Iraq

Finally, President George W. Bush has stumbled across a winning political-military strategy for containing Iran. Of course, it’s too bad that Saddam Hussein, a leading proponent of that strategy, is no longer around to help carry it out.

But Hussein’s anti-Iranian spirit lives on, embodied in the Bush administration’s new approach: selling advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia and other Arab regimes that fear and loathe Iran.

Unfortunately, the United States came to this position the hard way, after having made just about… more

Inside the mind of former Secretary of State James A. Baker III:

They are finally starting to listen to me on Iraq. My, what a difference eight months makes. Back in December, when Lee Hamilton and I -- plus eight other sturdy pillars of the establishment -- issued our Iraq report, we thought we were doing the Bush administration a favor.

That is, we were offering the White House -- which had just gotten its butt kicked in the midterm elections precisely… more

The United Nations estimates there are now more than four million Iraqis who are either internally displaced or have fled the violence in their homeland to become refugees, mostly in neighboring states. Middle East analysts say the crisis is continuing to grow and is straining services in Syria and Jordan, where most of the refugees now live. VOA correspondent Meredith Buel has details in this background report from Washington.

The United Nations says the magnitude of the crisis is staggering.… more

WASHINGTON, July 6 (UPI) -- The displacement of Iraqi refugees -- close to 4 million -- represents the most serious crisis involving population movements in the Middle East since the exodus of Palestinians in 1948, when fleeing the creation of the state of Israel, hundreds of thousands established themselves in decrepit refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as in Gaza and in the West Bank.Yet despite their numbers, the Iraqis remain "an invisible refugee crisis,"… more

Iraq’s Kurdish north has offered a heartening contrast to an otherwise blood-soaked country. Its polity works; its economy thrives. But the reports last week of a Turkish military incursion, in pursuit of Kurdish rebels, is an eruption of only one of three steadily deepening problems that could combine to worsen the Bush administration’s predicament in Iraq.

The first is the dispute over Kirkuk, capital of At-Tamim province. The city and its environs contain some 10 billion of Iraq’s 112 billion barrels… more

To: The New President From: The National Security Adviser Date: January 21, 2009

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" and triumphantly proclaimed the beginning of a new era in America’s relations with the Middle East. As Bush and his advisers worked to define this new era, they rejected the regional strategy launched by another American president on the deck of another… more

Evening in Erbil, Kurdistan, what passes for an oasis of peace in Iraq. It’s March 2006, and I’m waiting for a ride down to Baghdad along one of the world’s most dangerous roads, a six-hour drive through the Sunni Triangle. A few years ago, I would have taken a taxi, but now the insurgents run roadblocks looking for targets -- soldiers, contractors, journalists. I can’t rely on the Iraqi police, who are as likely to turn me over to insurgents… more

TONY JONES: The American military has displayed pictures of 42 prisoners it rescued from a desert hide-out in Iraq, believed to be an Al Qaeda base. Some of the prisoners have reported they'd been kidnapped and held at the camp for up to four months. Tom Iggulden reports.TOM IGGULDEN: This modest hide-out held 42 prisoners until American troops raided it today, after a tip-off from locals...TOM IGGULDEN: Further south, in Baghdad, there was more violence in… more

I arrived in Iraq before L. Paul Bremer arrived in May 2003 and stayed on long after his ignominious and furtive departure in June 2004 -- long enough to see the tragic consequences of his policies in Iraq. So I was disappointed by the indignant lack of repentance on full display in his Outlook article on Sunday.

In it, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority argues that he "was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly… more

While the public gaze is fixated on the reasons for and success of the Iraq war, few policy analysts, commentators, and journalists are paying attention to the largest refugee problem in the Middle East since 1948. New America Foundation Fellow Nir Rosen -- internationally recognized for his groundbreaking journalism on Iraq since the beginning of the war in April of 2003 -- presented his piece, titled "The Flight from Iraq," which was the cover story in the May… more