US to sell weapons to Iraq

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 12:09 PM - 0 Comments

The Obama administration in the US plans to sell $11 billion worth of arms and military aid to Iraq, over concerns that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki may be seeking to consolidate power. According to the New York Times, the sale will proceed despite growing concern about Mr. Maliki’s apparent efforts to marginalize Iraq’s Sunni minority. While the US prefers a strong Iraq as a counterweight to Iranian power, some fear bolstering the Maliki regime could backfire if he aligns himself more closely with Iran’s Shiite theocracy. Capt. John Kirby, spokesman for the Pentagon said, “The purpose of these arrangements is to assist the Iraqis’ ability to defend their sovereignty against foreign security threats.” But Rafe al-Essawi, a prominent Sunni politician who is Iraq’s finance minister, said “It is very risky to arm a sectarian army,” and Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on national security issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said ““The optics of this are terrible.”

New York Times

Obama the hawk

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

Barack Obama used U.S. air power to prevent a massacre and facilitate the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. He sent a team of Navy SEALS to conduct a secret surgical strike in Pakistan that took out Osama bin Laden, America’s public enemy number one. He sent a Predator drone armed with Hellfire missiles to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, whose extremist preaching was linked to several attempted terrorist attacks against the U.S. All three objectives were achieved without invasion, occupation, or the loss of American lives.

The last decade was dominated by the Bush administration’s “shock and awe” display of U.S. military might, a swagger that descended into a “long war” of occupation and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq that left thousands of Americans dead and wounded, and cost upward of a trillion dollars. But cold, calculating and nimble, Obama has turned a new page on the projection of American power. His emphasis on technology, intelligence, and leaning on allies is leaving a smaller and less costly U.S. military footprint on the globe, but one that is proving to be just as lethal to its adversaries.

In his first days as President, Obama ordered interrogation techniques cleaned up and the prison at Guantánamo Bay to be closed within a year. Congress objected, and Guantánamo has remained open, but the President has added zero detainees to the inmate population. Indeed, he’s barely taken any prisoners—instead, he has presided over many more drone strikes against terrorist suspects than George W. Bush. He is not waterboarding enemy prisoners who have been removed from the battlefield; he is killing them where they stand. (The administration denies frequent accusations that it is killing militants when capturing them would have been feasible.)

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Tony Hayward’s comeback

By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Alex Wong/Getty Images

He became infamous during the Gulf of Mexico spill. Now he’s drilling for oil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Drilling for oil has become an increasingly risky business. Most unexploited reservoirs are either far below the ocean, or in parts of the world where extracting the fossil fuel is either exceedingly expensive (like Alberta’s oil sands), or too dangerous. And Tony Hayward, the former chief executive of BP, doesn’t seem fazed by any of it.

After leaving BP last year in the wake of the disastrous Gulf of Mexico spill, Hayward recently re-emerged at the helm of a London-based energy investment company that, far from playing it safe, is hoping to strike it rich in one of the most geopolitically challenging places on earth: Iraqi Kurdistan. With Americans still furious about his now infamous Gulf crisis remark, “I want my life back,” Hayward earlier this year joined forces with financier Nat Rothschild, ex-Goldman Sachs banker Julian Metherell and entrepreneur Tom Daniels to create a so-called “blank cheque” investment company. Called Valleres PLC, it promised to buy and run an oil company somewhere in the world—and raised US$2.2 billion. “He is one of the most talented oil executives in the world,” says Karl Moore, a business professor at McGill University. “And some rich people saw that and said, ‘Hey, now we can get this guy to work for us.’ ”

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REVIEW: In my time

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:57 AM - 6 Comments

Cheney’s unapologetic memoir, which stretches from a modest childhood in Nebraska and Wyoming to his rise as the most powerful vice-president in history, saves its emotional energy for settling scores, especially against fellow members of the administration of George W. Bush. (One of the few tidbits he does reveal: the secure “undisclosed location” to which he was so often consigned after 9/11 was not some cave bunker but often his own home or the woodsy presidential retreat of Camp David.) On policy, Cheney has few regrets. “One of the most significant accomplishments” of Bush’s presidency, he writes, was “the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.”

