Word: iraq
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Waltz also conveys the jarring dislocation that soldiers, caught in a twilight state between reality and hallucination, feel coming home. "In Iraq, it takes American soldiers maybe a few days to go back home, giving them a little time to adjust," says Folman. "For me, it was a 20-minute helicopter ride and I was back in Haifa, where the war didn't exist." We follow his shell-shocked, teenaged self as he wanders the streets, numbly watching a rock guitarist on a store TV, kids in an arcade blasting video baddies, and finally his ex-girlfriend dancing with another...
...word of advice: cheer up. It's precisely because Obama intends to pursue a genuinely progressive foreign policy that he's surrounding himself with people who can guard his right flank at home. When George W. Bush wanted to sell the Iraq war, he trotted out Colin Powell--because Powell was nobody's idea of a hawk. Now Obama may be preparing to do the reverse. To give himself cover for a withdrawal from Iraq and a diplomatic push with Iran, he's surrounding himself with people like Gates, Clinton and Jones, who can't be lampooned as doves...
...grasp the logic of this strategy, start with the fact that Obama's likely national-security picks don't actually disagree very much with the foreign policy he laid out during the campaign. Jones is on record calling the Iraq war a "debacle" and urging that the detention center at Guantánamo Bay be closed "tomorrow." Gates has also reportedly pushed for closing Gitmo and for faster withdrawals from Iraq. He has called a military strike against Iran a "strategic calamity," urged diplomacy with Tehran's mullahs and denounced the "creeping militarization" of U.S. foreign policy. (You don't hear...
Obama knows that although Iraq has tarnished the GOP foreign policy brand, Democrats remain vulnerable. When the moderate Democratic group Third Way asked voters in September whom they trusted more on national security, Democrats trailed by 14 points. (The gap has widened substantially since late 2006.) On the question of "ensuring a strong military," they trailed by 30 points--an astonishing figure, given that it is a Republican President who has stretched the Army to its breaking point...
...even if Gitmo is shuttered, that still leaves the matter of those militants captured more recently in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere whom Obama says he intends to more fully prosecute. Such knotty questions have led some experts to bet that while he will scale Gitmo back as quickly as possible, Obama won't fully close it in 2009. They point out that the Bush Administration has already quietly discharged some 500 of the 700 prisoners who have been held there...