NewsTrust - Iraq - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Who Created Major Hasan?

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Robert Wright - Nov. 21 (Opinion) - seeing the fort hood shooting as an act of islamist terrorism is the first step toward seeing how misguided a hawkish approach to fighting terrorism has been.

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Iraq on the Edge

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Joost R. Hiltermann - Oct. 29 (Opinion) - For the occasional visitor such as myself, various methods exist to measure America's standing in Iraq, Iraqi suspicions and aspirations, and progress in the transfer of power, but none prove as illuminating as the checkpoints into and throughout Baghdad's Green Zone, that diminishing symbol of the Bush administration's ambitions.

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Obama’s Dick Cheney Moment

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Benjamin Wittes - Sep. 28 (Opinion) - His decision not to consult Congress on detentions represents a virtually wholesale adoption of Bush’s failed policies.

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Why They’re Mad

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Howard Kurtz - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Maybe journalists have been asking the wrong question. In probing why a chunk of the country seems so ticked off at Barack Obama, we've explored possible motivations ranging from racism to programmatic concern about the public option. We have examined whether Obama is trying to do too much and whether he's on TV too much. But perhaps the sense of anger and unease is more deep-rooted than that, and not limited to Glenn Beck conservatives.

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Fear was no excuse to condone torture

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Charles C. Krulak, Joseph P. Hoar - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.

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Why We Believe Lies, Even When We Learn the Truth

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Sharon Begley - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - The same skewed thinking that supports a Saddam-9/11 link explains the power of health-care myths.

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Will we really be out of Iraq by the end of 2011?

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - Aug. 01 (Opinion) - Even as the official focus shifts to the war in Afghanistan, a debate has erupted over the endgame in Iraq. It is universally seen as an endgame; we are getting out. The issue is how quickly, how completely, and, if some troops are left behind, what they should and should not do.

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The Other End of the Abu Ghraib Camera

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By William Quinn - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - DESPITE demands by human rights advocates that photos documenting abuse of military detainees be made public, the Senate last month passed legislation to block their release. The legislation is now before the House. President Obama supports these efforts. This is all good news. Classifying the photos would help protect those detainees’ basic rights to dignity and privacy.

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What will happen when U.S. combat troops withdraw from Iraq?

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - So, is all hell about to break loose in Iraq? By June 30, all U.S. combat troops are scheduled—in fact, they're required—to be withdrawn from all of Iraq's cities, towns, and villages.

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Obama's Unmacho Diplomacy

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Kathleen Parker - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - ...evaluating Barack Obama's first European tour as president, analysts have focused on whether he was quite manly enough. On their leadership blog, former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and columnist Steve Pearlstein asked whether Obama should have "grabbed an opportunity ... to demonstrate his toughness, showing his saber as well as his smile." Verily, spoken like men. What they're really asking is: Did Obama do justice to the fire hydrant?

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Obama's Plan for Iraq

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - Feb. 27 (Opinion) - The Post asked foreign policy experts for their impressions of President Obama's speech at Camp Lejeune on Friday. Below are contributions from Randy Scheunemann, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Meghan O'Sullivan, Jessica Mathews, Qubad J. Talabani, Andrew J. Bacevich, Douglas J. Feith, and Danielle Pletka.

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The war in Iraq isn't over. The main events may not even have happened yet.

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Thomas E. Ricks - Feb. 15 (Opinion) - In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East. To the south, the Arch of Titus, completed in 81 A.D., honors victories in Egypt and Jerusalem. To the north, the Arch of Septimius Severus, built 122 years later, celebrates triumphant campaigns in Mesopotamia. The structures brought home a sad realization: It's simply unrealistic to believe that the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the Middle East.

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Iraq, oil and the Bush administration

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By Jack Miles - Jan. 04 (Opinion) - "I am saddened," former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir, "that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Greenspan was certainly right that in the Bush administration, oil has been a love that dared not speak its name. One searches long and hard in the president's many Iraq speeches to find a single occurrence of the vulgar word "oil." With a Victorian delicacy, the administration has preferred, when it could not avoid the gross topic altogether, to employ polite circumlocutions such as "mineral resources" or lofty obfuscations such as "patrimony." So it happened that the White House (and most of the press corps) passed over in public silence a key paragraph in the recently concluded U.S.-Iraqi agreement on the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Article 26, section 3 of that agreement reads as follows: "Consistent with a letter from the President of the United States to be sent to the Prime Minister of Iraq, the United States remains committed to assist Iraq in connection with its request that the U.N. Security Council extend the protections and other arrangements established in Resolution 1483 (2003) and Resolution 1546 (2003) for petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas originating in Iraq, proceeds and obligations from the sale thereof, and the Development Fund for Iraq."

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The End of the War in Iraq: Just "Good Enough"

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Larry Kaplow - Jan. 04 (Opinion) - An Iraqi police SUV stays parked across the entrance to the market in Mahmudiyah, about 10 miles south of Baghdad on the highway to Najaf. The market road through town has been closed to traffic for years, but drivers seem OK with the long, bumpy detour. Better to endure the inconvenience than to risk more car bombings or another attack like the explosives-and-gunfire rampage that killed roughly 70 people in one half-hour in July 2006. By late 2007, attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in the area had slowed but still occurred about 15 times a week. Just last March, the town endured nearly a week of urban warfare in which roughly 2,000 Iraqi troops and 300 Americans battled a few hundred Shiite militiamen and their neighbors, who joined the shootout. Things are quieter now—although no one wants to take chances in the area that's been known since 2004 as the Triangle of Death.

