Iraqi refugees in Egypt get a free flight to a very uncertain future:
BAGHDAD (AP) _ Several hundred Iraqi refugees flew home from Egypt on Monday on the Iraqi prime minister’s plane, the first government-organized flight aimed at accelerating the return of Iraqis now that violence has waned.
Many of those returning on the free flight, however, [...]

Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor and eminent scholar of the Persian Gulf, has written a short essay on Hillary Clinton’s recent threat to “obliterate Iran” should it attack Israel for the excellent Gulf 2000 listserv he maintains. Notwithstanding the chiefly domestic US political reasons that led Clinton to engage in rather vulgar sable-rattling, Sick [...]

Doug Feith trots out a line about Saddam Hussein being part of an “international terrorist network” just as dangerous as al-Qaeda. This guy is truly shameless.

No clear end to occupation:
A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.
The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to [...]

A very good appearance by Sinan Antoon on Charlie Rose, where he dismisses the “what-went-wrong-in-Iraq” line of argument as forgetting that the US should have never gone in there in 2003 after a decade of sanctions.

Hannah has a great post about a very coquette (and courageous) Shia Tikriti woman:

How on earth, I asked her, does a Shiite Tikriti living under control of the Mahdi Army get away with dressing as she does when these days even Christian women have begun to cover their hair to deflect attention?
K replied that she [...]

Iraqi Voices in Cairo is a collection of accounts of Iraq refugees’ lives in Egypt, where over 150,000 reside with few opportunities to remake their lives:

Approximately 150,000 refugees from Iraq are trapped in Cairo, Egypt, with little hope of integration and no home to return to. We are an association of reporters and researchers working [...]

From Nir Rosen’s The Myth of the Surge in Rolling Stone, on the co-optation of former insurgents that had caused a decline in violence over the past year in Iraq :

But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. [...]

Paul Rogers on the Iraq Project:
In an echo of the Baghdad embassy, Balad has grown to become the largest US air-base anywhere in the world: a fifteen-square-mile mini-city with its own bus routes, fast-food outlets, two supermarkets and accommodation for 40,000 military personnel and contractors. The base - from which up to 550 air [...]

Next time you hear some one in the US say that voting for anti-war candidate (or a just war critic like Obama) is a disservice to the troops, consider this:

In the 4th quarter of 2007, individuals in the Army, Navy and Air Force made those branches of the armed services the No. 13, No. 18 [...]

U.S. hopes to arm Pakistani tribes against Al Qaeda:
WASHINGTON: A new and classified American military proposal outlines an intensified effort to enlist tribal leaders in the frontier areas of Pakistan in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces against an expanding militancy, American military [...]

Report Says Hussein Was Open To Exile Before 2003 Invasion:
“The Egyptians are talking to Saddam Hussein,” Bush said. “He seems to have indicated he would be open to exile if they would let him take one billion dollars and all the information he wants on weapons of mass destruction.”
I can think of several others I’d [...]

Boston Review - No Going Back:
The American occupation has been more disastrous than the Mongols’ sack of Baghdad in the 13th century. Iraq’s human capital has fled, its intellectuals and professionals, the educated, the moneyed classes, the political elite. They will not return. And the government is nonexistent at best. After finally succumbing to Iraqi [...]

From George Packer’s blog in The New Yorker, an odd theory about why Professor Fouad Ajami is so upbeat about Iraq:
It would be wrong to see in Ajami’s version of Iraq the same delusional thinking as in George W. Bush’s. The difference between them is the difference between a strategy and a fantasy. The President’s [...]

Bomber strikes Sunni-Shiite meeting:
BAQOUBA, Iraq - A suicide bomber struck a U.S.-promoted reconciliation meeting of Shiite and Sunni tribal sheiks as they were washing their hands or sipping tea Monday, killing at least 15 people, including the city’s police chief, and wounding about 30 others.
Two U.S. soldiers were also wounded in the 8:30 p.m. blast [...]

A new poll suggests over one million dead in Iraq since the invasion:
In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ‘surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003.
Previous estimates, [...]

I can’t claim anything as to its veracity, but below is an interesting anthropological-military analysis of what might have motivated the recent switch of key Sunni tribes from fighting with foreign jihadist elements to fighting against them. Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt (SWJ Blog):
The uprising began last year, far out in western Anbar province, but [...]

Clerics Begin to Take Over:
“Our country has turned from a secular into a purely religious country,” Munthir Sulayman, social reform activist in Baghdad told IPS. “We were dreaming of a huge development in social affairs to become more modern and free, where individuals can play their natural role in developing the country through participation in [...]

Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq - washingtonpost.com:
The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.
Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of [...]