31 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Hawra Karama
I had the opportunity to participate in the long-awaited Iraqi elections this weekend. Contrary to popular belief, this was not the first time my opinion has mattered to the Iraqi state. It was actually the third. Saddam Hussein had asked us Iraqis in both 1995 and 2002 if we wanted him to be our leader. [...]
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31 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Gordon Prather
Hours before his "ratification" inaugural, Vice President Dick Cheney was chatting with Don Imus on MSNBC about Iraqi and Iranian "nuclear programs." Now, Cheney appears to know the difference between a "nuclear program" and a "nuclear weapons program." Bush may not. In any case, both Cheney and Bush want you to hear "nuclear weapons" when [...]
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31 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Aaron Glantz
ARBIL – It is 8:30 in the morning, and the roads of Arbil appear for a moment to be eerily silent. Most cars have been banned from the streets of this Kurdish city of 800,000. Roadblocks are up all over town. But the city is hardly abandoned. The local peshmerga guerillas are out in [...]
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31 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Tom Engelhardt
Okay, under the rubric of “the war on terror” (which turns out to be just so versatile, so useful for so many much-desired but once back-burner policies, programs, and products), the military is having a grand old time protecting us from the Enemy up close and personal, right in our own, previously unlawful-to-occupy backyards. But, [...]
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31 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Justin Raimondo
The man most responsible for Iraq’s election didn’t vote because he wasn’t eligible. No, not George W. Bush – I mean the Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al-Sistani, the man who single-handedly faced down the Americans, demanded direct elections rather than the “caucus” system the occupation authorities wanted to impose, and called his people out [...]
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30 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Aaron Glantz
ARBIL, Northern Iraq, (IPS) – Many Kurds in Northern Iraq are facing new threats – and they do not come from masked Arab terrorists. They come from the two main Kurdish parties doing all they can to gain strength in the election Sunday, independent local journalists and opposition politicians say. Kurds are voting for [...]
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29 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Gordon Prather
Pulitizer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh first revealed – and neocrazy sycophants at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and UPI reluctantly confirmed – that the Bush-Cheney Administration has been conducting secret "reconnaissance" missions inside Iran since at least last summer. "Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information [...]
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29 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Tom Engelhardt
Since ancient Rome, imperial republics have invariably felt a tension between cherished republican practices at home and distinctly unrepublican ones abroad; or put another way, if imperial practices spread far enough beyond the republic’s borders and gain enough traction out there in the imperium, sooner or later they also make the reverse journey home, [...]
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29 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Ferry Biedermann
DOHUK, Kurdistan – As Iraq’s first national election since the fall of Saddam Hussein draws near, the country seems more on the brink of falling apart than of coming together in a celebration of democracy. Attacks against Shi’ite targets have increased in an effort to keep them away from the polling booths, security sources [...]
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29 January 2005 | Uncategorized | Dahr Jamail
Despite a continuing increase in the already draconian security measures imposed across Iraq, the bombs keep coming. Today in the al-Dora district of Baghdad a primary school which had been a designated polling station was struck by a car bomb. Four Iraqi Police (IP) were killed. A GMC packed with explosives rammed a checkpoint [...]
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