Iraq | Iraq
Apr.04.2008
On April 7, 2007, a 17-year-old Iraqi girl named Du'a Khalil Aswad was stoned to death by a mob for falling in love with a boy outside her community and running away. Du'a was a Kurdish Yezidi, while the boy she'd fallen in love with was an Arab Muslim.
Shockingly, her dishonor killing was...
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Feb.01.2008
From Jeff Lyon's great blog,In these dangerous, polarizing, and sometimes too politically correct times, writers who bravely tackle issues of international or homeland security, or U.S. involvement in you-know-where, and who are not sufficiently cautious to keep at least one creative foot firmly...
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Jan.09.2008
There will come a day, and it will be soon, upon which a great novel of the Iraq war will be published.
If you're an American fighting there, the war in Iraq is a clearly foolish endeavor in which you've been sent to fight and possibly die for frivolously presented, very inscrutable reasons...
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Jan.09.2008
Both the RAND Corporation and a former military advisor to the Salvadoran military described our efforts at counterinsurgency in El Salvador as failures. Despite this, numerous conservative commentators, many with links to the Reagan administration (John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, John...
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Jan.09.2008
Attempts to characterize the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in El Salvador as a “success” require a very limited definition of that word. By all accounts, the best the Salvadoran government could achieve, despite a decade of military and non-lethal aid totaling over $6 billion, was a stalemate with...
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Jan.08.2008
As I noted in a previous bolg, a number of commentators on the right—most visibly Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz—continue to analogize our foreign policy efforts in 1980s Central America with those in the current Middle East, claiming in particular that our “success” in El...
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Jan.08.2008
Our foreign policy in Central America, especially as it applies to counterinsurgency, has been frequently invoked by Bush Administration policymakers as an apt template for our efforts in Iraq. As I argue in “From Troy to Baghdad,” the essay that concludes Blood of Paradise, I consider this attempt...
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Jan.08.2008
Paradox: Where it is easy to bury the past, that’s exactly where one shouldn’t.
In the 2004 vice presidential debates, Dick Cheney stated that El Salvador is “a whale of a lot better” since the United States oversaw elections in the mid-1980s.
But in the past year, four high-profile “...
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