The book describes Cheney’s outsized influence in the first Bush term and increasing marginalization in the second. While he successfully pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, by the summer of 2007 he could not persuade Bush to bomb a Syrian nuclear reactor. “After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.” Cheney saves his harshest words for Bush’s two secretaries of state. He accuses Condoleezza Rice of misleading Bush while fumbling disarmament talks with North Korea (“We were promising rewards for their duplicity”) and naively seeking diplomatic engagement with villains. “In meeting after meeting, it seemed we had to argue against yet another misguided approach from the State Department.” And Colin Powell is painted as a disloyal colleague who criticizes Bush’s policies to others but not to the president’s face.

The world according to Cheney is dangerous and needs American power. When defence secretary Robert Gates tells the Saudis in late 2007 that Bush would be impeached if he took military action against Iran’s nuclear program, Cheney is livid: Gates “removed a key element of our leverage.” But Cheney’s will not be the last word. Rice’s political memoir is due out Nov. 1.

In the shadow of 9/11

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photography by Greg Locke

Last week in St. John’s, Maclean’s and CPAC hosted a round-table conversation entitled, “How has 9/11 changed our world?” In this wide-ranging discussion of the emotional, practical, political and cultural fallout in the decade following the attacks, Maclean’s columnists Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells were joined on the stage by David Collenette, Canada’s minister of transport at the time of 9/11 attacks, Sukanya Pillay, director of the national security program for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Tarek Fatah, political activist, author, broadcaster and founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. The discussion was moderated by CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen. The following is an edited excerpt.

Andrew Coyne: I don’t know what future historians will make of the grand sweep of September 11 and its place in world history, but there’s no doubt the last 10 years of our lives have been in the shadow of it and very much dominated by it. If there’s one thing that we should certainly remember on this anniversary it is the nature of the threat that al-Qaeda presented and still to some extent presents. It is, I think, unique and new, something new in world history, the combination of the willingness to inflict casualties on just an enormous scale, and the technological capacity married with it. I do think, though, we should, if we’re putting everything in the balance, take stock of the fact that 10 years later we have seriously degraded al-Qaeda’s capacity. We’ll discuss a lot of the pros and cons of how the battle has been fought, but I just want to leave people with the impression that it was a battle worth fighting, and it’s been broadly successful.

Paul Wells: The question before us is how did his happen, and I think it’s a combination of two things, extremism—or, to use a simpler term, evil—on one side, and complacency on the other. The extremism persists, and the complacency is gone, but it’s important to understand what those 19 men in those airplanes were trying to do: they were trying to provoke the West. The nature of asymmetrical warfare is you use the limited means at your disposal to essentially trip up a much larger and more powerful opponent, and to some extent those 19 men have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. We have to keep our vigilance up, we have to keep working. This is not a war that is going to go away just because a zero comes up at the end of the anniversaries. I think we are still in this for a very long time, which is why we have to make sure that, in defending our values, we don’t betray them.

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The decline of al-Qaeda

By Michael Petrou - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 2 Comments

Erik de Castro/Reuters

Osama bin Laden enjoyed talking about his death. And like other hyper-religious Islamists, he claimed to long for it. “So let me be a martyr, dwelling in a high mountain pass among a band of knights who, united in devotion to God, descend to face armies,” he wrote in a poem he recited in a 2003 audiotape.

Bin Laden could embrace dying because he believed the war he had declared on Jews and “crusaders” was bigger than him and any other individual. It would sweep the Muslim ummah, or nation. “I am just a poor slave of God,” he said in December 2001, shortly after slipping away from the American bombardment of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. “If I live or die, the war will continue.” With God’s grace, he said, the “awakening” had begun.

