Liberal Talk Radio

Somehow, even good news is bad news:
A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.
Let’s just [...]

“It would be as though a US ally had invaded Mexico and inadvertently unleashed a Marxist peasant rebellion against San Diego.”
– Juan Cole, trying to explain how things look in Iraq from Turkey’s point of view.

It boggles the mind that it took the Democrats 5 years to come up with this idea, and even still, the leadership is running away from it.

If you’re like me, and you believe that “privatizing” security operations in Iraq is about the farthest thing from a competitive market as one can get, than it won’t surprise you at all to learn that the CEO of Blackwater USA is a big-time conservative Republican moneyman and heir to an automotive fortune whose extended [...]

U.S. Diplomats pretty much can’t leave the Green Zone, now that Blackwater Security’s been shut down:
The episode has seriously handicapped the daily operations of the State Department at a time when the focus of the American effort here has shifted to outreach to tribes, local leaders and ordinary citizens in neighborhoods. On Tuesday, the embassy [...]

File under, “I’m surprised it took this long”:
BAGHDAD (AP) — The Iraqi government said Monday that it was revoking the license of an American security firm accused of involvement in the deaths of eight civilians in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion near a State Department motorcade.
The Interior Ministry said it would prosecute [...]

President Bush has made it clear on numerous times that the decision to leave Iraq will be a decision left for the next president. There will easily be 120,000 U.S. troops in the country come January 2009. This was only reinfoced by last night’s speech, where Bush essentially said he would run the [...]

The L.A. Times asks the fundamental question:
The president will ask the nation to pay for the next 11 months in Iraq with billions of dollars and hundreds of lives. We think this sacrifice will be in vain, because only Iraqis can heal their national wounds. And so we ask instead: What else could the United [...]

I had the opportunity to watch Robert Greenwald’s Iraq for Sale last night, and it spurred a lot of thoughts. The film is mainly about contractors in Iraq, from Blackwater to Halliburton to CACI, who do everything from soldiers’ laundry to interrogations to guarding Paul Bremer.
I came into the documentary sort of [...]

I’ve been meaning to link to this smart Allawi critique on Americablog. There’s one part that bothers me:
Most importantly, and quite simply, Allawi has virtually no support in Iraq. In the last elections, in December 2005, his party won a piddling 8 percent of the vote, earning just 25 seats in the 275-seat parliament. [...]