I was following Elizabeth Edwards today in New Hampshire, and got a chance to hear her talk about her conscription into the Mommy Wars. So now that I’ve come home, set my suitcase in the hall, helped one Swampkid with his high school Spanish homework, watched a television show with the Fifth Grader who claimed [...]
Juan Cole has some fascinating stuff here. Actually, Jay: Allawi is a former Ba’ath Party member, and always had ties to the Ba’athist segment of the Sunni insurgency. And this kind of confirms that Allawi’s support, such as it is, comes from an alliance of the powerless.
Bobby Ghosh reports that the Baath Party — yes, that Baath Party – is endorsing Ayad Allawi to replace Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister. You’d think, for a Shi’ite, that an endorsement from the Sunni-dominated outfit that Saddam rode to power and used to consolidate his dictatorship would be the political equivalent of a [...]
Eric Pooley spent a lot of time on the campaign trail with John and Elizabeth Edwards trying to capture the essence of the candidate, his populist message and his Iowa-focused strategy for leapfrogging Clinton and Obama on his way to the nomination. Pooley’s excellent piece appears in the new print issue of Time, and on-line [...]
David Ignatius has a fascinating column this morning, in which it is claimed that Condoleezza Rice and Nancy Pelosi–now there’s a duet!–prevented the CIA from covertly supporting moderate and secular politicians in the 2005 Iraqi elections, even as Iran was backing the Shi’ite religious list with lots of dough. Rice’s faith in democracy is touching, [...]
The news that Muqtada al-Sadr is “ordering” his Mahdi Army to stand down for six months–apparently half-a-year is the time unit of choice on both sides of the Iraq War–may be a very positive sign or a sign of weakness or nothing much at all. Positive Sign: For months, the U.S. has been trying, through [...]
