Warblogging

We just passed the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, and the staff of Reason magazine have been looking back to 2003 to review their positions on the war in Iraq then and now. I figure I might as well go on the record about where I stood then and where I stand now. Back then, I knew I didn't know enough to have a well-informed opinion (and I was still … [Read more...] about Five Years Later In Iraq

A friend of mine just reminded me of a great organization called Operation Support Our Troops-Illinois. Founded in 2003 by Debi Rickert, OSOTIL sends out care packages to our troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. They follow Department of Defense security standards and guidelines. Most of the items they send are not available through the military supply system and are … [Read more...] about Operation Support Our Troops – Illinois

Wretchard at The Belmont Club points to an article in the Sierra Vista Herald about an address by Qubad J. Talabany, a representative of Iraqi Kurdistan, to a U.S. military Training and Doctrine Command Cultural Awareness Summit: In 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger led the United States away from supporting a Kurdish homeland. After the first Gulf War against Iraq in … [Read more...] about What Will Happen to the Kurds?

Via Lindsey Bayerstein comes this link to photographs of U.S. soldiers receiving care at Walter Reed Hospital. (The whole Washington Post article is here). If you prefer something more abstract, check out icasualties.org. As I write this, there are 3133 confirmed U.S. war dead. Here's a list of all of them. The same site shows 23,471 wounded in combat, and another 6,835 … [Read more...] about Why We Must Leave Iraq Now

Everyone who's talking about Iraq is talking about "the surge" and whether it will work. Taken literally, that's a silly question. Of course the surge will work: The surge is just a troop movement. It's difficult to move 21,500 troops—and everything they need to fight a war—to the other side of the world, but it's the kind of difficult thing the U.S. military is … [Read more...] about The Surge Is Not the Plan