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Javier E

'The Sleepwalkers' and 'July 1914' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers
  • Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”
  • By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”
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  • Clark declines to join McMeekin in what he calls “the blame game,” because there were so many participants. He argues that trying to fix guilt on one leader or nation assumes that there must be a guilty party and this, he maintains, distorts the history into a prosecutorial narrative that misses the essentially multilateral nature of the exchanges, while underplaying the ethnic and nationalistic ferment of a region. “The outbreak of war in 1914,” he writes, “is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol.” Not having a villain to boo is emotionally less satisfying, but Clark makes a cogent case for the war as a tragedy, not a crime: in his telling there is a smoking pistol in the hands of every major character.
  • Clark makes a fascinating point I’ve not seen before: not simply were all the political players in the drama male, but they were men caught in a “crisis of masculinity.” He cites historians of gender who argue that at this particular time “competition from subordinate and marginalized masculinities — proletarian and nonwhite for example” accentuated assertiveness. You’d expect the military men to exude testosterone, and they do, but Clark is struck by how ubiquitous in memoir and memorandums are pointedly masculine modes of comportment, and how closely they are interwoven with their understanding of policy. “Uprightness,” “backs very stiff,” “firmness of will,” “self-castration” are typical modes of expression.
  • The brilliance of Clark’s far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue. The participants were conditioned to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment, sure of their own moral compass, but unknowingly impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures, patriotism and paranoia, sediments of history and folk memory, ambition and intrigue. They were, in Clark’s term, “sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”
alexdeltufo

The war against the Islamic State hits hurdles just as the U.S. military gears up - The... - 0 views

  • hen President Obama first ordered U.S. warplanes into action against the extremists sweeping through Iraq and Syria in 2014, U.S. officials put a three- to five-year timeline on a battle they predicted would be hard. After a rocky start, officials say they are gratified by the progress made, especially over the past six months.
  • “So far in terms of what we had hoped to do, we are pretty much on track,” said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive subjects. “We’re actually a little bit ahead of where we wanted to be.”
  • The Islamic State will have occupied those cities for well over two years before the offensives begin, far longer than any of those it has lost so far. The battle for Mosul, long a Pentagon priority, has already been delayed by at least a year
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  • The extra resources are an acknowledgment, U.S. officials say, that the war can’t be won without a greater level of American involvement.
  • U.S. officials say they have seen no fallout yet from the fracas in Baghdad, but don’t rule out that there could be one if the political instability continues.
  • We have to pause, reset a bit and do some things.”
  • intense Islamic State fire from the small but strategically important village of Al-Nasr, about 40 miles to the south. It was a reminder, said Col. Steve Warren, a U.S. military spokesman, that “we’ve got a foot on his neck but he’s still got some fight in him."
  • One major effort for which the United States needs Turkish engagement is a faltering offensive against the Islamic State in the northern Syrian countryside of Aleppo province, bordering Turkey.
  • Cutting the Islamic State’s vital supply route to Turkey is considered an essential prerequisite for any eventual offensive to retake Raqqa.
  • The recent resumption of fighting around the nearby city of Aleppo has come as a fresh reminder that the war in Syria will continue to draw resources away from the Islamic State fight. Peace talks in Geneva aimed at ending the conflict have deadlocked, eroding hopes that a political solution is in sight.
  • It was repelled, however, only with the help of intense U.S. airstrikes, underscoring the vital role the United States plays in securing recaptured territory.
  • But were you to remove that air power and the capabilities the Americans bring, I could imagine them making gains again on the ground.”
Cecilia Ergueta

'The Art of the Qur'an,' a Rare Peek at Islam's Holy Text - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Quran, like all foundational religious texts, is a tangle of ambiguities and mysteries, to which endless annotations can be, and are being, written.
  • So wide was the fame of the 11th-century Baghdad artist Ibn al-Bawwab (“son of the doorman”) that his signature was routinely forged
  • When a Mongol army laid waste to the city in 1258, his life was spared so that he could work for the new rulers,
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  • Spilling out of books onto wall tiles, ceramic vessels, glass lamps, textiles, mosque domes and building facades, it was both a sensual and ideological unifier, totalizingly utopian
  • Symbols were introduced to orchestrate the all-important recitation of its contents: indicators of where to pause, where to place emphasis, how to pronounce words.
  • Material preciousness became an end in itself, turning Qurans into prestige objects and political currency, valued as diplomatic gifts, as war booty and as pious, grace-earning donations to mosques and mausoleums.
  • I watched them as they looked intently at the manuscripts arrayed around us, and I knew they were seeing things I couldn’t see, and feeling things I couldn’t feel, because they could read the words.
  • I was aware — and this is an easy perception — of the larger barriers of unknowing that stand between art and understanding, and of the barriers that stand between cultures
lindsayweber1

