713 posts tagged with iraq and war.
Displaying 1 through 50 of 713. Subscribe:
'This Is What the US Military Was Doing in Iraq'
Photos of 2005 Haditha Massacre Finally Published - "On Tuesday, The New Yorker published 10 of the massacre photos—part of a collaboration with the "In the Dark" podcast that joined the magazine last year.' // The podcast's reporting team had filed its public records request four years ago, then sued the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Central Command over their failure to hand over the images. "In the Dark" host Madeleine Baran also traveled with a colleague to Iraq's remote Anbar Province to meet relatives of some of the 24 Iraqi civilians—who ranged in age from 1 to 76—slaughtered by U.S. troops." [more inside]
As the Great Game Goes 'Round: Middle East Rapprochement & Realignment
Qatar and UAE in process of restoring diplomatic ties [ungated] - "The restoration of ties comes amid a broader regional push for reconciliation with Iran and Saudi Arabia agreeing last month to re-establish relations after years of hostility, which threatened instability in the Gulf and stoked the war in Yemen." [more inside]
Unvanquished
On Iraq’s art under two decades of occupation. An often overlooked aspect of this story is how these artists had worked to develop a sense of appreciation among local audiences, who were being introduced to a new definition of art spread by a heterogeneous global modernism, the paradigms of which were distinct from those of preexisting traditions. They also inaugurated educational programs, galleries and art museums, publications, and other modalities of displaying, disseminating, and convening around artistic production. These efforts had a tremendous impact not only in Iraq but throughout the region. One of the catastrophic repercussions of the invasion was that it undermined decades of that labor.
Victims never forget
John le Carré was probably always a critic of American hegemony. But as he grew older he was less subtle [more inside]
The Human Toll of America’s Air Wars
Airstrikes allowed America to wage war with minimal risk to its troops. But for civilians on the ground, they brought terror and tragedy. [NYT investigation] [more inside]
Brett Kavanaugh, in Florida, with the Hand Recount
“Post 9/11 thread for people to post the wildest shit they remember from 01 to 06 I'll start:
People thought Osama had an entire mountain hollowed out that he was using as his base and that's why AQ was hard to find and that somehow a group of like 30 dudes arranged this.” (Twitter) Thread of reminders of the various scandals, current connections, and WTFery of the first G. W. Bush administration.
The boy in the photo
In the summer of 2018, BBC cameraman Andy Alcroft was waiting to film an interview at Exeter St David’s railway station, when he was approached by one of Amar’s friends. “You should do a report about him - Amar. The boy who came over from Iraq. Remember him? He’s got an amazing story,” he said. Andy took some contact details and we went to meet Amar in the Devon village where he still lives. We thought we might end up doing some kind of “catch-up” feature. “Whatever happened to the orphan Amar?” - that kind of thing. But when Amar revealed he had been receiving unexpected social media messages from a stranger, the story took an unexpected turn.
so it goes
I am now 38. I live in a rented house in Pittsboro, N.C., with my wife, my two daughters and my dog. I try to be kind. I try not to hurt people. And though I have just told you all the things I know with certainty about that day in September in Tal Afar, Iraq, when I was 24, I’m still not sure what it means. I don’t know if my being there in that place and at that time makes me a bad person, but on most days I think it means I do not get to claim to be a good one. Kevin Powers writes for the New York Times on the moral clarity of Slaughterhouse-five fifty years after its publication.
The War In Iraq Outlasted The Weekly Standard
“From the Weekly Standard’s April 28, 2003, issue — that is, a month after the U.S. invasion of Iraq — this may simultaneously be the worst, funniest, and most terrifying writing ever published in the English language. For instance, its opening paragraph includes the phrase, “Now that the war in Iraq is over.” You must read it for yourself; it cannot be explained, only experienced.” The 10 Most Appalling Articles In The Weekly Standard’s Short and Dreadful Life.
