Akbar Ahmed: What's fundamentalist about wanting to live in dignity?

Leaders and commentators need to stop viewing Muslims as a monolith
Published: 19 July 2007

Visiting the UK from the US is an unsettling experience. One gets a feeling of deja vu. It is like seeing a blockbuster Hollywood film on "Islamic Terror" being remade for a UK audience on English sets, with an English cast. The police are not quite as fat and drive smaller vehicles, but the emotions and prejudices are the same. continue...

Pull troops out now and stand up to Bush, inquiry tells Brown

By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
Published: 16 July 2007

British troops should be pulled out of Iraq even though the violence is likely to get worse, a cross-party commission has told Gordon Brown.

The commission co-chaired by Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, called for an end to offensive military operations by British forces and a "clear exit strategy". continue...

Bush finds no way out of Iraq as approval ratings plunge

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 11 July 2007

On the ground in Iraq, George Bush's war may long ago have sunk into an unwinnable morass. But the second week of July 2007 is set to go down as the moment when he started to lose control of Iraq policy-making at home as well. continue...

'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'

Interviews with US veterans show for the first time the pattern of brutality in Iraq

By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 12 July 2007

It is an axiom of American political life that the actions of the US military are beyond criticism. Democrats and Republicans praise the men and women in uniform at every turn. Apart from the odd bad apple at Abu Ghraib, the US military in Iraq is deemed to be doing a heroic job under trying circumstances. continue...

Ahern apologises for 'suicide' comments

By David McKittrick in Belfast
Published: 06 July 2007

The Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, has apologised for a speech in which he said he did not know why critics of his government's economic performance did not commit suicide. continue...

Smokescreen for the war blown away

Published: 06 July 2007

If asparagus and not oil was Iraq's leading export then the determination of the US, Britain and Australia to continue occupying the country would certainly be less than it is. Asked why the US invaded, many Iraqis promptly answer: "To steal our oil." By admitting that securing Iraq's oil supplies was one of the reasons why Australian troops are in Iraq, Brendan Nelson is stating the obvious. The prompt denial by John Howard that Australia has any such mercenary motive shows the sensitivity of the subject. Continue...

John McCarthy: Television is making torture acceptable

Bond's ability to joke while his genitals are beaten makes a mockery of the degradation felt by real victims

Published: 24 May 2007

The blows were excruciating, and the anticipation of them almost as bad. For several weeks while held hostage in Lebanon in the late 1980s, I and my fellow captive Brian Keenan were at the mercy of a guard who took a twisted delight in inflicting pain. continue...

Fight against militants agitates Lebanon's troubled camps

Devastation: A boy played in the rubble of the Shatila refugee camp located in the outskirts of Beirut on Tuesday. Most of the refugee camps in Lebanon have housed generations of Palestinians since Israel declared independence in 1948. Jiro Ose / Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Poverty and hopelessness have helped foster the emergence of radical Islamist groups in Lebanon's 12 Palestinian refugee camps.

By Nicholas Blanford | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

We share the story behind the story.

NAHR AL-BARED PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMP, Lebanon - As battles between the Lebanese Army and Islamic militants from Fatah al-Islam entered a third day, dozens of residents of this embattled Palestinian camp seized a chance Tuesday to flee.

They waved white sheets from cars as snipers still fired at them during a brief cease-fire. "The situation is very miserable," screamed Mouein Safadi as he reached an Army post. "There are many, many people dead under the rubble. We have no water, no food, no electricity."

Ahmad Afif, driving a battered red Renault filled with his family, said the militants "are not Palestinians. They are Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis. What do they want from us?" continue...

Robert Fisk: The road to Jerusalem (via Lebanon)

Inspired by al-Qa'ida, a hitherto little-known militant group is behind the outbreak of bloody violence which has left scores dead

Published: 23 May 2007

They came into Lebanon last summer when the world was watching Israel smash this small nation in a vain attempt to destroy the Hizbollah. But the men who set up their grubby little office in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, some of them fighters from the Iraq war, others from Yemen, Syria or Lebanon itself, were far more dangerous than America and Israel believed the Hizbollah to be. They had come, they told the few journalists who bothered to seek them out "to liberate" Jerusalem because "to free our territory is a sacred duty inscribed in the Koran". continue...

Opium: Iraq's deadly new export

Amid the anarchy, farmers begin to grow opium poppies, raising fears that the country could become a major heroin supplier

By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Published: 23 May 2007

Farmers in southern Iraq have started to grow opium poppies in their fields for the first time, sparking fears that Iraq might become a serious drugs producer along the lines of Afghanistan. continue...

Afghan MP expelled for calling parliament 'worse than a zoo'

By Kim Sengupta
Published: 22 May 2007

The most outspoken female MP in Afghanistan has been expelled from parliament after saying proceedings had descended to a level "worse than a zoo". The views of Malalai Joya, in a television interview, outraged fellow parliamentarians, who immediately voted to suspend her from the house for the rest of her five-year term. Some even demanded that she should be brought before a court for defamation and stripped of the right to stand again as a candidate. continue...