Now bin Laden is dead, assassinated by U.S. commandos in a May raid on his secret compound deep inside Pakistan. And indeed, the war between al-Qaeda and its many enemies continues. But al-Qaeda’s destructive nihilism is becoming a lonelier and lonelier pursuit. A decade after its most spectacular and murderous success, al-Qaeda is a shrunken shell of what it once was, rejected by increasing numbers of Muslims and even its onetime spiritual allies.

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The war on terror 10 years on

By Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 12 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

ANDREW COYNE: Perhaps the best way to think about the legacy of Sept. 11 is to think of all the things that haven’t happened. Most obviously, there has been no successful terrorist attack on American soil since then—nor any attempted attack originating from Canadian soil. Neither have there been any of the consequences that might well have followed from a second, possibly worse attack, or in some cases were predicted to follow from the first: no wholesale victimization of Muslims, no long, black night of repression of dissent, no cataclysmic clash of civilizations, and so on.

This is of more than theoretical interest. If, 10 years later, al-Qaeda seems a depleted force, there was no guarantee things would turn out that way, nor did it seem likely at the time. Reviewing television footage from the day, what is striking is the sense of be­wilderment in the voices of the normally phlegmatic anchormen, as the planes keep dropping out of the sky. Who could blame them? As of about noon that day, you could have told me California had fallen into the sea and I’d have believed you.

The audacity of attacking the world’s most powerful nation in such spectacular, head-on fashion still has the power to shock. More than anything else, Sept. 11 was a show of strength: look what we can do to you, it announced. And there is nothing you can do to stop it.

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REVIEW: Father of Money: Buying Peace in Baghdad

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Almost from the moment it began in 2003, the American-led invasion of Iraq has spawned a flood of books on its causes and its course, but few have been as enlightening as this one. In March 2004, then-U.S. Army captain Whiteley was appointed governance officer for al-Dora, one of the most volatile districts in the violent Iraqi capital. His job was to establish and foster a local Iraqi-staffed council, one of the dozens expected to become the seeds that would blossom into functioning institutions in a self-governing state. The key problem facing Whiteley was that he represented one of the most hidebound bureaucracies (the Pentagon) ever known in a district with an imminent need for money and jobs, in a culture that functions by personal word of honour and exchange of favours, legal or otherwise.

Whiteley thought he got the message. Two months into his year-long posting, and finding his council was fast losing authority, unable to tap into any of the quasi-legal economic opportunities in its neighbourhood, he led a convoy of three Humvees of troops to a local scrapyard. There, his men seized a dozen drivers about to take a load of shattered Iraqi military equipment off to Turkey, while Whiteley personally tasered the foreman. When the boss arrived, Whiteley hit him up for an ongoing “tax” of $20,000 per shipment (payable to the council). Thus began Whiteley’s brief career as a player in the Iraqi system: known as “Abu Floos” (Father of Money), the captain was considered a man who kept his word and got things done.

It was exhilarating, Whiteley writes, but also a moral swamp. His quick fixes inevitably alienated one group or another, especially in the face of the larger American failure to establish basic order. When he returned stateside at the end of his tour, it was with the same feeling of personal failure and the same desire to leave it all behind that seems to mark the entire occupation.

Wave of attacks hits Iraqi cities

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 11:43 AM - 0 Comments

A fresh wave of violence in several Iraqi cities has left at least 59 people dead. In the southeastern city of Kut, police said two bombs that went off at approximately the same time killed at least 37 people and injured dozens of others. No one has taken responsibility yet for the attacks, but the car bombs, roadside bombs and suicide bombs all went off in the morning. U.S. army forces are scheduled to leave the country before the end of the year under a deal worked out in 2008. Violence in the country hit a peak in 2006 and 2007 and cooled off until this recent spell. Iraq’s speaker of parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, has condemned the attacks.

