Anthem politics have proven especially tricky in the two central fronts on the global war on terrorism: Iraq and Afghanistan.
PERUGIA, Italy (AP) — A chance discovery at Rome's busy Fiumicino Airport led anti-Mafia investigators to a huge black-market transaction in which Iraqi and Italian partners haggled over shipping more than 100,000 Russian-made automatic weapons into Iraq.
BAGHDAD — Years of economic-policy mistakes after the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein left unemployed young Iraqis easy targets for recruitment by al Qaeda and other insurgents, a U.S. Defense Department official said yesterday.
Critics of the U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq called for by President Bush in January, early on cited American losses and then announced the plan's failure. Supporters have seen progress from new tactics (which, many argue, should have been adopted far earlier).
Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is now "hunkered down with a small group of sycophantic cronies, increasingly detached from the business of running a government." Speaking not for attribution, this was the message conveyed by a former ranking Iraqi government official in London over the weekend. The current drift at the top, he added, could only be reversed by "a strongman at the top."
KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine — President Bush yesterday said Nouri al-Maliki's government has underperformed, but he remained hopeful that the Iraqi prime minister can unite warring factions.
The results from a poll conducted last month by the New York Times so surprised top editors that they ordered a new survey, but the results were the same the second time around: More Americans now think that President Bush was right to send troops into Iraq.
TEHRAN (AP) — Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appealed to Iran yesterday for greater cooperation in easing violence in his country, even as the United States has stepped up accusations that Tehran is arming Iraqi Shi'ite militants.
It's not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when the New York Times printed an opinion article by Brookings Institution analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq.
