Iraq

Even though the election and economic crisis have pushed the Iraq war off the front—or even the first dozen—pages of newspapers, the December 2008 issue of Vanity Fair features an article by Seth Mnookin in which he reports on life inside The New York Times' Baghdad bureau. The story is not yet online, but it's full of interesting points, including details of "internecine warfare that once wracked the bureau." Update: November 4, 2008: Here it is: The New York Times’s Lonely War.

According to Mr. Mnookin, maintaining a presence in Iraq costs The Times "upwards of $3 million a year.  read more »

In June, The Observer talked to a number of reporters who'd spent time covering the war in Iraq. While some of their anecdotes sketched out what it's like to be in a dangerous reporting environment—the mortar attacks, the sandstorms, the numbing repetitiveness of a seemingly endless conflict—nothing in that article could prepare readers for the unflinching account of the war offered by New York Times' reporter Dexter Filkins in his book, The Forever War, which The Times Magazine excerpted this week.

Here's how Mr. Filkins' describes reporting from Baghdad for The Times: "When I was in Iraq, I might as well have been circling the earth from a space capsule, circling in farthest orbit. Like Laika in Sputnik. A dog in space. Sending signals back to base, unmoored and weightless and no longer marking time."  read more »

Nuri al-Maliki was once dismissed as a powerless politician with a fleeting grip on his office. Now, though, the Iraqi prime minister is apparently strong enough to change the fundamental terms of the war debate in the U.S. presidential election in a way that dramatically improves Barack Obama’s standing on the issue.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Maliki began hinting publicly that he’d favor some kind of timeline for the departure of American troops in Iraq. Then last weekend he went further – much further – telling Der Spiegel that he wanted the Americans out “as soon as possible” and that Obama’s call for a 16-month phased redeployment of U.  read more »

Here's Joe Biden on an Obama campaign conference call earlier arguing that John McCain had no idea what he's talking about when it comes to foreign policy:

"Quite frankly, I've known John for over 32 years. I don't understand anything about John's policy here. John talks about the central concern is the war on terror yet it's in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, we know where they live, where they're building, it's in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And John's policy in Iraq prevents us from having a larger strategy to deal with that."

Asked what he thought of McCain's idea that Iraq could one day have a level of American troop presence like that in Korea, Biden said, "I love John, he has been my friend for 33 years.  read more »

In theory, John McCain’s poll numbers should be improving right along with the news out of Iraq.

Just a year ago, daily news coverage was dominated by pictures and descriptions of carnage and chaos, and McCain seemed doomed: Even if he won the Republican nomination (which itself seemed a remote possibility last summer), his intimate association with the war and the widely criticized troop “surge” would surely render him electoral poison in the 2008 general election.

Today, violence in Iraq has dropped measurably (though it still persists), foreign fighters who previously flocked to the country have turned their sights elsewhere, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, once dismissed as a timid prime minister whose political impotence was symptomatic of broad governmental dysfunction, has consolidated his power, asserted his authority over some extremist groups, and in the last week has actually begun calling for an informal timetable for a U.  read more »

Spain’s skimpy, ubiquitous, mass market clothing chain, Mango, is venturing where no Western retailer has been before--at least since the 2003 war--by opening a branch in Iraq, WWD reported today.

Undaunted by the political instability, sporadic violence, and relatively more modest style of dress that prevails in even the relatively peaceful, liberal Kurdish region of Northern Iraq, Mango’s president of expansion Isak Halfon told Women's Wear Daily that the one million people in the city of Arbil are “starving for something like this.”

Unlike Mango’s Western branches, the Iraqi flagship won’t carry the typical skin-tight, midriff-baring, cleavage-flaunting, provacative attire, but a conservative line designed by Lebanese designer Zuhair Murad, tailored to the Middle East.  read more »

Captain Stefan Barr said the scallops at the Gramercy Tavern could use a little more salt. He’s been back only a few months from his second tour in Iraq. For 10 years, he was one of the few, the proud, or, as he puts it, “the best”—a Marine. Now he lives in Soho.

Yes, there are soldiers walking among us, dining right next to you, tucking into those same $20 scallops. Some of them probably look just like you or me. Mr. Barr does not. He is 6 foot 5. He has a chest like a well-fed pterodactyl, with long, sinewy arms and giant hands that could easily reach across the table and pop my head off like a cork.  read more »

As we noted recently, reporters and correspondents in Baghdad have had an increasingly difficult time in recent months getting their reports on air and their stories on the front pages of newspapers.