Iraqi special forces sweep Mosul University for remaining militants: spokesman | Reuters - 0 views

  • BAGHDAD Iraqi special forces swept through the campus of Mosul University on Sunday to clear it of any remaining Islamic State militants after taking full control of the area, a spokesman said.
  • "The university is completely liberated and forces are sweeping the complex for any hiding militants," CTS spokesman Sabah al-Numan told Reuters by phone on Sunday. "Most buildings are booby-trapped so we're being cautious."
  • Loss of Mosul could spell the end of the Iraqi side of IS's self-styled caliphate, which it declared from the city after sweeping through vast areas of Iraq and Syria.
Javier E

Angela Merkel and the history book that helped inform her worldview | World news | The ... - 0 views

  • many sections of the work – on globalisation, migration and technology, to name a few pertinent topics – read differently in the light of decisions she has made since reading it, such as the treatment of Greece at the height of the eurozone crisis
  • If Europe was able to pull ahead of China economically in the 19th century, Osterhammel argues, it was because the Chinese empire was hampered by a “chaotic dual system” of silver and copper coins, while much of Europe had created a “de facto single currency” with the Latin monetary union of 1866.
  • Osterhammel says he can see “she is very serious about the way world order (or disorder) has been evolving in the long run. She seems to understand, for instance, that migration and mobility have a historical dimension.”
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  • Osterhammel, a professor at Konstanz University, who wrote his dissertation on the British empire’s economic ties with China, instead recasts the century as one marked by globalisation, with 1860-1914 in particular “a period of unprecedented creation of networks” that were later torn apart by two world wars.
  • Although his magnum opus is in effect a history of early globalisation, Osterhammel is cautious about using the word. “I rather prefer to talk of globalisations in the plural, meaning that different spheres of life undergo processes of extension at varying speeds, and with specific reach and intensity,”
  • “If we cling to the concept of ‘globalisation’, we should not see it as a continuous and uninterrupted march toward an imaginary ‘global modernity’. It is a bundle of contradictory developments.
  • “While the economy or information may have been globalised, it has not led to a corresponding generalisation of a cosmopolitan morality, if we disregard the tiny layer of an educated and mobile elite.
  • “Globalisation is not a smooth and benign master process such as ‘modernisation’ used to be construed 50 years ago. It is always uneven, discontinuous, reversible, contradictory, producing winners and losers, no force of nature but manmade.”
  • The Transformation of the World shows how free movement between states and continents grew continuously in the first two-thirds of the 19th century, and passports, border controls and trade tariffs were only invented as Europe approached 1900.
  • Osterhammel, who spent four years at the German Historical Institute in London, finds many positive words for Britain’s part in developing global networks in the 1800s in general. While he says he would never go as far as saying the British empire was a good thing, “it is impossible to imagine history minus empires and imperialism”.
  • “The British empire was a major engine of global change in modern history. When you condemn all empires with equal vehemence, you miss at least two important points. First, the British empire was a bit less murderous than the empires of Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s
  • And secondly, it transferred the idea and practice of constitutional government, and the rule of law, to quite a few parts of world. A brief look at present-day Hong Kong will quickly elucidate this point,” he says.
  • One of the book’s recurring themes is that differentiating between occident and orient is often of little use when trying to understand the 19th century, and, as an invention of the 20th century, the distinction is increasingly irrelevant again. “Both the nouveau riche vulgarity of oil-exploiting societies and the atrocities at Aleppo, Baghdad and Kabul put an end to any romantic ‘east’,”
  • “And the ‘west’ as a transatlantic cultural formation is disintegrating before our eyes. It is being reduced to [Vladimir] Putin’s and [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s bogeyman.”
  • Osterhammel warns that there are “very few lessons” she would be able to find in previous eras. “Many major innovations of the 19th century took decades to mature; today, change can be incredibly rapid, not just in IT but also in biotechnology,” he says.
  • Political diatribes against experts and academics like him, he suggests, may be born not so much of genuine disdain but the realisation that politicians are more reliant on them than ever. “Politicians find it difficult to grasp the implications of these changes. They have to rely on experts who, in turn, they deeply distrust
johnsonma23