Architects of War
It's the fall of 1990. You’re in architecture school. Your assignment is to collect blueprints from a foreign country on the verge of American invasion. Are you helping to preserve threatened buildings—or unwittingly supplying intelligence for more accurate U.S. missile strikes? Geoff Manaugh investigates. [SLDailyBeast]
Radicalism In The Ranks
“On Monday, Task & Purpose reported that Army 2nd Lt. Spenser Rapone was slapped with an other-than-honorable discharge (and potentially $300,000 in West Point tuition repayments) after a photo went viral last September of him as a West Point cadet with the words “Communism Will Win” written in his cover.” Why Did The Military Keep A Neo-Nazi Marine But Boot That ‘Commie Cadet’? (Task And Purpose) The ‘Commie Cadet’, Spenser Rapone, in his own words “My actions overseas did not help or protect anybody. I felt like I was little more than a bully, surrounded by the most well-armed and technologically advanced military in history, in one of the poorest countries in the world.” (Interview with Rapone on the leftist veteran podcast What Hell Of A Way To Die) While The “Neo -Nazi Marine”, Vasillios Pistolis , at the Unite The Right Rally in Charolettville is likely to be pushed out, he’s only one of many veterans found to be active in or training with white nationalist or Neo-Nazi groups.
When Terrorists Run City Hall
We unearthed thousands of internal documents that help explain how the Islamic State stayed in power so long. "One of the keys to their success was their diversified revenue stream. The group drew its income from so many strands of the economy that airstrikes alone were not enough to cripple it...More surprisingly, the documents provide further evidence that the tax revenue the Islamic State earned far outstripped income from oil sales. It was daily commerce and agriculture — not petroleum — that powered the economy of the caliphate." (Warning: descriptions of assault and murder, also just freaky) [more inside]
One more battle and Mosul will be fully liberated, inshallah
Gripping pictures on the front - absorbing stories on the back!
Desert Storm Cards:
Although we Americans remain strongly split in our beliefs about whether or not our military belonged in Iraq after the Twin Towers fell, most of us felt it was the right thing to do to help Kuwait in it's battle against Saddam Hussein's invasion way back in 1991.[more inside]
Musings on Iraq
Musings on Iraq. Since 2008, journalist Joel Wing has kept a comprehensive, often day-by-day account on the politics and military actions surrounding the ongoing war in Iraq. His blog entries are at length, detailed, and thoroughly cited. [more inside]
From Jingoism to Feelings - the aesthetic response to collective trauma
Lindsay Ellis' (previously) new video series 'Loose Canon' (Previously) takes a look at the different media takes on the same cultural character or property. She takes on the longest and most detailed one yet with the media reaction to and portrayal of the 2001 9/11 attacks. Part 1 (21:21) Part 2 (27:37) (Warning for photos and video of attacks)
The Generation Kill Transcript Project
suggests that Bangladesh’s militant networks are internationalizing...
Bangladesh Attack Is New Evidence That ISIS Has Shifted Its Focus Beyond the Mideast [The New York Times] Friday night’s assault on the Holey Artisan Bakery in the diplomatic district of Dhaka, in which at least 20 hostages and two police officers were killed, marks a scaling up of ambition and capacity for Bangladesh’s Islamist militancy, which has until now carried out pinpoint assassinations, mostly of critics of Islam and members of religious minorities. [more inside]
The Graves of the Marines I Lost
"In the early hours of Jan. 26, 2005, one of two large Marine helicopters transporting troops for this expanded and therefore riskier mission crashed, killing all onboard: 30 Marines and a Navy corpsman....I promised myself that night that I would visit all 31 grave sites. I needed to get a sense of where these military service members came from: the schools and churches they attended; the streets where they learned to drive; the neighborhoods where many of their families still lived."
the Kurds are on the move
The Kurdish key - "Kurds are key to a Middle East solution as they hold the balance of power in Iraq and Syria, as well as being in the midst of an insurrection in Turkey. The US needs the Kurds as much as it needs the Turks in its efforts to defeat Isis." (also btw /r/Kurdistan: Who Exactly Are 'the Kurds'?; End Times for the Caliphate?)
Ending the new Thirty Years War
Ending the new Thirty Years War "Why the real history of the Peace of Westphalia in 17th-century Europe offers a model for bringing stability to the Middle East."