But this morning, seasoned war reporter Lara Logan of CBS News popped up on the front page of the New York Post—albeit for a bunch of allegations about her life in Baghdad that have nothing to do with her enterprising reporting on the region.

The allegations against her couldn't have come at a worse time for Ms. Logan. Yesterday, CBS News announced that Ms. Logan, considered a rising star within the network, will be assuming a new role for CBS, serving as "chief foreign affairs correspondent" out of Washington, D.C.

To reach Babak Dehghanpisheh, Newsweek's Baghdad Bureau Chief, you have to dial an twelve-digit number (that's minus a series of zeros that you sometimes need to dial first) which rings him on his satellite phone in the house the magazine shares with two other media organizations inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone.

Mr. Dehghanpisheh, who's been in and out of Iraq since 2003 in rotations that usually last two months at a time, sounds pretty upbeat as he talks about the challenges of reporting a war that in five years has gone through so many different phases. "In '03, '04 movement was pretty much unrestricted, I guess self-restricted," Mr. Dehghanpaisheh says through a slight delay. "You'd jump in a car and go to Fallujah and report a story. You could get away with a pretty bare bones security set up in those early days. Maybe just a guard. But in general, relatively low-key."  read more »

“It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,” said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody lies to you. Your government is lying to you. The Iraqi government is lying. The insurgents are lying. The militias are lying. The U.S. military is lying. Even the civilians lie. Or in the best case, there’s confusion and exaggeration. The truth is the most elusive thing in war, particularly in an insurgency.”

Sixty-two months into the war, this is the language of the American journalist in Iraq. It’s not the only language; there are others: Cyclical, monotonous, brutal, strategic, hopeful. But slowly, as Iraq slips from the front pages and Web pages, today’s news starts to sound like yesterday’s; violence explodes; a spectacular military success, or failure. Casualty lists grow until they become incomprehensible, and then unreadable, unquantifiable. Against that metronomic numbness, 90 American journalists (according to a November 2007 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism) continue to work a dangerous war that becomes a harder and harder story to sell to Americans. As the American press corps gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned about the war in Iraq.  read more »

The Return of History and the End of Dreams

 

By Robert Kagan

Alfred A. Knopf, 115 pages, $19.95

Consider the natural history of the Detroit muscle car: The Mustang began life in 1963 as a stripped-down roadster in the European tradition. As the culture and market matured, Ford responded each year with ad hoc modifications and additions, so that by 1972, the same basic car had become a 3,300-pound, 375-horsepower V-8 behemoth.  read more »

Students and other demonstrators who gathered in the main Quad of Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus yesterday were aware of the significance of the date they chose for their class walkout, a day after the 40th anniversary of the first in a wave of protests that rocked the campus in 1968.

Around noon, a couple of hundred students, professors and assorted other protesters gathered to hear anti-war speeches from several professors and a young Iraq war veteran. All around them, hundreds more students were sunbathing and playing frisbee on this warm April afternoon.  read more »

John McCain is in London to meet with Gordon Brown on Iraq (and hold a fund-raiser).  read more »

According to the Associated Press, two journalists with CBS News are missing in the Iraqi city of Basra.

CBS has put out the following statement:

Two journalists working for CBS News in Basra are missing. All efforts are underway to find them and until we learn more details, CBS News requests that others do not speculate on the identities of those involved. CBS News has been in touch with the families and asks that their privacy be respected.

While John Edwards is staking out a more anti-war stance in these last days before the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton has, if anything, gone back to striking a more cautionary tone on withdrawing troops.

She still says that her goal is “bringing our troops home as quickly and responsibly as I possibly can,” but she is not as emphatic about it as she was, for example, in May, when she delivered the line, “If President Bush doesn't end the war in Iraq before he leaves office, when I'm president, I will.”

In the last couple of weeks, she has been using in speeches some version of what she said today at a church in Indianola, Iowa.  read more »

Rudy Giulani's campaign is hitting back at the former mayor's onetime friend John McCain for his comments earlier today linking Giuliani to freshly indicted former aide Bernard Kerik.

"It's kind of shocking, since there is nothing new out there, that John McCain now changes his tune on Rudy Giuliani just because he is running for president," a Giuliani aide, speaking on background, just told me "That's not straight talk."

The aide was referring to the remarks McCain made this morning at a press conference with Tom Ridge, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, after today's indictment came down.

