Suffer the Children
Number of children dying higher than when the country was under sanctions.
By Hind al-Safar in Baghdad (ICR No. 237, 16-Nov-07)
Child mortality in Iraq has spiralled because of the tense security situation, deteriorating health services and lack of medical supplies, say experts.According to a report released in May 2007 by aid agency Save the Children, “Iraq’s child mortality rate has increased by a staggering 150 per cent since 1990, more than any other country.” The report, entitled State of the World’s Mothers 2007, said that some 122,000 Iraqi children – the equivalent of one in eight – died in 2005, before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of the deaths were among newborn babies in their first month of life….

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A Real Terrorist is on the Loose
Humanity and Mother Earth are in Danger
(A speech at Northeastern University, Chicago)
Ali Baghdadi
I am greatly honored to be speaking to you. I must tell you from the start that I will not beat around the bushes. I am not here to entertain you or to please you. Truth sometimes hurts. You are adults. You can take it. I am a Palestinian, an Arab and a Muslim. That means I belong to the people that the United States government has designated as enemy. I belong to the camp of the “bad guys”, who are punished, murdered, tortured and even raped. But I am also an American. I belong to the camp of the “good guys”, who are doing the murder, torture and rape, who are waging what President George W. Bush calls a crusade, against my people, the “terrorists”. Israel is an integral member of this camp. As a matter of fact, the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), a Zionist-Jewish lobby in Washington, is leading this camp….

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A “Jewish State”: I Can’t Define It, But You Have To Recognize It.
? Lawrence of Cyberia
At one time, everyone knew that peace would break out all over the Middle East if the Palestinians would just recognize Israel. But then the PLO went and spoiled things by recognizing Israel, so there had to be a new excuse for not ending the Occupation. The new demand was that the Palestinians had to recognize Israel’s “right to exist”. And now, to ward off any danger that peace might raise its ugly head at Annapolis, here’s a timely new one: the Palestinians have to recognize that Israel exists; that it has a right to exist; and that it has the right to exist as a “Jewish state” (…) When Olmert and Livni talk about Israel as a “Jewish state”, they mean essentially that it is a state that is for Jewish people, even if they don’t reside or have citizenship there. It would be very handy for them if they could force the Palestinians to accept this definition, because then they could go into final status talks with some of the more intractable issues – like how to resolve the Right of Return – pre-emptively swept off the table. After all, how can Palestinians have a right to return to their homes in a “Jewish state” when they’re not even Jewish, and non-Jews shouldn’t expect to be allowed to live in a “Jewish state” in the first place…

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Gay death in Iraq: a desperate call for help
artmika
…Here is just a small excerpt from this chilling documentary about ‘proud’ confessions of a father who killed his son: “I found out he was gay. I killed my son and now I am considered a hero by my friends. I hanged him in my house, in front of his brother to give an example to him and to prevent him from doing the same.” He was charged for murder but soon was released after his lawyer explained why he committed his crime. Apparently, new Iraqi constitution states that a person who commits the crime to restore the honour of the family should be exempt from the prosecution….

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Afghan prisons: What Ottawa knew
Bloody floors, constant use of leg irons and few checks on authority revealed in declassified government files
PAUL KORING AND ALAN FREEMAN, Globeandmai
The Harper government knew prison conditions were appalling long before The Globe and Mail published a series of stories last April detailing the abuse and torture of prisoners turned over by Canadian soldiers to Afghanistan’s notorious secret police, documents released this week show. The heavily censored documents also show that at the same time as senior ministers were denying evidence of abuse, officials on the ground in Afghanistan were collecting first-hand accounts from prisoners of mistreatment. Although large sections of the more than 1,000 pages of documents and messages between Ottawa, Kabul and Kandahar remain blacked out, two disturbing pictures emerge from the pile….

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When night falls, the assassins gather in Hayaniya Square
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in Basra, The Guardian
Hayaniya Square in Basra is a busy intersection leading to a poor and run-down neighbourhood. On one side of the piazza, sewage water flows through what was once a dried-up river bed, filling the air with an oppressive smell. On the other side, a pair of kebab stalls send columns of smoke from skewers of burning meat into the warm air. Two sheep, whose fate lies on those skewers, stand tethered to a nearby telegraph pole. The square is dominated by a painting of six men dressed in casual trousers and jackets, behind whom loom the faces of Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi army, and his father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. The six men, described on the mural as martyrs, are Mahdi army commanders who were killed by the British. At night, when traffic in the square slows, a group of men gather. These are the sakkaka, or assassins. Their Toyota saloons, chosen for the voluminous boots that can accommodate two bodies with room to spare, stand parked nearby. The assassins chat, eat kebabs and stroll around in small groups, discussing their sinister trade…

