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Tuesday, July 1, 2008 |
Deal seeks to end Iraq contractors' immunity. Security contractors working in Iraq will no longer receive immunity from prosecution in that nation under a deal being brokered by Iraqi and U.S. officials, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said.
[CNN.com]
7:56:56 PM 
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Globe Columnist Gets It Right On Iraq Even with all the Iraq War criticism out there, it is rare to find a writer who manages to get it as right <a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07/01/what_bush_hath_wrought/";>as Andrew J. Bacevich does in today's Boston Globe. The key paragraph:
Bush's harshest critics, left liberals as well as traditional conservatives, have repeatedly called attention to this record. That criticism has yet to garner mainstream political traction. Throughout the long primary season, even as various contenders in both parties argued endlessly about Iraq, they seemed oblivious to the more fundamental questions raised by the Bush years: whether global war makes sense as an antidote to terror, whether preventive war works, whether the costs of "global leadership" are sustainable, and whether events in Asia rather than the Middle East just might determine the course of the 21st century.
Too often, the Iraq War debate has tended to get bogged down in whether or not the so-called "surge" is working, and, if so, doesn't this redeem the Bush presidency. This is clearly where McCain would like to take the debate, but it's a classic "forest-for-the-trees" moment. The basis for the Iraq War was not to use it as a means to demonstrate that President Bush, after creating a situation of increased sectarian violence in Iraq, could successfully conceive a means to temporarily curb that violence. Rather, the Iraq War was fought on the basis of it being first a pre-emptive response to a great and gathering threat to our national security, and later, a means of executing a larger, more insane, neo-conservative vision of the "domino theory," where our incursion into Iraq would bring all of the other bad actors in the region into line...ponies and democracy and theme parks to follow hard upon. As it turned out, there was no imminent threat to our national security, and the incursion only managed to embolden those bad regional actors (with the added bonus of offering al Qaeda a critical avenue for survival and reconstitution).
Matt Yglesias, <a href="http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/bacevich_on_the_big_questions.php";>to whom this item owes a hat tip, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Heads-Sand-Republicans-Foreign-Democrats/dp/047008622X";>has a book I've constantly pimped on HuffPo's readers that explains all of this in greater detail than I can here, but I'd follow Matt up by pointing out that as great as it is to have General Wesley Clark out on the stump criticizing McCain for his lack of judgement, it's a pity that Clark isn't up to the task of articulating this point as well as Bacevich does here. The ability to do so would have likely spared Clark no end of grief.
Read more: Iraq War, Iraq Surge, John McCain, Success of the Surge, George W. Bush, John Mccain Surge, Iraq, War in Iraq, Politics News - The Huffington Post News Team [Huffpolitics on The Huffington Post]
6:59:32 PM
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"Queen Of Mean" Leona Helmsley's Fortune To Go To Caring For Dogs Sure, the hotelier and real estate magnate Leona Helmsley left $12 million in her will to her dog, Trouble. But that, it turns out, is nothing much compared with what other dogs may receive from the charitable trust of Mrs. Helmsley, who died last August.
Her instructions, specified in a two-page "mission statement," are that the entire trust, valued at $5 billion to $8 billion and amounting to virtually all her estate, be used for the care and welfare of dogs, according to two people who have seen the document and who described it on condition of anonymity.
It is by no means clear, however, that all the money will go to dogs. Another provision of the mission statement says Mrs. Helmsley's trustees may use their discretion in distributing the money, and some lawyers say the statement may not mean much anyway, given that its directions were not incorporated into Mrs. Helmsley's will or the trust documents.
"The statement is an expression of her wishes that is not necessarily legally binding," said William Josephson, a lawyer who ran the Charities Bureau in the New York State attorney general's office from 1999 to 2004.
<img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=1c2b95f7f341422c850064a1a1547644"; height="1" width="1"/>
<img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1c2b95f7f341422c850064a1a1547644"; style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/> - The Huffington Post News Editors [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com]
6:57:46 PM
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Afghanistan Death Toll Outpaces Iraq. For the second month in a row, the number of American and NATO casualties in Afghanistan was higher than in Iraq. In fact, the so-called forgotten war was deadlier last month than at any time since the United States invaded in 2001, according to an AP tally.
AP via the Los Angeles Times:
In Iraq, at least 31 international soldiers died in June: 29 U.S. troops and one each from the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. There are 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, along with 4,000 from Britain and small contingents from several other nations.
The 40-nation international coalition is much broader in Afghanistan, where only about half of the 65,000 international troops are American.
U.S. Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, the top commander of U.S. forces here, said in June that militant attacks were becoming more complex—such as gunfire from multiple angles plus a roadside bomb. Insurgents are using more explosives, he said.
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9:56:07 AM
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© Copyright 2008 Patricia Thurston.
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