Ark and flood in one package
The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was established in 1961 and has grown into one of the US government’s largest intelligence organizations. It employs 17,000 people, including thousands stationed overseas, and its 2013 fiscal year budget request was for $3.15 billion. Yet, the DIA is also one of the more secretive agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, regularly denying access to basic information about its structure, functions and activities. On November 20, the National Security Archive posted a new sourcebook of over 50 declassified documents that help to illuminate the DIA’s five-decades-long history. [more inside]
Tables turning
Putin Bets Big on Aggressive Syria Policy
As the UK government denies reports that RAF pilots have been given the green light to shoot down hostile Russian jets in Syria.
Iraq has begun bombing Islamic State insurgents with help from a new intelligence center with staff from Russia, Iran and Syria.
Russia is using electronic warfare to cloak its actions in Syria from Isis and Nato.
What happens if Russia decides to go into Iraq. How to respond to Russia in Syria while avoiding World War Three.
Meanwhile Shiites in Iraq Hailing Putin for Syria Push.
Iraq has begun bombing Islamic State insurgents with help from a new intelligence center with staff from Russia, Iran and Syria.
Russia is using electronic warfare to cloak its actions in Syria from Isis and Nato.
What happens if Russia decides to go into Iraq. How to respond to Russia in Syria while avoiding World War Three.
Meanwhile Shiites in Iraq Hailing Putin for Syria Push.
"We thought we’d rather die in a plastic boat than die there."
"For the next several days, I’m going to be sharing stories from refugees who are currently making their way across Europe." Humans of New York went to Greece (and will go to other locations) to talk to newly-arrived refugees fleeing Iraq as well as some locals. It will be posting their stories and photos. There are spots of kindness, however, as you'd expect, they are largely terrifying and tragic. (Warning: Human suffering and death.) [more inside]
The Forgotten Battalion
In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another. The Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment (2/7) was deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2008. During eight months of combat, the unit killed hundreds of enemy fighters and suffered more casualties than any other Marine battalion that year. When its members returned, most left the military. Seven years later, at least 13 of the 1200 members of that battalion have killed themselves in the interim: two while on active duty, the rest after they left the military. That is nearly four times the rate for young male veterans as a whole and 14 times that for all Americans. (This story discusses self-harm, suicide and suicidal ideation. Some readers may find the content disturbing.) [more inside]
ISIS, ISIL, Daesh
The Mystery of ISIS
The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise—the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters—fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.[more inside]
Making a State By Iron and Blood
A War Of All Against All
Why Turkey is bombing the Kurds more than Islamic State - "Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's bombing campaign — capitalizing on the nationalist, anti-Kurd sentiment that has been steadily growing inside Turkey — could help him regain his AKP party's absolute majority in parliament now that coalition talks have failed and snap elections are likely." [more inside]
Meet self-proclaimed freedom fighter Matthew VanDyke.
I said, hey, you’re good at combat and people need you here; why not go?
Many American, Canadian, and British military veterans opposed to the actions of ISIS in Iraq have been, individually, going over to fight with the Kurdish Peshmerga for some time now, bringing thousands of dollars of military gear and irreplaceable training. There have been so many of them fighting that the Peshmerga are now actively recruiting military veterans online. Not to be internet-outdone, military veterans have begun investigating forming units of their own to fight ISIS -including notable and controversial science-fiction author John Ringo, who suggested trying to crowdfund for 'a brigade of soldiers'. [more inside]
"disorder ... is cheap to create, but very costly to prevent"
The Galula Doctrine: An Interview with Galula's Biographer A.A. Cohen, who wrote Galula: The Life And Writings of the French Officer Who Defined Counterinsurgency, and an excerpt. [more inside]
Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.
How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times.
According to one senior official, “He wasn’t up to the job.”
President Obama will announce today that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is submitting his resignation. According to the New York Times, "The officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Hagel, 68, as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ." [more inside]
A lieutenant general's op-ed about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Lieutenant General Daniel P. Bolger, recently retired from 35 years in the US Army, reflects on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "As a general, I got it wrong."
The zeal these young men have for killing surprises me.
"Many Marines I talk to are skeptical of the aims used to justify the war - fighting terrorism, getting weapons of mass destruction (which they never see). Quite a few accept that this war was probably fought for oil." 'The Killer Elite', Evan Wright's coverage of a US Marine Corps Battalion in the 2003 Iraq War (later developed into the book and TV series Generation Kill). [more inside]
From Above
How the US Stumbled into the Drone Era [WSJ] As ubiquitous as Predators, Reapers, Global Hawks and their ilk may now seem, the U.S. actually stumbled into the drone era. Washington got into the business of using drones for counterterrorism well before 9/11—not out of any steely strategic design or master plan but out of bureaucratic frustration, bickering and a series of only half-intentional decisions.
