Special to WorldTribune.com The number of Jews in Iraq, once at 120,000 strong, has been whittled down to just eight, seven of whom are elderly women who “live in constant fear”. According to an Iraqi lawmaker, seven of the eight remaining Jews in Iraq are elderly women who reside in Baghdad. None has family and […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — Despite some recent military successes against the Islamic State (ISIL) forces, both the security and the humanitarian situation in Iraq remain fragile and precarious. That’s the assessment from Jan Kubis, the UN special representative in a sobering report to the Security Council on the road […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SAIGON — It’s become fashionable among intellectuals from left and right to talk about the Vietnam War in terms of “lessons learned.” Better yet, critics of U.S. policy write and talk about “lessons not learned.” One of the latter emailed asking me to tell him “in a nutshell” […]
Special to WorldTribune.com The New York Times reported on Oct. 14 that U.S. troops in Iraq had between 2004 and 2011 repeatedly encountered Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Meanwhile, voters back home and the world at large had been repeatedly told precisely the opposite by U.S. media reports. The Republican administration of George W Bush […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com Looks like Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is safe for now. He won’t have to return the bauble he received in 2009 for doing his utmost to curb “nuclear proliferation” and talk nice to Muslims. He can keep the money too. Not too trivial a sum — about […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Brian M Downing Most accounts of the Second Iraq War (2003-11) attach great importance to counterinsurgency programs in ending the conflict there. The shift from using heavy firepower to winning hearts and minds is said to have created a “Sunni Awakening,” which changed the course of the war and brought a […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The tenth anniversary this week of the opening salvos in the American “shock-and-awe” campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq reminds us of the “axis-of-evil” speech delivered by George W. Bush in his state-of-the-union address on Jan. 20, 2002, a year after he was inaugurated. No one would dispute Bush’s […]
Special to WorldTribune.com BAGHDAD — The U.S. military has assessed that it was leaving a small but resilient Al Qaida presence in Iraq. Officials said the U.S. military has assessed that the Al Qaida network in Iraq has shrunk significantly since 2009. They said the Islamic insurgency network does not contain more than 1,000 operatives, […]