Smoking Mushrooms?
[ Posted Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 – 15:25 UTC ]
Archive of Articles in the "Iran" Category
Friday Talking Points [Vol. 6]
[ Posted Friday, October 19th, 2007 – 17:15 UTC ]
Senator Chris Dodd wins the inaugural MIDOTW award for showing how Democrats are supposed to behave. He has tossed down the gauntlet on the wiretapping bill working its way through the Senate, and will put a "hold" on any bill which comes out of committee that provides amnesty for telecommunications companies which have broken wiretapping laws in the past by cooperating with Big Brother and just meekly handing over data without a warrant to compel them.
Well done Senator Dodd! The first ever Golden Backbone is yours in a landslide!
Sovereignty In Iraq
[ Posted Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 – 03:54 UTC ]
Sovereignty (n) -- government free from external control
Is Iraq a truly sovereign state, or is the Maliki government a puppet of America? We may know the answer to this crucial question in a very short time. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki could show independence from American interests in many ways, some of them decidedly not to President Bush's liking.
News From The Edges Of Iraq
[ Posted Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 – 17:09 UTC ]
Is Basra a lot better than when the British were holed up downtown? Or is it a lot worse? Or is it currently experiencing a lull in violence that will prove to be the calm before the storm of factional Shi'ite war? Or are the Iraqi militias actually working out their differences with agreements rather than bullets?
Of course, this is not Jeffersonian democracy at its finest. It's closer to warlordism than we'd care to admit as a nation. The process is going to be messy and unpleasant, no matter how it works out. And the lessons of Basra likely can't be applied to other parts of Iraq (due to different ethnic and sectarian populations).
But, as I said previously, Basra bears watching. Because there is a larger question to be asked here: If U.S. troops pull out, will Iraq become more or less stable when we're not around to shoot at anymore?
The Day After We Bomb Iran
[ Posted Monday, October 1st, 2007 – 17:22 UTC ]
There's a raging debate within the Bush administration, the punditocracy, and the blogosphere about whether or not it is time to bomb Iran. While this conversation scares small children (and other sane people), most of the focus has been on (1) whether President... oh, excuse me... Vice President Cheney truly is moonbat-crazy enough to do so, and (2) whether anyone else in America (including the military) would go along with the idea. But not enough attention is being paid to what happens after we rain death from the skies down on Iran. Which is a shame, because that's what we ignored during the ramp-up to war with Iraq. And we all know how that turned out.