Liberal Talk Radio

How do we know things are getting better in Iraq? Because our Iraqi brothers and sisters are reaching US-levels of nonchalance about voting! But while election monitors hailed a smooth vote, Iraqi officials reported that turnout was 51 percent – lower than expected, particularly in Baghdad, where only 40 percent of registered voters went to [...]

The Iraqis have a lot of money. $120B to spend rebuilding their country, due to the record price of oil. Still, they’re pumping less oil than they were in the Saddam era. It looks like the neocon plan of having Iraq finance its own reconstruction are finally coming true. Were they counting on $140/barrel oil [...]

Man, Tom Friedman sure is annoying today, getting all sanctimonious about how Bush needs to either get with the alternative-energy program or else STFU. But why is Friedman so angry? Bush already had a strategy to lower oil prices: invade Iraq. And he did so with the blessings of… Tom Friedman. Back in ’02, Friedman [...]

This is not the kind of blog where I typically go posting MoveOn.org videos, but this one is just too well done not to link to: When folks like me say it’s time to pull up stakes and leave Iraq, this is why. “Victory” has been just around the corner for the last 5 years, [...]

Matt Yglesias, on the fact of American Army and Marine Corps officers trying to rebuild Iraq: Suppose we replaced the mayor of your town with a twentysomething foreigner who didn’t speak English but did have a ton of firepower at his disposal and no real checks on his power. You’d probably feel that was a [...]

I meant to post something about the 5-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, but I got distracted by work. Anyway, I was going to post that ridiculous video of Bush searching under his desk for WMDs from the 2004 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but I could only find the really disturbing remixed [...]

First, we had the “surge.” Now we have “the pause“: That pause in drawdowns would begin in July, after five combat brigades ordered to Iraq last year are fully withdrawn. At that point, about 140,000 American troops are projected to be in Iraq, down from a high of more than 160,000 late last year, but [...]

Iraqis fall in love with the Lionel-Industrial Complex: The service between Baghdad and Basra resumed with little fanfare in December after a hiatus of 18 months. Few dared use it at first, but word has spread of a safe and cheap journey, and railway officials are scrambling for funds for more carriages. “There’s been a [...]

Obama has said in his policy statements that he’s going to bring troops home from Iraq without permanent bases there, but unless I’m wrong, there seems to be a great deal of wiggle room in his position: Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades [...]

If you’re a Fred Kaplan fan (and who isn’t, really?) his diavlog with Bob Wright this week is pretty fantastic. I liked this section in particular where he really lays out the machinations behind the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. Rumsfeld and Cheney weren’t neocons, he notes, but they used those ideas when it was convenient [...]