Falluja offensive: Iraqi troops retake key town of Karma from ISIS - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Iraqi troops retake key town from ISIS in Falluja offensive
  • Iraqi security forces and supporting militias have retaken the key town of Karma from ISIS, the government's first significant victory
  • The recapture of Karma, about 16 kilometers (10 miles) northeast of Falluja, brings most of the territory east of Falluja under government control.
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  • Iraqi government troops, backed by Shiite militias known as the Popular Mobilization Units and an air campaign by the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition, launched an offensive Monday to retake Falluja, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) west of Baghdad.
  • The United Nations said it fears an estimated 50,000 civilians trapped in Falluja ahead of the government advance are at extreme risk.
  • But activists said ISIS is preventing residents from leaving, and U.N. officials have said some have died trying to escape.
  • About 800 people had been able to flee to safety since Sunday, with most hailing from outlying areas, the U.N. statement said.
  • Those who made it out described dire humanitarian conditions in Falluja, which has had supply routes cut off since government forces retook nearby Ramadi in December.
Megan Flanagan

Militias in Libya Advance on ISIS Stronghold of Surt With Separate Agendas - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • dvancing along the Mediterranean coast toward the Islamic State stronghold of Surt, signaling the first major assault on territory that
  • the terrorist group’s largest base outside of Iraq and Syria.
  • reduced the length of Libyan coastline controlled by the Islamic State to 100 miles from about 150 miles
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  • advance did signal a new setback for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, at a time when it is already under concerted attack in Falluja, Iraq, and in parts of Syria.
  • risks destabilizing the fragile peace effort by fostering violent competition between rival groups
  • slamic State fighters have presided over a brutal rule in the city, with public executions and floggings, as well as shortages of food and medicines
  • a potential plan for extensive airstrikes against the militant group’s camps,
  • faltered badly as the unity government, which arrived in the capital, Tripoli, in March, has failed to gain broad political acceptance.
  • a significant prize because its loss to the Islamic State last June was seen as a significant step in the group’s domination of the Surt region.
  • seized the coastal town of Bin Jawad and claimed on Tuesday to have moved on nearby Nawfaliyah.
  • principally involved in intelligence gathering and reconnaissance.
  • such efforts are being frustrated by the tribal and personal rivalries that have fueled chaos in Libya since the fall of Colonel Qaddafi in 2011
  • “These forces lack crucial capabilities,”
  • The coastal city is thought to be home to a majority of the Islamic State fighters in Libya, estimated to number between 3,000 and 6,500.
  • the eastern branch of the country’s central bank this week announced that it had printed 4 billion Libyan dinars through a company in Russia, drawing a furious reaction from the main central bank in Tripoli.
abbykleman

Iraqi forces push up to Mosul's key military base by airport - 0 views

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    BAGHDAD - Iraq's special forces say they have begun an assault against the Islamic State group on a sprawling military base south of Mosul that's adjacent to the city's airport. Two Iraqi special forces officers say their troops have reached the edge of the Ghazlani base on the city's southern rim on Thursday morning and that clashes there are underway.
marleymorton

Iraqi security forces approaching main government complex in western Mosul - officer - 0 views

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    World News | Tue Feb 28, 2017 | 3:26am EST BAGHDAD Iraqi security forces are getting close to the main government complex in western Mosul in their offensive to dislodge Islamic State militants from their last stronghold in the city, a military media officer said on Tuesday.
marleymorton

Waiting for New Lives: 2 Refugees' Long Journeys to the U.S. - 0 views

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    Registering With the United Nations as Refugees Faiz Khalil Mr. Khalil was in a daze when he arrived in Amman, Jordan, from Baghdad in July of 2006. He had been anxious, depressed and unable to think clearly ever since his daughter Maha left for school one day and did not return.
B Mannke

Clashes Between Militants and Army Spread in Iraq - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A confrontation between Iraqi insurgents and government forces in the western city of Falluja edged closer to the capital on Sunday, after clashes between militants and the army left at least 14 people dead in the Abu Ghraib district in Baghdad Province, according to security officials.
  • killing at least 14 civilians.
  • Instead of using the military, Mr. Maliki appeared to be leaning on Sunni tribal leaders to expel the militants themselves, and has been providing them with weapons and money for that purpose.
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  • We will be in this for the long haul,” Mr. Zebari said. “Probably as long as Syria is going on.”
  • The Obama administration “feels that if this is not contained, it’s moving toward an all-out sectarian confrontation,” he said.
  • Several of the refugees in Karbala said Sunday that they had little hope of returning home soon, and no clear notion of the identities of the gunmen fighting in their city — said to be a mix of tribesmen, Qaeda militants and others.
  • at least four soldiers and 10 civilians were killed, according to security and hospital officials.
  • In a statement, Fadhel al-Barwari, a commander in the Special Operations Forces, pledged to “kill a thousand Al Qaeda members” for each of the soldiers.
Javier E

