I think I wrote a couple days ago about Matt Gallagher’s great Iraq war memoir, Kaboom. My schedule only permitted me to read it in fits and starts, and so one of my pleasures on vacation was to go back and read the whole thing, giving a funny, moving and insightful book the attention it [...]

Amnesty International released its annual report into global capital punishment, and the New York Times read it so I don’t have to. China is far and away the world leader in executing people, although the exact death toll is considered a state secret (one imagines last year’s unrest in Xinjiang led to increased executions), but [...]

Will I have to apologize to Bob Blackwill for constantly carping on his Allawi obsession circa 2004-5? We shall see. This is cause for far more genuine nervousness: Concerns about unrest intensified after Mr. Maliki released a statement last week that said the election commission must respond to demands for a recount in order to [...]

The United States invaded Iraq. We barely mark today with an anniversary, a sign that the Iraq war has lost not merely the centrality it once occupied in American political discussion but practically all of its purchase. In a manner breathtaking to behold considering the 90,000 U.S. troops who are still in Iraq — is [...]

Anthony Shadid, who saw the rise of the Sadrists in 2003-4 clearer than anyone, has a great piece about their political return in Iraq’s parliamentary election. Shadid reports that the Sadrists will win “more than 40 seats,” a figure even Sadr’s Shiite rivals concede is true, thereby tipping the balance of the Shiite coalition in [...]

I have yet to see an account of the Iraqi election that puts fraud at nearly the levels experienced this summer in the Afghan presidential election. Nor have I seen an account of initial turnout figures — admittedly very fragmentary at the moment — that overturns the pre-election expectation that a) Prime Minister Maliki’s State [...]

I once had the pleasure of being introduced to Dan Senor during Peter Beinart’s 2003 Hannukah party. We ate some latkes and chatted amiably about Iraq. He didn’t let his mask of smug bullshittery slip the whole time. Everything was going awesomely in Iraq. Sectarianism was nonsense and the economy was rarin’ to go. In [...]

Question has come up, so for what it’s worth: I want some greater degree of certainty over the facts before I say anything, and Tony Shadid tells us that preliminary data can arrive as early as tomorrow. Yes, this degree of uncertainty did not bother me so much in 2005 and 2009. But this time [...]

Hakim al-Zamili was Moqtada Sadr’s man in the Iraqi Ministry of Health, and contemporaneous reporting indicated he ran it like a butcher shop, targeting Sunnis for disappearance and murder. An Iraqi court failed to convict him. Now he’s running for parliament. Sunnis who joined the Baath Party for simple professional reasons during the Saddam era, [...]

Still chewing over Tom Ricks’ let’s-stay-in-Iraq proposal, I remembered that in July I asked Prime Minister Maliki if he thought the Status of Forces Agreement that stipulates a total U.S. withdrawal by 2011 ought to be renegotiated, and he gave a no-but answer. (That being: “If Iraqi forces required further training and further support, we [...]