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Tony Blair: ‘I wanted war – it was the right thing to do’
Philip Webster, TimesOnline
Tony Blair has admitted for the first time that he ignored the pleas of his aides and ministers to deter President Bush from waging war on Iraq because he believed that America was doing the right thing. And he has acknowledged that he turned down a last-ditch offer from Mr Bush to pull Britain out of the conflict. He has also revealed that he wishes he had published the full reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) instead of the infamous September dossier about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that so damaged him, and was almost certainly one of the factors that contributed to him leaving office sooner than he wanted….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 16 November 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
In a dispatch posted at 6:15pm Baghdad time Friday evening, the Yaqen News Agency reported that US forces are coming under heavy criticism from historical and archaeological circles in Samarra’ for their abuse of Iraqi historical sites in the city. Yaqen reported Haytham Qadduri, a member of the Antiquities Police in Samarra’ as saying, “the American occupation turned the Caliph al-Mu’tasim Historical Site into a military camp more than a month ago, reducing it to a dump and range for target practice with their weapons. Qadduri reported that American military vehicles have destroyed the gate leading to the “curving minaret” and have occupied the yard of the grand mosque there, where the Iraqi Government under President Saddam Hussein had installed a main framework preparatory to the total renovation of the site. The American troops have also arrested a number of people who were coming to visit the historical site, in an incident that took place two weeks ago, Qadduri said….

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The Palestinians’ Right to Education
Action for Palestine
On Wed 14th Manchester Student’s Union held it’s General Meeting with attendance of over 1000 students and strengthened their commitment to the Palestinian’s Right to Education and their twinning with An-Najah University with almost a two-thirds majority. A motion called “Peace through Education” was proposed which aimed at undermining the twinning of Manchester Student’s Union with An Najah. It gave the Palestinian university the ultimatum of signing a statement condemning terrorism within two months or the twinning would be abandoned. It was a racist motion that caused vast indignation amongst the student population by stereotyping Palestinians as terrorists and accusing An-Najah University of actively supporting terrorism. The writers of the motion cited an unreliable website as a resource which included many inaccuracies and racist quotes….

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In Shiite Iraq, temporary marriages may be rising
Bobby Caina Calvan | McClatchy Newspapers
At 18, Zahraa Abdulrasool married a man 15 years her senior, a good man, she said, who never refused a day’s work. To support his family, he drove a truck from Basra to Baghdad, a perilous journey in these days of war, sectarian violence and lawlessness. “I pleaded with him to stop,” she said, “ to find some other kind of work, but there was no other work.” On a spring day in 2004, he again set off for Baghdad. He never returned. His body was found on the side of a road. He was shot to death, his truck torched and destroyed. At 23, Abdulrasool was a widow. “I lost my husband, father of my two boys and my only support in this world,” she said. Alone to raise her family, she fell into despair. Her way out was to remarry, again and again and again. She betrothed herself to men who provided dowries and a sense of security and comfort, if only fleetingly. “It has become a way of life to me,” she said. These temporary marriages — called mutaa or “pleasure” marriages — are said to be on the rise in Iraq, where the ravages of war have made widows of thousands of women….

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Vatican spokesman criticizes Israeli policies
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC
An envoy from the Holy See visiting Jerusalem on Friday stated that Israel has failed to live up to its promises since diplomatic relations were established in 1993. The envoy from the Pope, the highest authority in the Catholic church, added that relations between the Vatican and Israel were better before diplomatic ties were officially established in 1993. Christians inside Israel and in Palestine have faced oppression from the Jewish state, due to the military occupation of Palestinian land and the discrimination against Palestinians. A small percentage of Palestinians are Christians, some of them tracing their ancestry back to the time of Christ. The Vatican envoy cited one of many restrictions faced by Christians in Israel: the difficulty in obtaining permits to Jerusalem. Israeli authorities issue the permits, and they are extremely difficult to obtain – even for Christian clergy members…”Everyone can see what kind of trust you can give to Israel’s promises,” said Monsignor Sambi during his Friday visit to Jerusalem holy sites….

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Inquiry begins into soaring cost of US embassy in Iraq
Ewen MacAskill, Guardian
The US justice department is investigating the soaring building costs for a huge American embassy in Baghdad. Postponing its scheduled opening last month, the state department said it didn’t “have an answer” as to when it would be finished. The embassy was supposed to have opened by now but has suffered from repeated postponements because work has either been judged to be below standard or because of design changes. The original budget for the embassy, the biggest US one in the world, was $592m (£296m) but this has jumped by a further $144m….

