WASHINGTON — President George Bush met with a leading Iraqi Shiite politician at the White House Monday amid speculation of an imminent change of direction in the U.S. approach towards charting Iraq’s national destiny. Bush said he told Sayyed Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the influential leader of SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, “we’re not satisfied with the pace of progress in Iraq.” The administration has been gathering proposals from several sources on how to put the democratization of Iraq back on track and accelerate an orderly American withdrawal. One source, the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group is [...]
This past week, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) once again dropped the “D” word into the midst of the political debate surrounding the war in Iraq. By announcing his intent to introduce legislation to reinstate the draft, Rangel once again drew attention to the fact that the United States continues to wage a long-term war with an all-volunteer force. Then, as if on queue to highlight the “burden sharing” disparity that motivated Rangel’s proposal, we learned that the President’s daughter was busy fighting her own battle to recover the purse she had stolen while dining in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thus, as [...]
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — Donald Abinan, 25, ekes out his existence in this West African metropolis by energetically directing cars in and out of empty parking spaces. He earns, by his estimate, slightly more than a dollar a day. Abinan’s turf is the street in front of the downtown mosque under construction, close to a small shopping center. But when President Laurent Gbagbo’s young partisans marched in often-violent, city-congesting demonstrations in support of their champion, he said he joined in. “I am not pro-Gbagbo, but I like his politics,” Abinan said. What attracted Abinan is not a program of economic [...]
