Australia’s new prime minister is comfortable with firsts. Kevin Rudd is the only Western leader who is fluent in Mandarin. He has set off on a lengthy world tour just after assuming office, with the first stop in the United States. And he kicked off the tour by quietly honoring an election pledge and opting out of a security alliance in the controversial occupation of Iraq.
When General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker testify before a Senate Committee this week, it’s likely they’ll point to "security improvements" and a "drop in violence" over the last year.
Last month in Iran, supporters of a long-shot parliamentary candidate stuck campaign materials to a handful of chickens and set them loose in the village in what a local official called “a new way to campaign.” Though the chickens were an innovative way to remind voters that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad failed to deliver on his campaign promise to put a chicken in every pot, this candidate and others were forced to find obscure ways to reach voters because they were prohibited from putting their faces on campaign materials. Because of this and other arbitrary election rules, the large margins of victory by conservative hardliners in the March 14 election came as no surprise.
Five years ago the United States attacked and occupied Iraq. It has lost militarily, politically and morally. The end of the war may be in sight. But the consequences will endure, as will the deep-seated impulse among America’s leaders for global intervention without constraint.
Former U.S. Marine Corps machine gunner John Michael Turner leaned over the microphone, his voice choking with emotion, the words barely forcing themselves out, the tears barely held back.
On March 17, New York Senator and Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington University outlining her plans to de-escalate U.S. military involvement in Iraq. Though she called for the gradual withdrawal of U.S. combat brigades over the next several years, she continued to refuse to apologize for her 2002 vote authorizing the invasion, to acknowledge the illegality of the war, or to fully explain her false claims made at that time regarding Iraq’s military capabilities and alleged ties to al-Qaeda. Nor was she able to offer an explanation as to what led to her dramatic shift from a supporter of the ongoing war and occupation as recently as a year and a half ago to her current more critical perspective.
Five years of combat in Iraq started in earnest on March 19, 2003.
Joseph DeLappe began to think of a memorial to Iraqi civilians in early spring 2004, when all 5,200 entries for the World Trade Center memorial were posted online. “To give access to this entire grouping of proposals was really intriguing,” he says. “It was almost a year since the Iraq invasion had started. My first thought was: I bet there will be no process like this to memorialize all the Iraqi civilians in the Iraq War.”
Victories are within sight for people in a growing number of nations where communities that host U.S. foreign military bases have long fought to get rid of them.