Rumsfeld's War and Its Consequences Now by Mark Danner | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • if the attacks on New York and Washington had been bold and shocking and outlandish, the goals behind them had been the classic objects of insurgents for millennia: to encourage recruits to join the insurgent cause, to show the vulnerability of the ruling power, and to provoke that power to overreact—to respond to insurgent attacks in such a way that would reveal to the world the regime’s cruelty and repressiveness and so bring the quiescent population (in this case, all Muslims) increasingly over to the insurgents’ side
  • the Americans offered a gift undreamt of in al-Qaeda’s philosophy: they invaded and occupied Iraq, a much more important country. The result was catastrophe, not only for Iraq but for the Bush administration’s worldwide “war on terror,” for the invasion seemed to brand Bush’s war, in image after bloody humiliating image of “Americans killing Muslims,” as a new Western crusade against the Islamic world, confirming in every newscast the guiding idea of al-Qaeda’s politics and propaganda.
  • Henry Kissinger, Rumsfeld’s old antagonist from the Ford administration, when asked why he supported the Iraq war, had reportedly replied, “because Afghanistan wasn’t enough.” The radical Islamists had wanted to humiliate us, he went on, “and we need to humiliate them.”3 This was about restoring national credibility, about rebuilding the national power—consisting in no small part of the image of power—that had been severely diminished by those world-altering real-time pictures of the collapsing towers
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  • Proud realists, neither man put much stock in the “democratic tsunami” that, in the fantasy of neoconservative true believers like Wolfowitz, the Iraq war would send sweeping out of Baghdad to engulf the Middle East. Instead they put their faith in “American leadership” and the restoration of American power through a decisive demonstration of American strength.
  • Rumsfeld is first and foremost a patriotic midwesterner, a politician who nourishes in his soul a primordial and undying belief in the manifest need for, and rightness of, American power. To him this truth is self-evident, imbibed at an Illinois breakfast table. Who do we want to lead in the world? Somebody else? The idea is plainly inconceivable.
  • As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”
  • He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.
  • month after month in his arrogance and tenacity he would deny an insurgency had taken root. Month after month, as the shortcomings of the army he had sent into Iraq—too small, too conventional, not configured or equipped or trained to fight an insurgency and thus fated in its impotent bludgeoning to make it ever worse—became impossible to deny, he would go on denying them, digging in his heels and resisting the change he had to know was necessary.
Javier E

The War to End All Wars? Hardly. But It Did Change Them Forever. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • For Germany, which had invested heavily in the machinery of war, it was an almost incomprehensible defeat, laying the groundwork for revolution, revanchism, fascism and genocide. Oddly enough, says Max Hastings, a war historian, Germany could have dominated Europe in 20 years economically if only it had not gone to war.
  • “The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,” Mr. Hastings said, a point he now emphasizes when speaking with Chinese generals.
  • Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939, when restraint was costly, and miss the lessons of 1914, when restraint could have avoided the war? Continue reading the main story Recent Comments AR 3 hours ago So exactly 100 years ago Baghdad and Damascus were sleepy, almost forgotten provincial cities of the Ottoman Empire. Too bad they didn't... AHS 3 hours ago Thanks for this thoughtful and challenging article. We Americans, in particular, are often unaware of the context of our lives and politics... Kevin Cahill 3 hours ago World War I showed that politics doesn't always work well. Vietnam and W's invasion of Iraq showed that it often doesn't work well. See All Comments Write a comment
maddieireland334

Inside Jordan's fight against home-grown extremism - BBC News - 0 views

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    On Jordan's bleak, windswept border with Iraq there is little two-way traffic these days. The convoys of articulated lorries that used to thunder through the Karama crossing, shuttling goods between Baghdad and Aqaba, have dwindled to a trickle.
jongardner04

Iraq: ISIS fighters close Ramadi dam gates - CNN.com - 0 views

  • ISIS has closed off a dam to the north of the Iraqi city of Ramadi -- seized by its forces last month -- cutting water supplies to pro-government towns downstream and making it easier for its fighters to attack forces loyal to Baghdad, local officials and residents said.
Javier E