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Videos: Camilo Mejia and Martin Smith on Soldiers Against the War
PeaceJournal.org
Camilo Mejia, Iraq veteran and Chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War, gave with workshop with Martin Smith (Midwest Coordinator of IVAW) on “Soldiers Against the War from Vietnam to Iraq.” Martin Smith, Midwest Regional Coordinator of Iraq Veterans Against the War, gave the second presentation. This meeting was one of many educational programs offered at the Midwest Socialist Conference, held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, November 3-4, 2007….

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Una Storia Importante.
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
…I find it disgusting that some, an equally nauseating bunch- having conveniently put aside the fact that Saddam Hussein at the gallows, seconds before his death said “Ya Muqtada heya hadhee al Marjallah” -”Muqtada is that what manhood is all about?” – are desperate to make an alliance with this psychopath murderer (…) And what about Maliki? I mean look at Maliki. Every time I see him, I want to throw up. Honest to God. I keep my Alka Seltzer next to me just in case I get a nauseous bout. The guy looks as if he has not showered in an eternity, since he left Iran to be more precise… You need to know that all these sectarian Shia groups, and it is common knowledge in Baghdad and elsewhere, are the most corrupt, dishonest, degenerate group around… They falsify their diplomas, invent them when they have none, are signatories to fraudulent contracts, are oil smugglers, pimp leaders of pedophile rings, traders in religion, thugs dressed in suits, charlatans and murderers in the name of religion… By God, you don’t know these people and what they stand for. But then I think you do. And that is why you chose them and accommodated them to rule what was once a true nation. You chose them because they are an identical carbon copy of yourselves…And you love admiring your own moral turpitude, your own moral decay…

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Facebook censors Palestinian human rights activist
Booman Tribune
The kind of censorship I am about to describe can only occur in America, sadly to say, in the freedom of speech capital of the world. When Daily Kos, the largest left wing Democratic site on the internet, made a decision earlier this year to ban advocates of Palestinian freedom and self-determination, it did so at the behest of a cabal of right wing Zionists that monitor the site. Administration even worked with this cabal to eventually purge over twenty bloggers, including Palestinian and Palestinian-Americans, Israeli and Jewish American peace activists, and a host of advocates for the Palestinian human rights …

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Ramon: Recognition of a “Jewish state” important as it means no right of return
Palestinian Information Center
Israeli vice Premier Haim Ramon stressed that Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” is important as it means dropping the right of return of millions of refugees who were uprooted from their homes and land sixty years ago. “The recognition is important because it is part of the Palestinian recognition that the solution to the Palestinian refugee problem is the return of the refugees to a Palestinian state,” Ramon told ambassadors of the EU on Thursday afternoon, according to Israeli radio on Friday. He was also reported as saying: “A Palestinian state is the solution for the Palestinian refugees, just like Israel was the solution for the Jewish refugee problem.”…

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Israel’s economic blockade stops Gaza’s strawberry-farmers selling their crop
Donald Macintyre in Beit Lahiya, Independent
Almost all of Gaza’s turbulent story is bound up with Jamil Abu Hmaideh’s strawberry fields here in the far north of the strip. Between two wispy clouds high in the blue sky above us, two Israeli Apache helicopters hover on the look-out for the Qassam rocket-launching crews as we bite into the luscious, perfectly ripened fruit Mr Hmaideh has picked for us. At the end of the neat plantation rows are the high sandbanks just inside the Gaza town of Beit Lahiya’s border with Israel, the ones from which the military bulldozers descended when they last ploughed up one of his fields before he started planting at the end of August. Hanging on the wall in his two-room farm station is a “martyr portrait” of his 21-year-old son, Nael, who was killed in May, a non-combatant casualty of the savage infighting between Fatah and Hamas…

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A TRILLION HERE, A TRILLION THERE
Malcom Lagauche
I rarely write about detailed economics because I am neither a mathematician nor an economist. But, recent news items have prompted me to take a shot at writing about money. A few days ago, a report emerged that stated the U.S. would spend almost four trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by the year 2017. Estimates on the amount spent already in the Iraq conflict have surpassed the trillion-dollar mark. How much is a trillion dollars? I will use the American standard for discussing the following. The British use different figures for what a billion represents, so I want to clarify the system I am using. A million dollars is still the benchmark for a wealthy person in the West. Take a thousand million and you have a billion. Then, take a thousand billion and you have a trillion. That is a one with 12 zeros following: $1,000,000,000,000. That’s a helluva lot of money. Let’s go back to the pre-liberated Iraq days preceding March 2003. Paul Wolfowitz told the people of the U.S. that the invasion of Iraq would not cost the U.S. taxpayer one penny. He predicted that any conflict would be short-lived and whatever the U.S. would fork over for the cost, somewhere in the vicinity of $20 billion, would soon be replaced by the selling of Iraqi oil to pay back the U.S. for the favor of bringing democracy to Iraq. Such a deal….