At the event, McCain cited Kerik's training the Iraqi police force in 2003, when McCain was visiting Iraq.

"Kerik was there at the time," McCain said. "Supposedly his mission was to help train Iraqi police. He stayed a couple of months and then up and left. That should have been a part of anybody's judgment whether to recommend that individual to be the head of the Department of Homeland Security. His contribution to the training of the police and law enforcement people in Iraq, which was ostensibly why he was there, was less than successful."

UPDATE: This is now getting ugly.

McCain Campaign Manager Rick Davis released the following statement.

"Rudy Giuliani's history with Bernie Kerik is a story of poor judgment. After being briefed on Kerik's ties to organized crime, Giuliani named him chief of the New York Police Department. Without any further vetting, Giuliani asked him to join his security consulting firm. Despite obvious ethical problems, Giuliani went so far as to personally recommend Kerik for the top job at the Department of Homeland Security."

"A president's judgment matters and Rudy Giuliani has repeatedly placed personal loyalty over regard for the facts."

And the Giuliani campaign sends over this statement from communications director Katie Levinson in response to McCain seeking to secure a loan to bolster his cash-strapped campaign.

"Let me get this straight - first, campaign finance crusader John McCain oversees a campaign that spiraled completely out of control and went bankrupt and now he wants a questionable $3 million loan? Doesn't quite pass the smell test, does it?

"Americans need someone in the White House who knows how to balance their own checkbook before they try to balance the federal government's. They don't need John McCain, they need Rudy Giuliani - who has actually balanced a budget and made a payroll."

In a separate and subsequent statement by Levinson, the Giuliani campaign communications director adds the following:

"Is this what desperation looks like? Bernie Kerik's issues have been known since 2004 and John McCain still had glowing things to say about Rudy Giuliani and his leadership. What, exactly, changed today? Best as I can tell, it's just John McCain's pure desperation in the face of a failing and flailing campaign trumping his so-called straight talk. It is truly a shame that John McCain has chosen to stoop this low."

And to round out the day, McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker writes in the following statement. 

"The only person who broke the law is Rudy's good friend Bernie Kerik.  And the only person who showed questionable judgment was the man pushed him to be Secretary of DHS, Rudy Giuliani."  

 

More from Hillary Clinton on Iraq and Iran:

She writes in a new essay in Foreign Affairs magazine that she lays out a tough diplomatic approach on Iran and says that she would start bringing troops home from Iraq "within the first 60 days of [her] administration," but that she could also foresee an American presence in and around the country to help maintain stability and keep pressure on al Qaeda.

In a conference call with reporters that just ended, her campaign's national security director, Lee Feinstein, said that while "a commander and chief does not take options off the table and neither does Senator Clinton," she also "makes it very very clear that the best approach, the preferred approach right now, is to pursue...diplomacy and economic pressure."

Feinstein was asked about whether a bill supported by Clinton asking the Bush administration to declare Iran's 125,000-member Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization paved the way to open conflict with Iran.

"No," said Feinstein. "There is nothing whatsoever which gives any authorization of the kind."

He said that the Guards "are indisputably an odious outfit," and that "some people want to rush to war. Some people think that doing nothing is the answer." But the bill, he said, was part of a robust diplomatic effort to put pressure on Iran.  read more »

The tantalizing illusions of war opponents about two Republican Party elders have this week been shattered.  read more »

On Sunday, the idea that Kerry ever considered using McCain as a running-mate seemed laughable.  read more »

Rudy Giuliani's first web ad, attacking Hillary Clinton for shifting her position on the war and refusing to speak out against MoveOn.org for it's 'Petraeus or Betray Us' ad, is up on his campaign web site.

Here's the script for "She Changed."

 

NARRATOR: "In 2002, Hillary Clinton voted to authorize military action in Iraq ... because she believed it was the right thing to do."

CLINTON: "If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."

 

CLINTON: "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al-Qaeda members."

 

CLINTON: "So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation."

 

NARRATOR: "But now that she's running for President, Hillary Clinton has changed her position, even joining with the radical group MoveOn.org in attacking American General Petraeus. Clinton stood silently by when MoveOn.org ran this venomous ad in The New York Times."

 

NARRATOR: "The same General she called an expert not long ago."

NARRATOR: "Now, she is questioning his honesty."

 

HILLARY CLINTON: "The reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief."