BBC News

End of the U.S. empire?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, July 25, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 32 Comments

John Moore/Getty Images

It took a truck driver from Manchester, N.H., to put the matter succinctly. “Well, I support the U.S. military,” Greg Salts told the arrayed candidates at the Republican presidential debate in the Granite state last month. “But frankly, we’re in debt up to our eyeballs.” Isn’t it time to close some U.S. bases abroad, he asked. A retired navy man named John Brown also wanted to know, “Osama bin Laden is dead. We’ve been in Afghanistan for 10 years. Isn’t it time to bring our combat troops home from Afghanistan?”

Not so long ago, such questions would have come from Democrats and would have been met with charges of disloyalty and taunts of “cutting-and-running” from Republicans. No longer. The Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, said in that debate, “We’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation.”And the Tea Party darling, Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, said the U.S. should never have intervened in Libya. “First of all, we were not attacked. We were not threatened with attack. There was no vital national interest,” she declared. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman went even further, calling for a smaller U.S. footprint abroad. “The deployments are mighty expensive,” he said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. “We’re going to have to look at the map at some point and reset our level of engagement and our deployments in some corners of the world.”

Welcome to the new U.S. reality. As discussions of national security morph into a debate over spending and debt in a nation still limping out of the Great Recession, questions are being raised about just how big a military America can afford—and what happens if the global cop walks off the job? And they are coming not just from Democrats, whose President is drastically drawing down troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, but also from Republicans who for a decade had rallied around a hawkish view of America’s role in the world.

To appreciate how far the mood has shifted, consider the November 2007 Republican presidential debate in St. Petersburg, Fla., where candidates such as John McCain and Rudy Giuliani sought to out-hawk one another and were pressed by voters on whether they would “make a permanent long-term military commitment to the people of Iraq?” Giuliani urged Americans to “stay on the offence” and not to put their “head in the sand,” like their opponents. “You’ve got a Democratic debate and not a single one of those Democratic candidates used the word ‘Islamic terrorism,’ ” he declared. That phrase was used four times in the 2007 GOP debate. In the latest Republican contest, it was not uttered at all.

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Iraq butts in

By Claire Ward - Monday, May 23, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 3 Comments

Sasse/laif/Redux

Just days after hundreds gathered in downtown Baghdad to demand better services and jobs from their government, the Iraqi parliament sat to consider a ban on smoking in many public places. The measure would also force companies to print harsher warning labels, not unlike efforts in many Western countries.

The bill, first introduced and subsequently dropped in 2009, seems to be particularly out of step with the desires of Iraqis, who can buy a pack for just 25 cents. “I don’t think you could overstate how many people smoke in Iraq,” says Jason Whiteley, a 34-year-old soldier from Houston, Texas, who spent a year in Iraq working in governance. “Every 10 metres there’s a fold-out table with people selling cigarettes.” Surely car bombs, regular power outages and widespread unemployment are more pressing.“The Iraqi hierarchy of needs hasn’t yet reached the point where they are talking about luxury regulations like this,” Whiteley told Maclean’s. “It seems like a bit of a reach that it’s an Iraqi idea. It smells a little bit colonial, to be honest.”

So long, Michael Ignatieff. I miss who you used to be.

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 12:33 PM - 93 Comments

Andrew Potter’s essay on Michael Ignatieff reminded me of the influence Ignatieff had on my own life, well before he entered politics.

In 2002 I faced something of a dilemma. The previous year I had begun my first real job in print journalism at the Ottawa Citizen. It hadn’t started well. No one ever tells aspiring writers that they’ll start their careers covering car accidents and asking distraught parents how they feel about children drowning in their backyard pools. But this is how it begins. I started thinking about a new line of work.

Then al-Qaeda flew jet planes into New York skyscrapers and murdered thousands. I begged my editor to send me to Afghanistan. He did. My career took off. By 2002 I had the sort of job I always wanted: covering foreign news for the National Post.