Republicans Don't Understand the Lessons of the Iraq War - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed “neoconservative” seemed on the verge of collapse.
  • Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the GOP presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal. According to recent polls, GOP voters now see national security as more important than either cultural issues or the economy. More than three-quarters of Republicans want American ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq, and a plurality says that stopping Iran’s nuclear program requires an immediate military strike.
  • What explains the change? Above all, it’s the legend of the surge. The legend goes something like this: By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, George W. Bush finally won the Iraq War. Then Barack Obama, by withdrawing U.S. troops, lost it. Because of Obama’s troop withdrawal, and his general refusal to exercise American power, Iraq collapsed, ISIS rose, and the Middle East fell apart. “We had it won, thanks to the surge,” Senator John McCain declared last September. “The problems we face in Iraq today,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal argued in May, “I don’t think were because of President Bush’s strength, but rather have come about because of President Obama’s weakness.”
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  • But although the violence went down, the reconciliation never occurred. According to the legend of the surge, Iraq’s collapse stems from Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops at the end of 2011. “If we’d had a residual force of 10,000 to 12,000,” Senator Lindsey Graham said last year, “I am totally convinced there would not have been a rise of al-Qaeda.” In reality, the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, began persecuting the Sunnis—thus laying the groundwork for their embrace of ISIS—long before American troops departed the country. As early as 2007, writes Emma Sky, who advised both Petraeus and his successor, General Ray Odierno, “the U.S. military was frustrated by what they viewed as the schemes of Maliki and his inner circle to actively sabotage our efforts to draw Sunnis out of the insurgency.”
  • In the late 1970s, the legend of the congressional cutoff—and it was a legend; Congress reduced but never cut off South Vietnam’s aid—spurred the hawkish revival that helped elect Ronald Reagan. As we approach 2016, the legend of the surge is playing a similar role. Which is why it’s so important to understand that the legend is wrong.
  • The surge was not intended merely to reduce violence. Reducing violence was a means to a larger goal: political reconciliation. Only when Iraq’s Sunni and Shia Arabs and its Kurds all felt represented by the government would the country be safe from civil war. As a senior administration official told journalists the day Bush announced the surge, “The purpose of all this is to get the violence in Baghdad down, get control of the situation and the sectarian violence, because now, without it, the reconciliation that everybody knows in the long term is the key to getting security in the country—the reconciliation will not happen.”
  • The legend of the surge has become this era’s equivalent of the legend that America was winning in Vietnam until, in the words of Richard Nixon’s former defense secretary Melvin Laird, “Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975.”
  • One day, Republicans will resume the painful work they began in 2006—the work of reconciling conservative attitudes with the limits of American power. Let’s hope they don’t do too much damage before that day comes.
  • These errors came well before Obama’s decision to remove American troops at the end of 2011. The fact is, the U.S. failed to stop Maliki’s slide into sectarian tyranny even when it still had 100,000 troops patrolling Iraqi soil. That’s because America had already lost much of its leverage. Once the surge succeeded in reducing violence, Maliki no longer needed American troops to keep him in power
  • The problem with the legend of the surge is that it reproduces the very hubris that led America into Iraq in the first place. In 2003, the Bush administration believed it could shatter the Iraqi state and then quickly and cheaply construct a new one that was stable, liberal, democratic, and loyal to the United States. By 2006, many conservatives had realized that was a fantasy
  • in 2007 and 2008, through a series of bold innovations, the United States military bribed, cajoled, and bludgeoned Iraqis into multiple cease-fires. The Iraqi state was still broken; its new ruling elite showed little of the political magnanimity necessary to reconstruct it in an inclusive fashion. And the Band-Aids that Petraeus and his troops had courageously affixed began peeling off almost immediately. Nonetheless, Republicans today say the Iraq War was won, and would have remained won, had the U.S. left 10,000 troops in the country after 2011.
  • the same wild overestimation of American power that fueled the war in Iraq now fuels the right’s opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. To hear hawks tell it, the United States can scuttle the current deal, intensify sanctions, threaten war, and—presto—Tehran will capitulate. But Iranians have been living under the threat of attacks from America or Israel for more than a decade now. And British and German diplomats have warned that if the U.S. Congress torpedoes the agreement, sanctions pressure on Iran will go not up but down, as countries that have lost billions by limiting their trade with Tehran stop doing so.
  • The tragedy of post-surge Iraq has its roots in America’s failure to make the Iraqi government more inclusive—a failure that began under Bush and deepened under Obama
  • Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon called the president’s Iraq policy “absurd” if not “criminal.” George Will, the dean of conservative columnists, deemed neoconservatism a “spectacularly misnamed radicalism” that true conservatives should disdain.
Javier E

