel Nasser in the mid-1950s, and came to London in the early '70s for medical treatment. At around that time, Osman…
Brought to you by Glenn Greenwald: That is why war opponents on the "left" -- including bloggers -- were and still are deemed Unserious even though they proved to be correct. Their opposition was not based (at least principally) on the belief that we were using the wrong "force deployment packages," that the timing was wrong, that we should have waited a little longer (that type of "opposition" was the only permitted type). Rather, it was largely based on the notion that the war itself was illegitimate because Iraq had not attacked us and could not threaten our national security, and that…
Yes, I've cribbed the title from Chris Hedges' superb, must-read book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. But Josh Marshall stumbles across a great insight about the Iraq War and Occupation, but doesn't quite carry through all the way. So the Mad Biologist will. Marshall writes about President Bush (italics mine): And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq. By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on.…
The Anti-Defamation League reversed its previous position that held the genocide of Armenians wasn't genocide yesterday. Sort of, anyway: The national office of the Anti-Defamation League reversed its long-held position today and acknowledged the Armenian genocide of 1915, saying in a statement that the mass killings of that era at the hands of the Ottoman Turks "were indeed tantamount to genocide." However, the statement reaffirms the national ADL's belief that the legislation pending in Congress to recognize the genocide is "a counterproductive diversion." From the ADL statement, the non-…
You might have heard of Family Security Matters, a rightwing faith-tank that has been embarrassed by one of their members, Philip Atkinson. He embarased them so thoroughly that FSM has purged all reference to him from its website (more about that, later). So what was the offending passage, given that FSM's stable of commentators is, well, rather unstable? Here's Atkinson, in a column titled "Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy": When faced with the possible threat that the Iraqis might be amassing terrible weapons that could be used to slay millions of citizens of Western Civilization,…
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is said to be one of the signature injuries of the conflict in Iraq, and accounts for a larger proportion of troop casualties than it has in previous wars fought by the United States. According to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, the U. S. military formally diagnosed 2,121 cases of TBI between October 2001 and January 2007. The incidence of TBI among troops may actually be much higher than these official statistics suggest, largely because of the increasing use of the signature weapon of the Iraq war: the improvised explosive device (IED).…