In the meantime, however, I had applied to study for a doctoral degree at the University of Oxford and was accepted. I saw a looming fork in the road. But in truth I wanted to do both: journalism and academia; the thrill of breaking news and the deeper satisfaction of digging into a topic for weeks or years, rather than hours.

Michael Igatieff, at the time, straddled both worlds. He was a rare academic who wrote lucid and important journalism. On a whim, I sent him an email at Harvard, where he was running the Kennedy School. Continue…

'Bad information is an occupational hazard'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 36 Comments

The CEO of Sun Media says—and the Conservative campaign confirms—that a Conservative strategist forwarded a dubious photo of Michael Ignatieff.

Three weeks ago, our vice-president for Sun News, Kory Teneycke, was contacted by the former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper, Patrick Muttart. He claimed to be in possession of a report prepared by a “U.S. source”, outlining the activities and whereabouts of Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in the weeks and months leading to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The report suggested that rather than being an observer from the sidelines, as he wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece after he entered Canadian politics, Ignatieff was in fact on the front lines and on the ground at a forward operating base in Kuwait, assisting U.S. State Department and American military officials in their strategy sessions. Muttart also provided a compelling electronic image of a man very closely resembling Michael Ignatieff in American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002.

What Mr. Muttart provided was apparently enough for the Sun papers to run a story that claimed Mr. Ignatieff was “was on the front lines of pre-invasion planning when he worked in the U.S.” Still, Mr. Peladeau believes this was part of an effort to discredit both Mr. Ignatieff and Sun media and that this episode should debunk any notion that the Sun is a tool of the Conservative party of Canada.

Wootton Bassett goes royal

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Matt Cardy/GETTY Images;

For four years the people of Wootton Bassett, a town deep in the English countryside, have played a solemn role in Britain’s war life. Every time a serviceman is killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, his or her body is returned to the nearby base of RAF Lyneham and then driven slowly through the heart of the Wiltshire town. There, hundreds and often thousands of residents have stood silently as the cortège passes by on its way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. (Before 2007, the repatriations occurred at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, and the route to the hospital skipped all the local towns.)

The tradition so touched Britain that last week Queen Elizabeth II did something no monarch had done in more than a century: she gave permission for the ancient town to add “Royal” to its name. It is a bittersweet recognition. In September, RAF Lyneham will shut down, and the repatriations will return to Brize Norton. It is now up to Oxfordshire to plan a route that continues the tradition that Royal Wootton Bassett started.

Is Libya another Iraq?

By Michael Petrou - Monday, March 28, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 4 Comments

Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images

A coalition of mostly Western nations, including Canada, has entered a war with loosely defined objectives and an uncertain end.
Following much-delayed approval from the United Nations Security Council for a no-fly zone and the use of “all necessary measures” short of occupation to protect civilians, France, Britain and the United States launched a barrage of air and cruise missile strikes against Libyan air defences, armour and command centres last weekend. Canadian CF-18 fighters flew their first sorties over Libya Monday. Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s expansive Bab al-Aziziya complex in Tripoli was attacked Sunday night—suggesting, despite conflicting statements from nations fighting in Libya, that Gadhafi himself is a target.

British Prime Minister David Cameron told MPs Monday that the Security Council resolution “does not provide legal authority for action to bring about Gadhafi’s removal from power by military means.” Britain’s chief of defence staff, Gen. David Richards, said targeting Gadhafi was “not allowed under the UN resolution.” But Defence Secretary Liam Fox said striking at the Libyan leader was “potentially a possibility.”

U.S. President Barack Obama, who for weeks appeared reluctant to involve American forces in the Libyan war, said the mission’s goals centred on protecting civilians rather than regime change. Asked if these goals might be achieved with Gadhafi still in power, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said, “That’s certainly potentially one outcome.” Speaking in Chile Monday, Obama said Gadhafi “needs to go,” but suggested this might be accomplished using “a wide range of tools” besides military action.

