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  Saturday  July 23  2005    12: 22 AM

iraq

The Iraq war is over, and the winner is... Iran
Hamstrung by the Iraq debacle, all Bush can do is gnash his teeth as the hated mullahs in Iran cozy up to their co-religionists in Iraq.
by Juan Cole


Iraq's new government has been trumpeted by the Bush administration as a close friend and a model for democracy in the region. In contrast, Bush calls Iran part of an axis of evil and dismisses its elections and government as illegitimate. So the Bush administration cannot have been filled with joy when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and eight high-powered cabinet ministers paid an extremely friendly visit to Tehran this week.font>

The two governments went into a tizzy of wheeling and dealing of a sort not seen since Texas oil millionaires found out about Saudi Arabia. Oil pipelines, port access, pilgrimage, trade, security, military assistance, were all on the table in Tehran. All the sorts of contracts and deals that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had imagined for Halliburton, and that the Pentagon neoconservatives had hoped for Israel, were heading instead due east.

[more]


Iraq: The War We Are Not Being Shown
By Arianna Huffington


My vacation has been remarkably eye-opening. Now, when travelers say things like that, they usually are talking about being introduced to new cultures, different foods, singular settings… but in my case, I’m talking about war. Specifically, how shockingly different the coverage of the war in Iraq is here in Europe compared to what we get back home.font>

It’s like a pair of blinders has been removed and I’m suddenly seeing for myself what I’ve long known to be the case: just how sanitized a version of the war the American mainstream media are delivering, and how little of even this cleaned-up coverage we get.

[more]



A war without enough equipment, under commanders who consider civilians the enemy, an Iraq War veteran sounds like a Vietnam War veteran.


Talk about deja vu all over again: Here was a fed-up veteran recalling being sent into war without enough military equipment, under troop commanders who considered civilians the enemy. But 26-year-old Patrick Resta wasn’t talking about Vietnam. He was relating his experiences with an Army National Guard unit in Iraq.

[more]

  thanks to Antiwar.com


IVAW
Iraq Veterans Against the War