The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. Public Enemy Number One. It formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, “an astounding change in the nature of warfare.”
Many of the same people who led the push for regime-change in Baghdad now have their sights set on Tehran.
Canada offered to “discreetly” assist the United States as it prepared to invade Iraq even as the ruling Liberal party trumpeted its foreign policy independence from Washington.
As with Iraq beating the drums of war on Iran only requires alleging imminent acquisition of WMD.
“Iraqis have broken the chains. But the world is silent and apparently deaf and blind. Where is the free Western press?”
The exhibition, “Artists in Exile: Forgotten Iraqi Refugees in Syria,” seeks to bridge cultural gaps between the United States and Arab and Middle Eastern countries.
However different the two, Libya could still end up like Iraq today: a nation deeply divided not by sect and language but by geography and tribe.
Foreign occupation is the common thread tying suicide terrorism together the world over. In Dying to Win and again in Cutting the Fuse, Robert Pape argues that the United States must endeavor to draw down its occupation of Middle Eastern countries and return to a policy of offshore balancing to maintain its regional interests.
The Pentagon and the National Rifle Association have a lot in common these days. They’re in love with guns. They maintain powerful lobbies. They refuse to acknowledge the dangerous consequences of their policies.
And they’re both on the defensive.
By April 2004, just a little over a year after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and before the sectarian violence began, the Iraqi Association of University Teachers (AUT) reported that 250 academics had been killed. Award-winning British journalist Robert Fisk had warned early that year of the assassinations of Iraqi academics, but few U.S. newspapers picked up on the story. By the end of 2006, according to The Independent, over 470 academics had been killed. Another British paper, The Guardian, reported that about 500 academics were killed just from the Universities of Baghdad and Basra alone.