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Iraq government shuts down two opposition party offices

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 12:09 PM - 1 Comment

Two Iraqi political parties that led demonstrations over the past two weeks have been ordered to close their offices, reports the New York Times. On Sunday, dozens of armed security forces controlled by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki entered the offices of the Iraqi Nation Party and the Iraqi Communist Party and gave notice of their eviction. While the parties do not hold seats in Parliament, they are outspoken critics of Mr. Maliki’s government. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of demonstrators have rallied in Baghdad for government reforms and better services. Mr. Maliki’s cabinet responded that they were following through with a plan to return publicly owned buildings to government use, and that there was no political motive behind the evictions.

New York Times

In Egypt and Libya, the U.S. is opting for diplomacy first

By John Parisella - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 9:12 AM - 4 Comments

The coming March 20 will mark the 8th year anniversary of the second Iraq war. While combat operations have been scaled back, the presence of American troops on Iraqi soil is not about to end soon. Listening to the cable news pundits debate how Obama should respond to Tunisia and Egypt—and lately Libya—you would think very little has been learned either there or in Afgghanistan.

The events in Libya are more complicated because of the violent repression, but they show the administration has resisted a march to war. Compare the comments of current Defense Secretary Robert Gates to those of Donald Rumsfeld in the buildup to the war in Iraq, and you will see the U.S. will now exhaust all the diplomatic efforts before ever engaging militarily. And well it should.

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Egypt: Unnoticed at the back of the parade

By Paul Wells - Friday, March 4, 2011 at 2:34 PM - 78 Comments

“Canada remains alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the position Canada took.”

— Stephen Harper, August 2003

He was talking about Iraq, in the pages of this magazine, but I couldn’t help remembering that quote as I did a little research today on international reaction to the events in Egypt. That country’s capital, Cairo, has become a bit of a hot spot for high-profile international visitors lately. Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, has been to Cairo and other capitals in the region. So has Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd, U.S. senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, Turkish president Abdullah Gul, the German ministers of (roughly) foreign affairs, trade and development, the EU‘s foreign-policy representative and Norway‘s foreign minister. France’s foreign minister Alain Juppé is to arrive in Cairo on Sunday.

I suppose it’s possible to write the lot off as rubber-neckers and grandstanders. I suppose also that each of them will go home with dozens of new contacts in a country that has a shot at a democratic transformation.

In the end, as Stephen Harper once said, Canada can’t stay isolated forever. “The government will join, notwithstanding its failure to prepare, its neglect in co-operating with its allies, or its inability to contribute. In the end it will join out of the necessity created by a pattern of uncertainty and indecision. It will not join as a leader but unnoticed at the back of the parade.” Again, he was talking about Iraq, but I suspect it applies here too.

Deadly protests in Iraq

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 25, 2011 at 11:43 AM - 0 Comments

Iraq is the latest Middle Eastern country to see popular uprisings, after thousands took to Baghdad’s streets in a “day of rage”, similar to the recent protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Jordan. Other protests took place in Mosul, Hawja, Falluja and Kirkuk. At least five people have been reported killed, as the Iraqi military locked down the city and set up roadblocks. In Baghdad’s own Tahrir Square, hundreds of protests gathered to call for reform (not regime change), while soldiers took up positions around them. Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki urged civilians not to join the protesters, accusing them of being al Qaeda supporters and Saddam Hussein loyalists. The protesters say they are simply calling for political reform and better government services. “We don’t want to change the government, because we elected them,” a 24-year-old student told Agence France-Presse, “but we want them to get to work.”

