The mosque’s golden dome gleamed like a fallen sun, burning out the mud-colored city of Samarra with its broken shops and acres of cinderblock poverty. Two slender minarets framed the dome in regal style and a grid of delicate scaffolding wound around it, suggesting repairs planned and then stalled, probably because of the war. From the neighborhoods beyond, streams of black smoke bled into the winter sky above satellite dishes and slack electric wires. I watched the dome through the battered back window of a U.S. medevac helicopter as it descended to retrieve wounded soldiers at a makeshift landing zone. [...]
On February 5, 2007, Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski accepted the resignation of Defense Minsiter Radoslaw Sikorski. Although Sikorski’s departure will have few short-term implications, over the long term it could weaken Poland’s support for several important American-led security initiatives. Sikorski indicated that he resigned out of frustration because the government would not provide him with sufficient resources to ensure the success of the country’s expanded role in the NATO-led post-conflict stability operation in Afghanistan. Characterizing the deployment as Poland’s “most dangerous mission since WWII,” Sikorski had unsuccessfully requested substantial funds to enable the Polish military to generate goodwill among [...]
The conventional wisdom among neoconservatives who advocated an invasion of Iraq is that Bush administration incompetence explains what has gone wrong. The problem, they say, lies in the execution of what they still maintain was a noble idea: that invading Iraq would put anti-American forces in the Middle East on the defensive and initiate the spread of democracy through the enhancement of U.S. dominance of the region. This collective washing of hands culminated in a series of interviews with well-known neoconservatives in the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair. Those interviewed pointed towards the Bush administration’s operational mistakes and bureaucratic [...]