But they hadn't destroyed it.
On Tuesday, a group of Islamic militants that were thrown out of al-Qaeda for being too violent took over Iraq's second largest city. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (abbreviated as ISIS) kicked the Iraqi Army out of Mosul, a wealthy city in northwestern Iraq. Today, ISIS secured another northern city, Tikrit. It currently controls an area "the size of Belgium," according to Jason Lyall, a Yale University political scientist who studies insurgencies. [more inside]
War fatigue
The young men and women enlisting in the armed forces now were in pre-school on 9/11. "As a nation we have internalized our longest military conflict; it has suffused the social, political, and cultural body. The war is not something the nation is doing; it's simply something that is." Vox on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from Jessica Lynch to Bowe Bergdahl. [more inside]
"I am honor-bound to protect you, brother."
The Interpreters We Left Behind. "As our troops pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we're abandoning fixers and translators to the dangerous countrymen who view them as traitors. Asylum in the U.S. could be their last hope. If only we'd let them in."
Can't Put a Lid On It
What Combat Feels Like, Presented in the Style of a Graphic Novel. An animated film based on a true story by Iraq veteran Colby Buzzell (previously).
broken .
"Daniel Somers was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was part of Task Force Lightning, an intelligence unit." [more inside]
How A War Hero Became A Serial Bank Robber
How A War Hero Became A Serial Bank Robber. "Army medic Nicholas Walker returned home from Iraq after 250 combat missions, traumatized and broken. His friends and family couldn’t help him. Therapy couldn’t help him. Heroin couldn’t help him. Pulling bank heists helped him." [Via]
Other than Honorable
"A Gazette investigation shows an increasing number of soldiers, including wounded combat veterans, are being kicked out of the service for misconduct, often with no benefits, as the Army downsizes after a decade of war."
"Disposable: Surge in discharges includes wounded soldiers"
"Left Behind: No break for the wounded"
"Locked Away: Army struggles with wounded soldiers"
"Disposable: Surge in discharges includes wounded soldiers"
"Left Behind: No break for the wounded"
"Locked Away: Army struggles with wounded soldiers"
Crossing the "Red Line"?
Syria Options Go From Bad To Worse
As reports have surfaced of possible use of sarin gas in the Syrian civil war, calls by long-time proponents of U.S. intervention on behalf of the anti-Assad rebels have grown to a fever pitch. These same voices, both at home and abroad, have evoked the administration’s previously stated “red line” on use of chemical weapons. But even assuming that reports of WMD usage in Syria turn out to be true, the Obama Administration’s position may be far more nuanced than previously thought.[more inside]
"Never, ever let anybody use your gender as an excuse."
"Women get flustered under fire. They're too fragile, too emotional. They lack the ferocity required to take a life. They can't handle pain. They're a distraction, a threat to cohesion, a provocative tease to close-quartered men. These are the sort of myths you hear from people who oppose the U.S. military's evolving new rules about women in combat. But for women who have already been in combat, who have earned medals fighting alongside men, the war stories they tell don't sound a thing like myths" [more inside]
How the Bush administration sold the Iraq war
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.” Zinni, sitting right next to Cheney’s lectern, says he “literally bolted” when he heard the vice president’s comments. “In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD [weapons of mass destruction], through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.” Rachel Maddow hosts Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War, a documentary special, based on the eponymous book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, that will air Monday, February 18 on MSNBC at 9 p.m.
Overcoming student debt by working in war zone
"If I had felt any unease that I was potentially exploiting a horrible situation for personal gain, it was short-lived. The next four months were the most stressful, difficult, and dangerous of my life until that point, and probably—hopefully—ever. ... On December 31, 2004, I achieved a couple of significant milestones: I made my final student loan payment, and I had a positive net worth for the first time in my adult life. Mortars, rockets, and car bombs aside, that was pretty satisfying."
How to kill a rational peasant
You might want to have your surprised face handy.
Curveball comes clean: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression." ... When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."