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A Chance for Consensus on Iraq

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - After our visit to Iraq this month, it is clear that what was once unthinkable there is now taking place: A stable, safe and free Iraq is emerging. Violence has fallen to the lowest level since the first months of the war. The Sunni Arabs who once formed the core of the insurgency are today among our most steadfast allies in the fight against al-Qaeda. A status-of-forces agreement between Iraq and America will take effect next month, providing for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a commensurate increase in Iraqi self-defense. And Iraqi politics is increasingly taking on the messy but exhilarating quality of a functioning democracy. While uncertainty and risk remain high, and the gains made are not irreversible, the situation in Iraq has improved dramatically since the dark days before the surge.

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The Sole of a Nation

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Dan Froomkin - Dec. 15 (Opinion) - Reality made a dramatic cameo appearance when President Bush’s legacy tour touched down in Baghdad.

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Turning reality, truth inside out

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Miami Herald - Dec. 09 (Editorial) - In a speech last week, Mr. Bush said the Middle East is a freer, more hopeful place today than when he took office in 2001. He said the threat from terrorist groups like al Qaeda has been curtailed and that Iran faces greater pressure from the international community than ever before. Mr. Bush described his Mideast policies as ``ambitious in vision, bold in action and firm in purpose.''... Mr. Bush's vision may have been ambitious and his plan bold, but history will record that he utterly failed to meet those objectives. His administration emboldened America's enemies, put Israel's security at greater risk, mired the U.S. military in an endless occupation and diminished America's prestige around the globe. No pixie dust can change that reality.

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The errors of Iraq are being repeated - and magnified

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Simon Jenkins - Nov. 19 (Opinion) - The error of Afghanistan is far more serious than the error of Iraq. If the resulting insurgency is now exported to Pakistan, both errors will seem peccadillos. Pakistan is the sixth largest state in the world, and nuclear-armed.

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Obama On Economic Crisis, Transition, Also Discusses National Security, Iraq, And His Cabinet

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

60 Minutes - By Steve Kroft - Nov. 17 (Interview) - Since Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States 12 days ago, he has largely remained out of sight, getting high-level government briefings and conferring with his transition team. But he surfaced on Friday afternoon in Chicago, alongside his wife Michelle to give 60 Minutes his first post-election interview.

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McCain Is Wrong On Afghanistan

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Forbes - By Barnett R. Rubin - Oct. 02 (Opinion) - Though McCain has no plausible plan to increase troops in Afghanistan, he agrees that more should be sent. And what should they do there? According to McCain, duplicate the "same strategy" that "succeeded" in Iraq.

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Is the Iraq War Winding Down?

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Mark Thompson - Aug. 23 (Opinion) - The Iraq war seems to be ending in what the Bush Administration will argue is victory. Granted, it's not the kind of fledging democracy that will spread like wildfire to neighboring nations in the Middle East. And Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's recent move against elements of the Sunni Awakening Councils, which have been instrumental in helping American forces secure order, could reignite violence. But it is amazing how much things have changed.

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Why do we have such a hard time hearing good news from Baghdad?

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Christopher Hitchens - Aug. 11 (Opinion) - It is in no spirit of revenge that I remind you that, as little as a year ago, the whole of smart liberal opinion believed that the dissolution of Baathism and militarism had been a mistake, that Iraq itself was a bottomless pit of wasted dollars and pointless casualties, and that the only option was to withdraw as fast as possible and let the inevitable civil war burn itself out. To the left of that liberal consensus, people of the caliber and quality of Michael Moore were describing the nihilist "insurgents" as the moral equivalent of the Minutemen, and to the right of the same consensus, people like Pat Buchanan were hinting that we had been cheated into the whole enterprise by a certain minority whose collective name began with the letter J.

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Iraq, Bush and the 'time horizon'

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

International Herald Tribune - By Selig S. Harrison - Jul. 28 (Opinion) - Iran is never mentioned when President George W. Bush explains what led to his surprising acceptance of a "time horizon" for the withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq. But I found clear evidence on a recent visit to Tehran that Iranian diplomacy was a key factor behind his reversal.

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Getting to Know You

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Bob Herbert - Jul. 26 (Opinion) - The conventional wisdom in this radically unconventional presidential race is that the voters have to get to know Barack Obama better. That's what this week's overseas trip was about: to showcase the senator as a potential commander in chief and leader of U.S. foreign policy. Skip to next paragraph Go to Columnist Page » According to this way of thinking, as voters see more of Mr. Obama and become more comfortable with him (assuming no major foul-ups along the way), his chances of getting elected will be enhanced. Maybe so. But what about the other guy? How much do voters really know about John McCain?

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Commentary: Back to the future in the war on terror

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

McClatchy - By Joseph L. Galloway - Jul. 24 (Opinion) - The events of this week served to underline the fact that the war on terrorism was always really about Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that President George W. Bush's splendid little adventure in Iraq was always a sideshow, even though it siphoned off the biggest chunk of manpower and resources. The president and his would-be Republican successor, Sen. John McCain, had barely completed even one Iraq victory lap singing hosannas to the surge when they were obliged to begin thinking and talking about how they're going to shore up a failing policy in Afghanistan.

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