BBC News

Rumsfeld lashes out at John McCain, Condoleezza Rice, and others

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, February 14, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 6 Comments

Photograph by Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Donald Rumsfeld is still at war. In his new memoir, Known and Unknown, George W. Bush’s former defence secretary takes aim at fellow Republicans. And one is blasting him back. Rumsfeld writes that Republican Sen. John McCain, who criticized him for sending too few troops to Iraq, had a “hair-trigger temper and a propensity to fashion and shift his positions to appeal to the media.” McCain, who had argued for a “surge” in the number of troops, went on Good Morning America this week to respond: “I respect secretary Rumsfeld. He and I had a very, very strong difference of opinion about the strategy that he was employing in Iraq, which I predicted was doomed to failure.” And, he added, “Thank God he was relieved of his duties and we put the surge in; otherwise we would have had a disastrous defeat in Iraq.”

Others may be weighing in as well. Rumsfeld also takes on the image of Colin Powell, who served as secretary of state, as a voice of dissent in the Bush cabinet. “The media image of Powell battling the forces of unilateralism and conservatism may have been beneficial to Powell in some circles, but it did not jibe with reality. The reality was that Powell tended not to speak out at National Security Council or principals meetings in strong opposition to the views of the president or of his colleagues.”

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Blair ‘regrets’ loss of life in Iraq

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 4:03 PM - 10 Comments

Tony Blair appeared on Friday for the last time in front of the Chilcot inquiry, which is investigating the lead-up to the Iraq war. The former British PM said he “regrets deeply and profoundly the loss of life” during the Iraq war, clarifying previous comments he made during his previous testimony in which he expressed no regrets in taking the decision to go to war. His statement was met with cries of “too late” from the public gallery. Blair’s testimony revealed that he had told George W. Bush that he could “count on us,” and admitted disregarding Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s warning, which the former Prime Minister called “provisional,” that invading Iraq without the backing of the UN would be illegal. Blair also took the opportunity to warn about the destabilizing threat presented by Iran, saying the West has a “wretched policy, or posture, of apology for believing that we are causing what the Iranians are doing, or what these extremists are doing. The fact is we are not.”

BBC News

How ethical is your oil?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 7, 2011 at 5:32 PM - 188 Comments

The Environment Minister observed yesterday (around the 12-minute mark of that interview) that Canada is a supplier of ethical oil—a phrase recently employed by Ezra Levant—because the revenues derived from that oil are not used to “fund terrorism or the destabilization of other governments.” This may or may not beg questions about the origins of our own oil imports.

The latest release of Statistics Canada’s Energy Statistics Handbook lists our sources of crude oil and equivalents going back to 1989. Our noted individual sources in 2010 (through September) were, in order: Algeria, the United Kingdom, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia and the United States.

Sadr back in Iraq

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 4:37 PM - 7 Comments

Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose militia displayed the toughest resistance against the American military, returned to Iraq on Wednesday following a three-year exile to cries of “long live the leader!” Sadr’s militant movement fractured following his self-imposed exile to the holy city of Qum in Iran in 2007, when his militia was defeated and divided. But in the 2009 local elections, they made an impressive comeback and proved to be shrewd political negotiators. Sadr is said to be the only viable opponent to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. His arrival in Iraq was eerily reminiscent of Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumphant return to Tehran following Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Whether he stays in Iraq long enough to become the leader his followers are hoping for is uncertain. At the very least, Sadr’s return to Iraq is an event that will certainly complicate Iraqi democracy, its stability already fragile in its infancy.

New York Times

Iraqi parliament approves new government

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 1 Comment

Iraq’s parliament has appointed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to a second term in office, ending a deadlock that paralyzed the country for nine months. Back in March, ballot-box results showed the coalition led by al-Maliki, a Shia, trailing the Sunni-backed bloc of Ayad Allawi , a former interim leader, by a handful of votes. The new government led by al-Maliki includes all the major factions in Iraq’s political landscape, but the arrangement already shows signs that the political infighting isn’t over. Members of parliament, in fact, could not agree on candidates for the ministries of interior, defence and national security, which analysts say are key to promoting sectarian agendas within the country.

BBC News