As expected, the testimony of both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker today was predictable. First, Petraeus recommended that planned US troop withdrawals in July be postponed to ensure that ‘gains’ made are not jeopardized. He also claimed that security in Iraq is currently better than it was when he last testified before Congress in September of 2007. Unfortunately, when one looks at the numbers, that simply isn’t the case. Attacks against US forces and Iraqi security forces this month are higher than they were ...More »

Removed from a situation, so much so that it has become an informational inconvenience, not to mention social taboo with regards to conversation, how do societies at war deal with the realities of war given the distance from which they are viewed? With regards to fighting abroad, this reality provides those promoting conflicts abroad with the ability to use disingenuous justifications and rhetoric to not merely defend their purpose, but to casually address the failures produced by them. Besides those fighting in Iraq, what experience does ...More »

It’s weird to think that I woke up in my own bed this morning but will be performing tonight in another city in another country. It’s only a 30-minute flight away, mind you, but it’s still strange. I took Nyquil at around 8:30 last night and went to bed. This meandering head cold is really, really pissing me off. So tonight will be a rather interesting experiment in under rehearsed hilarity, but I’m sure that it’ll all be fine in the end. The death toll ...More »

It has snowed for the first time in living memory in Baghdad. It didn’t stick, but it didn’t need to. For a city that has been beset by violence for so long, even something as simple as snowfall can have a profoundly positive affect. Residents of the city wandered out into the streets to watch it. Were everything like the wonder of snowfall in the desert, what a paradise we might make of this world. More »

Sometimes there are things that you grow accustomed to when wandering the world of information each day, such as Gareth Porter’s recent piece White House Fought NIE Over an Old Charge. There is Darfur, the humanitarian crisis in Somalia, the never ending rivers of blood flowing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and everything besides that conjoin to make the unbelievable less shocking on a daily basis. But every once in a while I come across a story that leaves me utterly speechless. This week, it is ...More »

The Insititute For War And Peace Reporting brings to light the reality of the child mortality rate in Iraq… “According to a report released in May 2007 by aid agency Save the Children, “Iraq’s child mortality rate has increased by a staggering 150 per cent since 1990, more than any other country.” The report, entitled State of the World’s Mothers 2007, said that some 122,000 Iraqi children - the equivalent of one in eight - died in 2005, before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of ...More »

Home. Finally. Unpacked, doing laundry, walked the dogs, clean bed linens. Put Leopard on my iMac, went and got some milk, packed the fridge full of left over beer, water, and Coke from the tour. A few things of interest. According to the FBI investigation into the Nisour Square massacre… “Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 episode in which Blackwater security personnel shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians have found that at least 14 of the shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect ...More »

“I know something about Blackwater USA. This opinion is both intellectually driven as well as moderately emotional. You see, during my own yearlong tour in Iraq, the bad boys of Blackwater twice came closer to killing me than did any of the insurgents or Al Qaeda types. That sort of thing sticks with you.” - Robert Bateman, October 12, 2007, Chicago Tribune. I wrote, some weeks ago, that nothing would come of the criminal behaviour that Blackwater has been guilty of in Iraq. I stand by ...More »

More Blackwater developments. According to an unnamed senior US military official… “Blackwater security guards involved in a Baghdad shootout last month that left up to 17 Iraqi civilians dead were "obviously wrong," a senior US military official was reported as saying. The unnamed official told the Washington Post newspaper that the US military reports from the scene of the September 16 incident suggested the US private security firm was to blame for the deaths, and that its employees in Iraq were trigger-happy. "It was obviously excessive, it was ...More »

While today’s New York Times is reporting that US helicopters opened fire on a group of civilians in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Abu Dshir, killing an estimated eight people, the accounts of which are, as usual, contradictory with regards to US military and local versions of events – the Times Online has run a story regarding the September 16th incident involving Blackwater Security. It seems that one of Blackwater’s guards actually yelled for restraint during the incident and reportedly trained his own weapon on his ...More »