Israeli woman killed by rocket fired from Gaza by militants

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Published: 22 May 2007

An Israeli woman civilian was killed by a Qassam rocket last night after Israeli air strikes killed five Palestinians - including all four members of an Islamic Jihad rocket launching cell.

The woman was three metres from a car hit by a rocket near the commercial centre of the southern border town of Sderot. Her death was the first in the current spate of rocket attacks by Gaza militants on Israel. One man was injured. continue...

Robert Fisk: A front-row seat for this Lebanese tragedy

Published: 22 May 2007

There is something obscene about watching the siege of Nahr el-Bared. The old Palestinian camp - home to 30,000 lost souls who will never go "home" - basks in the Mediterranean sunlight beyond a cluster of orange orchards. Soldiers of the Lebanese army, having retaken their positions on the main road north, idle their time aboard their old personnel carriers. And we - we representatives of the world's press - sit equally idly atop a half-built apartment block, basking in the little garden or sipping cups of scalding tea beside the satellite dishes where the titans of television stride by in their blue space suits and helmets. continue...

Johann Hari: Blair's legacy lies in the Baghdad morgue

As one who made an equally foolish misjudgement, I've some insight on how his thinking went so wrong
Published: 14 May 2007

As the crowd clapped along to the old back-to-the-Nineties tune of "Things Can Only Get Better" in Trimdon Labour Club, awaiting Tony Blair's swansong, there was a bleaker postscript to the Blair years piling up half a world away.

In Baghdad morgue, these days they separate out the hundreds of Shia bodies and Sunni bodies that are dumped on them every day. It's easy to do: the Shia have been beheaded, while the Sunnis have been tortured to death with power-drills. continue...

William E. Odom

Senior Fellow
Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. Headquarters

Areas of Expertise

• Military and strategic issues
• Intelligence issues
• Asian economic and security issues
• Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies
• European politics and military issues

Biographical Highlights

Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. As Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, he was responsible for the nation's signals intelligence and communications security. From 1981 to 1985, he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer.

From 1977 to 1981, General Odom was Military Assistant to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski. As a member of the National Security Council staff, he worked upon strategic planning, Soviet affairs, nuclear weapons policy, telecommunications policy, and Persian Gulf security issues. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1954, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970. continue...

Know When to Fold 'Em

From the January 11, 2007, New York Daily News
January 11, 2007  by William E. Odom

The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said that war is always a gamble. President Bush stepped up to the Iraqi poker table in the spring of 2003 and won a couple of big hands. Flush with the cash and a cry that, "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed," he failed to pick up his chips and go home. Instead, he has hung around for the last 3½ years, betting on lousy hands - pairs of twos and threes and numerous inside straights. continue...

Men who tried to leak Bush memo jailed

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 11 May 2007

A civil servant and an MP's researcher were jailed for disclosing the contents of a secret memo recording discussions between Tony Blair and George Bush about the war in Iraq.

David Keogh, 50, a Cabinet Office communications officer, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for copying the four-page document and passing it on to Leo O'Connor, 44, a researcher for an anti-war Labour MP, Tony Clarke. O'Connor, who passed the memo to Mr Clarke, was jailed for three months for breaching the Official Secrets Act. continue...

Freedom Of Information: Government could be forced to publish secrets of Iraq memo

What did Tony Blair tell George Bush when they discussed Iraq? Robert Verkaik, Law Editor, considers how the Freedom of Information Act might provide the answer
Published: 11 May 2007

A civil servant and an MP's researcher were yesterday sentenced by an Old Bailey judge for being involved in the disclosure of the contents of a top-secret Iraq memo which recorded conversations between Tony Blair and George Bush during a 2004 meeting in Washington. The same memo has been the subject of an 18-month inquiry under the Freedom of Information Act.

A request made to the Government for the memo's formal disclosure under the right-to-know legislation is now with the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, who has the power to order release of the four-page document. Such a move would be extremely embarrassing for the Government and undermine the decision to prosecute the two men under the Official Secrets Act of 1989. continue...

US reconstruction 'successes' in Iraq falling apart

posted May 02, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. EDT

A government inspector report finds sectarian violence, corruption major factors in the disrepair.

By Arthur Bright | csmonitor.com

A report by the federal office overseeing US reconstruction in Iraq says that of eight rebuilding projects, costing some $150 million and previously declared successes, seven are now in disrepair or have been abandoned.

The New York Times writes that the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), which released its quarterly report to Congress Monday, found that the "seven projects were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting, and expensive equipment that lay idle." continue...

Balancing the Prophet

By Karen Armstrong
Published: April 27 2007 15:43

Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister figure. During the 12th century, Christians were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims, even though Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. The scholar monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who established the false religion of Islam by the sword. They also, with ill-concealed envy, berated him as a lecher and sexual pervert at a time when the popes were attempting to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy. Our Islamophobia became entwined with our chronic anti-Semitism; Jews and Muslims, the victims of the crusaders, became the shadow self of Europe, the enemies of decent civilisation and the opposite of ”us”. continue...