Yesterday, a student asked me about the recent news reports indicating that Iraq did, in fact, have "weapons of mass destruction" back in 2002 and 2003 when the U.S. was attempting to justify a "preemptive" war. The New York Times reported that American soldiers were...
Catch my prescient NCAA prediction at the beginning.
My first post on the Iraq War asked if academic IR had any responsibility to slow the march to war. The second tried to formulate what the neoconservative theory of the war was, because...
The debate is indeed on, and the Duck is paddling rapidly on this one with excellent posts from Robert, Jon, and Dan. I take/took a slightly different tack. I opposed the war at the time and like...
Last night, over a good meal, two Department colleagues and I talked with several out-of-town guests for quite some time about the prolonged war in Afghanistan. Eventually, I happened to make a point that a fellow blogger said seemed novel and interesting -- certainly worthy of a blog post.Let's see if anyone agrees.As many experts note, the war in Afghanistan is prolonged in large part because too much of the local population sees the U.S.-NATO intervention as illegitimate. Regardless of good intentions, Americans are seen as unwanted foreign invaders. Moreover, even U.S. Generals concede...
Eric Randolph tells us why at Complex Terrain Lab in a post entitled "A New Kind of War Movie" : "The Hurt Locker has already garnered the epithet of ‘first great Iraq war movie’ since its US release back in June, but that might actually be an underestimation. For a start, it has an intensity that will leave your bowels twisted and your nails bleeding; and it’s made a star of a nobody in James Renner. But, more importantly, by side-stepping the question of the war’s founding morality and justification, director Kathryn Bigelow has achieved something quite new for the war genre. Her resolute...
The Iraqi people have suffered tremendously this decade -- and are apparently suffering even more this summer. The LA Times is reporting today that Iraq's latest calamity is an "environmental catastrophe." Decades of war and mismanagement, compounded by two years of drought, are wreaking havoc on Iraq's ecosystem, drying up riverbeds and marshes, turning arable land into desert, killing trees and plants, and generally transforming what was once the region's most fertile area into a wasteland.Falling agricultural production means that Iraq, once a food exporter, will this year have to import...
In the June 15 dead-tree version of The Nation (online since May 27), Jonathan Schell writes that the Iraq war was produced by torture. Everyone knows that the "war on terror" and the Iraq war produced torture, but few have focused on the reversed causal arrow. And we are still learning details of the prominent and apparently unprecedented role Vice President Dick Cheney played in approving torture and promoting war.To document his charge, Schell references a remarkable blog post at The Washington Note penned by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin...
For some time, the media has been losing interest in America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Portland at the International Affairs symposium I previously mentioned, Washington Post journalist Thomas Ricks named a handful of news agencies covering Iraq -- and then claimed that no others remained in-country. He named his own paper, the New York Times, CNN, and McClatchey. He may have mentioned one or two more that I've forgotten, and he may have overlooked an outlet or two, but Iraq is clearly not receiving all that much coverage in the American media.The blogosphere has largely followed...
We're just a few weeks from the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war -- but the end is now clearly in sight. President Obama, earlier today: Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.Even better, as Obama told U.S. troops: "mission [kinda] accomplished."We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime – and you got the job done. We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government – and you got the job done. And we will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life – that is your...
Last night, at a couple of gatherings with family and friends, some people were speculating that Afghanistan could become Barack Obama's Vietnam -- or Iraq. A blogger at the socialist Monthly Review made this precise charge last summer. Should we reasonably fear this possibility?First, events since election day seem to assure that Obama's campaign promise about Iraq withdrawal will be fulfilled.Since I posted about "Obama's exit strategy?" just 10 days ago, Iraq's Parliament has approved a Status of Forces Agreement with the US establishing a formal timetable for the withdrawal of US troops....
Colin H. Kahl, John A. Nagl and Shawn Brimley argue, in Foreign Policy, that despite much progress, the political situation in Iraq remains fragile. The United States, they contend, should shift from a policy of unconditional support ("the US will remain there as long as it has to") to conditioning US military security upon political progress.... Iraq remains a dangerous place—and a number of significant attacks did take place out of earshot during our trip. But overall violence against Iraqi civilians and U.S. and Iraqi forces has fallen to levels not seen since early 2004. And as U.S....