Last spring, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq got a makeover,replacing the scandal-plagued Blackwater private security company with a firm named Triple Canopy.
The new $1 billion contract cemented Triple Canopy's status as the pre-eminent provider of private security services in Iraq, with its heavily armed employees appearing side by side with senior State Department diplomats.
An upsurge in violence in Iraq in the month of August 2009 has led to the highest number of deaths from violence in the country for more than a year.
Figures compiled by the Iraqi government show that 393 civilians were killed during August.
Sixty police officers and soldiers also died in attacks.
But the violence is well below the worst levels of 2006 and 2007 when more than 2,000 Iraqi civilians were being killed on average every month.
The Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003 with a force of approximately 130,000 troops. Top White House and Pentagon officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were convinced that, by August, those troops, welcomed with open arms by the oppressed Iraqis, would be drawn down to
30,000-40,000 and housed in newly built,
permanent military bases largely away from the country's urban areas.
WASHINGTON - The agreement announced Monday between Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
and a Shi’a resistance group called the "League of the Righteous" (Asa'ib al-Haq)
formally ended the group’s armed opposition to the regime in return for the
release of its leader and eight other Shi’a detainees. This deals a final blow to
the U.S. military’s narrative of an Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq.
Parliament
members are afraid to attend meetings. Iraq's nascent economy is
deteriorating. Hundreds of armed militias are ready to fight for their
own interests. This is Iraq today.
WASHINGTON - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hinted that US troops may remain in Iraq beyond the end of 2011, the deadline set under a bilateral agreement reached last year.
"Pursuant to the agreement, in 2011, the military presence of the Americans will take end in Iraq," Maliki told a US think-tank.
"Nevertheless, if the Iraqi forces required further training and further support, we shall examine this then at that time based on the needs of Iraq.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Embassy in Iraq, the government's largest overseas diplomatic mission, is significantly overstaffed and needs to be downsized to reflect the reduced American role in the country, according to a new State Department report.
"There is a clear consensus from the top to the bottom of the embassy: The time has come for a significant rightsizing," says the report Wednesday by the department's inspector general.
Has it all come to this? The wars and invasions, the death and destruction, the exile and torture, the resistance and collapse? In a world of shrinking energy reserves, is Iraq finally fated to become what it was going to be anyway, even before the chaos and catastrophe set in: a giant gas pump for an energy-starved planet? Will it all end not with a bang, but with a gusher? The latest oil news out of that country offers at least a hint of Iraq's fate.
For modern Iraq, oil has always been at the heart of everything.
Here's how reporters Steven Lee Myers and Marc Santora of the
New York Times described the
highly touted American withdrawal from Iraq's cities last week:
"Much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night. Gen.
Last week the U.S. "stood down" in Iraq,
finalizing the pullout of 140,000 troops from Iraqi cities and
towns -- the first step on the long path home. After more than six
years, most Americans are war-weary, even though a smaller
percentage of us have been involved in the actual fighting than in
any major conflict in U.S. history.
