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

Whaddaya Mean Obama Hasn't Done Anything?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Esquire - By John H. Richardson - Nov. 03 (Comment) - A blow-by-blow breakdown of the young president's first year reveals that today's frustration stems not from a lack of policy so much as a lack of common ground. Therein lies the myth of the American center.

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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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As the Commander in Chief Deliberates, Frustration Builds Within the Ranks

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Elisabeth Bumiller - Oct. 20 - Active and retired military officers say there is concern that President Obama is moving too slowly on deciding on troop levels for Afghanistan.

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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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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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One Newspaper, Many Checkbooks

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Clark Hoyt - Jul. 19 (Opinion) - Lindsey Hoshan, a freelance journalist in Palo Alto, Calif., hopes to sell a multimedia slide show and maybe an article to The Times about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of floating plastic trash caught in swirling currents in a stretch of ocean twice the size of Texas. But first, she has to get there. To help finance a $10,000 reporting trip aboard a research vessel, Hoshaw has turned to Spot.Us, a Web site where reporters appeal for donations to pay for their projects. If she can raise $6,000 before the September departure date — so far, only about $1,600 has come in — she will take out a loan for the rest, she said. The Times has told Hoshaw that it might pay about $700 for the pictures, more if it also buys a story.

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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 Can’t Turn the Page on Bush

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Frank Rich - May. 17 (Opinion) - To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions. That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

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End the Watada case, discharge him

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - May. 07 (Editorial) - Let the decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to allow the Obama administration to drop a pending appeal of a mistrial at Fort Lewis be the end of the Army case against 1st Lt. Ehren Watada. He refused to join his combat brigade in Iraq. Give him a general discharge and move on. Put the military's energy into the welfare of others.

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Defense Secretary Robert Gates Announces His Strategic Pentagon Blueprint

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - Apr. 11 (Editorial) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a man not known for having his head in the stars, announced his strategic Pentagon blueprint this week, saying his proposals "will profoundly reform how this department does business." We hope he informed Congress, home to 535 procurers in chief.

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A brave man who stood alone. If only the world had listened to him

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Robert Fisk - Mar. 30 (Opinion) - Tom Hurndall had stayed in Rafah. He was only 21 where – in his mother's words – he lost his life through a single, selfless, human act. "Tom was shot in the head as he carried a single Palestinian child out of the range of an Israeli army sniper." Mrs Hurndall asked me to write a preface to Tom's book and this article is his preface, for a brave man who stood alone and showed more courage than most if us dreamed of. Forget tree huggers. Hurndall was one good man and true.

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With United States on its knees, why are we still at war?

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Bob Herbert - Mar. 03 (Opinion) - We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We have not broken the back of al-Qaida or the Taliban. We have not captured or killed Osama bin Laden. We don't even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest assessment of the situation, taking into account the woefully corrupt and ineffective Afghan government led by the hapless Hamid Karzai, would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and quagmire. Instead of cutting our losses, we appear to be doubling down.

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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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Calling a Time Out

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By George McGovern - Jan. 21 (Opinion) - As you settle into the Oval Office, Mr. President, may I offer a suggestion? Please do not try to put Afghanistan aright with the U.S. military. To send our troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan would be a near-perfect example of going from the frying pan into the fire. There is reason to believe some of our top military commanders privately share this view. And so does a broad and growing swath of your party and your supporters. True, the United States is the world's greatest power -- but so was the British Empire a century ago when it tried to pacify the warlords and tribes of Afghanistan, only to be forced out after excruciating losses. For that matter, the Soviet Union was also a superpower when it poured some 100,000 troops into Afghanistan in 1979. They limped home, broken and defeated, a decade later, having helped pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is logical to conclude that our massive military dominance and supposedly good motives should let us work our will in Afghanistan. But logic does not always prevail in South Asia. With belligerent Afghan warlords sitting atop each mountain glowering at one another, the one factor that could unite them is the invasion of their country by a foreign power, whether British, Russian or American.

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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 emperor gets the boot

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Asia Times - By Pepe Escobar - Dec. 18 (Opinion) - These shoes also metaphorically hit the huge Bush administration army of advisers, analysts, sycophants, politicians, diplomats, generals, UN bureaucrats, businessmen, "human-rights" wags, media hacks and assorted profiteers that made the Iraqi tragedy possible. These shoes put to immense shame US public opinion, which overwhelmingly condoned the 2003 invasion and occupation and only turned against it when facts on the ground and horrific non-stop carnage spelled out that this was an "unwinnable" war.

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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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Why the United States got it wrong

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Hindu - By P. Sainath - Dec. 11 (Opinion) - It is worth learning this: Al-Qaeda was the biggest beneficiary of the “response” of the United States to 9/11 alongside U.S. corporations. America’s “War on Terror” produced far more terrorism in the world than there had been prior to that response.

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Official accountability and the U.S. Supreme Court

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

International Herald Tribune - Dec. 11 (Editorial) - In America, no one is supposed to be above the law. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has spent the last eight years undermining that fundamental ideal.

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I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Matthew Alexander (pseudonym) - Nov. 28 (Opinion) - I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.

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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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