With newspaper reports today suggesting that a pullout [or even a phased one] from Iraq is on the cards in the very near future one has to wonder where that leaves the people and country of Iraq. Abandoned it would seem - and confronting a civil war. That the war is said to have cost the US some US$191 billion [yes! - you read correctly] is one thing. The death and carnage is another. It is almost now beyond doubt that the US - and therefore Australia and Great Britain as willing members of the coalition of the willing - had absolutely no plan, let alone an idea, what would happen once that dreadful war of "shock and awe" got underway and the military forces arrived at the gates of Baghdad. Time magazine has an interesting article on its investigation of how the US embarked on and undertook this entire Iraq debacle
There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives? In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
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