 

NARRATOR: "Just when our troops need all our support to finish the job, Hillary Clinton is turning her back on them. General Petraeus and the brave men and women now serving under him deserve an apology. And our nation deserves better. Senator Clinton, do the right thing. Apologize for your comments and condemn the MoveOn.org ad."

 

 

Congressional Democrats will now try to gather enough votes to impose a different plan from Petraeus' on the President. There’s no reason to believe they'll succeed.  read more »

I just got off a media conference call with Barack Obama in which he addressed the subject of his burgeoning foreign policy debate with Hillary Clinton.

Asked whether his personal life experience gives him an advantage over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards when it comes to formulating foreign policy, he said, “At this point it is not just about life experience, though that informs my perspective.” The important thing, he said, is how that perspective informs “how the United States should present its interests and ideals around the world.”

Obama also went back to the original argument which started during this week’s YouTube/CNN debate, in which he was criticized by Hillary Clinton for saying that he would be willing to talk to international dictators.

“I think it is a debate over the same conventional thinking that led people to authorize the vote over Iraq without asking questions,” he said. He compared this with a different line of thinking that “asks questions and is not informed by a lot of received wisdom.”

(Shades of Howard Dean's argument in 2004 about John Kerry's vast Senate experience and Kerry's vote, later lamented, to authorize the war.)

Obama did say that he agreed with Clinton’s position on whether America should commit ground troops to Darfur.  “It is absolutely true that given what is going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is difficult for us to mount the kind of troop strength that would be necessary,” he said. “But more important, it would be disastrous for even our policy in Darfur to send U.S. troops unilaterally into another Muslim country. It’s very important for the sake of our success there that it’s done as part of an international effort.”

New Republic editor Franklin Foer tells The New York Times today that the magazine is investigating articles written under the pen name Scott Thomas and billed as the magazine's "Baghdad Diarist."

Three articles have been attributed to Thomas in the magazine since February, describing gruesome events in Iraq from the point of view of an American soldier.  read more »

The New York Times is reporting that 23-year-old Khalid Hassan, an Iraqi interpreter and reporter who worked for the paper, was killed today in Baghdad:

Mr. Hassan was shot in the Saidiya district of south central Baghdad while driving to work under circumstances that remain unclear, Mr. Burns said. He had called the bureau earlier and said his normal route to the office had been blocked by a security checkpoint.

“I’m trying to find another way,” he told the bureau staff.  read more »

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If Mr. Lieberman were to flip to the Senate G.O.P. now, he’d probably still be surrounded by colleagues intent on ending the war.  read more »

What makes Fariel Rasheed Ali rare within the ranks of Iraq’s beleaguered reconstruction hierarchy is simply the fact that she’s a she.  read more »

Nine Candidates Need to Gin Up Stances on War; Democratic Wonks Lunching With Dick Holbrooke, McCain Aide Recoils at Mitt Message; Rudy Asks Bolton.  read more »

Live: Real Soldiers From Real Wars    read more »

“When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it w  read more »

John McCain's speech today at the Virginia Military Institute left no doubt about his belief that American needs to persist and prevail in Iraq, and that the Democratic candidates' "reckless" withdrawal plans would make for an unacceptable and catastrophic defeat. "Our defeat in Iraq would constitute a defeat in the war against terror and extremism and would make the world a much more dangerous place," said McCain.

But McCain's speech was a slap on the wrist to the Democrats compared with the lashing his chief Iraq advisor, Randy Scheunemann, offered last week.

Describing many of the Democratic candidates' post-combat troop withdrawal strategy -- leaving behind a reduced military presence or horizon force to fight al Qaeda, prevent genocide in Iraq and avoid the conflagration of a wider regional war - Scheunemann said, "It's ludicrous. Because the idea that we will be able to better prevent sectarian violence and fight al Qaeda better from Kuwait than how we are doing it now is laughable."

-- Jason Horowitz

Both Iraqis and Americans alike were stunned by the audacity of Senator John McCain’s heavily  read more »

CIA Warning of 9/11 Attacks    read more »

It’s hard to imagine that the founders of the National Model United Nations program intended t  read more »

Hillary Clinton has gone to significant lengths to cultivate relationships with U.S. military leaders. Hillary said she'd sign on with the Democratic plan to withdraw all combat trrops from Iraq by the end of the summer of 2008, but also said that she would keep some troops there "to deal with al Qaeda."