The Empire Is Striking Back « The Dish - 0 views

  • The Obama administration is now facing a real test of its resolve in Iraq. The depressing but utterly predictable resurgence of Sunni Jihadism in a country broken in 2003 and never put back together again by the “surge” has been so successful and the Iraqi government so weak that even Kurdistan is now at risk. The policy now is to do enough – but no more – to keep the Kurds in the game, keep the Yazidis on planet earth and push the Iraqis in Baghdad to get real.
  • Obama’s signature achievement so far has been his steadiness in resisting that vortex, in defusing Jihadism rather than giving it yet more reason to be inflamed, in being that rare president capable of internalizing what most Americans want – rather than what Sunday talk show blowhards demand.
  • the greatest throwback to 2003 in this respect is Hillary Clinton. So far as one can tell from her interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, there is no daylight between her and John McCain or even Benjamin Netanyahu – but a hell of a lot of space between her and Barack Obama
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  • Clinton’s position is Netanyahu’s. And that’s important to understand. If you want a United States with no daylight between it and any Israeli government, whatever that government may do, vote for Clinton. If you want someone who believes the Libya intervention was the right thing to do, vote for Clinton. If you think America’s problem is not torture or drones or destabilizing occupations or debt but that we don’t tell the world how great we are enough, then vote for Clinton. If you really long for 2003 again, vote for Clinton.
  • isn’t it amazing that after the catastrophes of the Bush-Cheney era, both parties could effectively be running neocons for the presidency in 2016! Welcome to Washington – where the past is always present, amnesia is a lubricant, and the leading Democrat is running as a neocon.
Javier E

The Truth About the Wars - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Here’s a legend that’s going around these days. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and toppled a dictator. We botched the follow-through, and a vicious insurgency erupted. Four years later, we surged in fresh troops, adopted improved counterinsurgency tactics and won the war. And then dithering American politicians squandered the gains. It’s a compelling story. But it’s just that — a story.
  • The surge in Iraq did not “win” anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans’ unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate. Like a handful of aspirin gobbled by a fevered patient, the surge cooled the symptoms. But the underlying disease didn’t go away. The remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents we battled for more than eight years simply re-emerged this year as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
  • We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn’t understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We’re made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam.
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  • As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to “clear/hold/build” even as the “hold” stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan. The American people had never signed up for that.
  • those who served deserve an accounting from the generals. What happened? How? And, especially, why? It has to be a public assessment, nonpartisan and not left to the military. (We tend to grade ourselves on the curve.) Something along the lines of the 9/11 Commission is in order.
  • Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren’t enough, we’re told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we’re there.
  • I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.
qkirkpatrick

C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.
  • The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said
Javier E

What Washington Refuses To Admit « The Dish - 0 views

  • Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well. The <img class="alignright wp-image-138319" src="https://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/troopsjoeraedlegetty1.jpg?w=398&h=265" alt="" width="398" height="265" />president himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.
  • These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again
  • This is not just a Republican fixation. It’s a function of the hegemony reflexively sought by liberal internationalists as well.
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  • The US is intervening – despite clear evidence that it can do no real good – simply to make sure that ISIS doesn’t actually take over the country and thereby make president Obama look bad.
  • But the IS was never likely to take over Kurdistan or the Shiite areas of Iraq, without an almighty struggle. And our elevating ISIS into a global brand has only intensified its recruitment and appeal.
  • We responded, in other words, in the worst way possible and for the worst reasons possible: without the force to alter the underlying dynamic, without a breakthrough in multi-sectarian governance in Baghdad, without the regional powers taking the lead, without any exit plan, and all to protect the president from being blamed for “losing Iraq” – even though “Iraq” was lost almost as soon as it was occupied in 2003.
  • the leadership in both parties cannot help themselves when they have a big shiny military and see something they don’t like happening in the world.
  • Worse, our political culture asks no more of them. The Congress doesn’t want to take a stand, the public just wants beheadings-induced panic satiated by a pliant president (who is then blamed anyway), and the voices that need to be heard – the voices of those who fought and lost so much in Iraq – are largely absent.
  • To go back in and try to do again with no combat troops what we could not do with 100,000 is a definition of madness brought on by pride. It is to restart the entire war all over again. It makes no sense – except as political cover.
  • When will Washington actually admit its catastrophic errors and crimes of the last decade – and try to reform its own compulsive-interventionist habits to reflect reality rather than myth?
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