Bush has plans to leave fifty permanent bases (with troops) in Iraq and declare victory... all the while committing the next president to staying in Iraq.

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November ( Read more... )

I'm going to show you a picture. I want you to guess what it's of.

( Slightly disturbing image behind the cut )

First, the Boston Globe takes a look at what the $611 billion spent on the Iraq War could have bought. It's a little disingenuous, in that just because we've spent all this money, doesn't mean we actually had it; we put it all on the national credit card. Some of the examples are also a bit ridiculous and Boston-centric. And since when is ( Read more... )

Last night I went to see independent journalist Dahr Jamail speak and read from his book: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied IraqFrom the excerpts he read, I felt that what most distinguishes Darh Jamail's reporting from mainstream news coverage of Iraq - besides the fact that he looks beyond U.S. military ( Read more... )

"No timeline? No funding. No excuses."

( Excellent YouTube vid behind the cut )

More than one million Iraqi civilians may have died in Bush's war.

According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million ( Read more... )

I bring you some debunking of what General Petraeus is bound to say.

Go see this chart right now: Troop fatalities are higher every month in 2007 than they were in 2006. So sure, they were lower in August than in May this year, but they're always lower in August than in May, because it's hot as ever-living hell in Iraq in the summer ( Read more... )

First, the war news:

These are the coffins Bush doesn't want you to see, obtained by the Memory Hole's Freedom of Information Act request.

Soliders in Iraq are openly wondering why they're there:

The pivotal moment came, [Staff Sergeant David Safstrom] says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they ( Read more... )

You may have heard of Eyes Wide Open, the travelling memorial to lives lost in the Iraq War, where each pair of combat boots, set out in solemn rows like headstones, represents one American serviceperson who's died in Iraq. (Each pair of regular shoes represents hundreds or thousands of dead Iraqi civilians.) There's now a thirty minute ( Read more... )

Yay?
WASHINGTON -- The Democratic-controlled House issued a symbolic rejection of President Bush's plan to deploy more troops to Iraq on Friday, opening an epic confrontation between Congress and commander in chief over an unpopular war that has taken the lives of more than 3,100 U.S. troops.

The vote on the nonbinding measure was 246-182.


( Read more... )