Barack Obama's still-vague health care plan would theoretically achieve universal coverage faster than Hillary's plan.

Eliot Spitzer is moving away from talking about a government shutdown.

And he softened his stance on what he'll negotiate to get a budget passed.

"The police may have overreached and misused surveillance authority," the Times editorial board wrote.

"No wonder the convention went off without a hitch," wrote the Post editorial board.

A Queens drug dealer said he was shot by Sean Bell.

And the state employee who chauffeured Alan Hevesi's wife is out of a job.

-- Azi Paybarah

Freshman Representative John Hall got a boost during his campaign from his days as a bare-chested rock and roller with the group Orleans. But now, a few months into his first term, a Republican has stepped up to challenge him, criticizing not only his position on Iraq, but his ties to the music industry.

Kieran Michael Lalor, a former marine who served in Iraq, has launched an exploratory committee to run the 19th congressional district in the Hudson Valley, which Hall represents. Among his complaints:

Hall's campaign was supported by the likes of Susan Sarandon, who is so radical she was uninvited to a 2003 event at the baseball Hall of Fame because she was actively undermining the morale of American troops in Iraq. Musician Bonnie Raitt, who in 1999 traveled to Cuba to play for Castro and bash the United States in the Karl Marx Theatre, played a concert to raise money for the Hall Campaign.

-- Azi Paybarah

Josh Rushing, the former Marine and Control Room star turned Al-Jazeera English reporter, spent near  read more »

Every dismal anniversary of the U.S.  read more »

John McCain thinks that if the war in Iraq drags on too long, the public support that remains for any possible military presence could evaporate entirely.

"The American people may get so frustrated, no matter what the other options are, they may say 'get out of it,'" McCain said at a fund-raiser last night at the Hudson Theater in midtown.

The theater was full of men and women in business suits who bought tickets for $1,000 or $2,300 to hear Mr. McCain's views on foreign and domestic issues. From a small stage, he addressed his unpopular position on the war in Iraq ("I read the polls more than you do") and defended himself against accusations of pandering by pointing out his support of stem cell research. "That's not pandering to the right," he said.

After addressing the donors, he met with the press, whose questions centered on Rudy Giuliani's lead in the polls.  read more »

When asked why Giuliani was so far ahead, given the fact that the two candidates had similar positions on the war, McCain said "I don't know the answer to that. If I did it would be a lot closer."

Niall Stanage sends in this dispatch from Dubuque:

Hillary Clinton faced the question that won't go away yet again last night - this time at an otherwise successful campaign event at the University of Dubuque, Iowa.

A male member of the overflowing crowd condemned the former first lady's standard response to attacks on her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. The man charged that the senator's oft-repeated explanation - that had she known then what she knows now, she would have voted differently - seemed like "a way of saying 'I'm not responsible for my vote'."

Hillary countered, "I have said many times that I take responsibility for my vote." But she quickly moved on to criticize the president's tactic of a troop increase in Iraq.

Referring to the Bush plan as an "escalation policy", Clinton asserted that the strategy amounted to nothing more significant than "putting a fist in the water. When it goes in you'll see the ripple effect, then it will close around your fist. When you pull out, you'll see the ripple but it's not going to change much."  read more »

She added, "The Iraqis have to decide they want to stop killing each other."

Americans frustrated with the Democratic Congressional leaders for dithering over Iraq should never  read more »

Near midnight, Pacific time, on March 23, actor Ryan O’Neal pulled Dr.  read more »

What follows is a transcript of an actual interview that took place during John Edwards’ visit  read more »

A Quinnipiac poll of registered voters in New Jersey has Rudy Giuliani leading Hillary Clinton 50 to 41 percent in that state. Giuliani's strength is in stark contrast to President Bush's stunningly low numbers in that state.

So the trick for Giuliani will be to make sure that even as he sells himself to red state voters as a who-knew conservative and a Bush ally, his Democratic-leaning fans in the New York suburbs continue to see him as an independent-minded moderate. Easy, right?

From the poll:

New Jersey voters give Giuliani a 66 - 20 percent favorability rating.

New Jersey voters disapprove 70 - 26 percent of the job President George W. Bush is doing, tying his lowest score ever in the Garden State.

Voters disapprove 75 - 22 percent of the President's handling of the war in Iraq and say 64 - 32 percent that going to war in Iraq was the wrong thing to do.

-- Azi Paybarah

Hillary Digs Her Foxhole    read more »