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Gougings and killings
Nermeen Al-Mufti, Al-Ahram Weekly
In a surprise move, Nuri Al-Maliki decided to integrate 18,000 militiamen into the army and security services. Iraqi sources say that the militiamen are from Al-Maliki’s Daawa Party and the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The militiamen have been given posts at the interior, defence, and national security ministries with ranks ranging between lieutenant and major. The move followed a four-way agreement signed recently by the Daawa Party, SCIRI, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Several political parties and blocs, including the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF) of Adnan Al-Duleimi and the Iraqi List of Iyad Allawi voiced their opposition to the integration of militiamen into military and security institutions, noting their previous involvement in criminal atrocities. A former senior police officer said that he resigned in protest against frequent violations committed by militiamen integrated into the security services. He added that most security personnel accused of corruption and torture originally came from the militia…

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No way out
Serene Assir, Al-Ahram Weekly
Five months after the closure of the Rafah terminal on 14 June and the number of Palestinians stranded in Egypt is once again growing. There are now an estimated 2,000 awaiting return, including 500 stranded in Arish, North Sinai. They face deteriorating conditions on the Egyptian side of the border, says longtime Arish resident Abdel-Sater Al-Ghalban. “Little enough attention was paid to the problems of Palestinians stranded in Egypt in the summer and now their conditions have worsened,” Al-Ghalban, himself of Palestinian origin, told Al-Ahram Weekly. “It seems everyone in the world has forgotten there is a siege on Gaza except Gazans themselves, those who are imprisoned there and those trapped outside.”…

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 15 November 2007.
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice.
…In a dispatch posted Thursday, the Yaqen News Agency reported that armed men shot and killed Su’ad Kawkaz, the Director of the al-Amal Girls’ School in Baghdad’s al-Kazimiyah district on Thursday morning. Yaqen reported a source in the puppet police as saying that gunmen sprayed Su’ad Kawkaz with a hail of bullets near her home in the al-Habnah area of al-Kazimiyah when she was on her way to the school. She died on the spot. The gunmen fled the scene after their attack. The Thursday morning attack was the latest in a series of murders of Iraqi women educators. On 4 November gunmen attacked two schools in the southern Baghdad district of as-Sayyidiyah. The attackers killed Iman Husayn, the director of the al-Mustaqbal School, and wounded Bushra ‘Abed al-Harr, the director of the Umm Qasr School….

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Homes in illegal Israeli settlements for sale at London expo
Haroon Siddique, Guardian Unlimited
Israeli companies are using UK property shows to sell housing in illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, Guardian Unlimited can reveal. At the Israel Property Exhibition at Brent town hall, North London last Sunday, one company, Anglo-Saxon Real Estate, was offering for sale properties in Maale Adumim and Maccabim. Both West Bank settlements lie on the Palestinian side of the so-called green line, the pre-1967 boundary and often cited as the border between Israel and a future Palestinian state…

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Charges dropped against last of ‘Los Angeles Eight’
Michel Shehadeh
For the last 20 years, the U.S. government has accused me of being a terrorist. Along with six other Palestinians and a Kenyan, we were dubbed the “Los Angeles Eight” by the media. Our case even made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Oct. 30 — 20 grueling years after the early morning raid in which armed federal agents barged into my apartment, brutally arrested me before my 3-year-old son’s eyes, incarcerated me in maximum security cells in San Pedro State Prison for 23 days without bond, and attempted to deport me — the government dropped all charges fabricated against me. The charges involved accusations of aiding a member group of the Palestine Liberation Organization that the government alleged aided terrorism. But Los Angeles immigration Judge Bruce J. Einhorn had ordered an end to the deportation proceedings against us last January because the government failed to comply with his order to disclose evidence that supported our innocence. He called their behavior “an embarrassment to the rule of law.”….

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Dershowitz calls for ‘accountable’ waterboarding, says torture ‘works sometimes’
David Edwards and Muriel Kane, Raw Story
Law professor Alan Dershowitz has become notorious since 2001 for his advocacy of legalizing torture and his insistence that it is fully constitutional as long as it is not used to compel self-incrimination. He has also been arguing since 2004 for a pre-emptive attack on Iran. “I think the people in the United States want to see the Democrats be just as strong but smarter than the Republicans in fighting terrorism, fighting in Iran, fighting Iraq, fighting all the enemies of America,” Dershowitz said Thursday on MSNBC. “If Democrats do that in order to win, they might be going against what they believe in,” responded MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski. “Perhaps what we really need to be doing is rebuilding our moral standing.” “I agree,” said Dershowitz. “I think we should take a stand on waterboarding. We should say, never should it be permitted as a routine matter.” He then cited the hypothetical “ticking bomb” situation, arguing that any leader would order torture under those circumstances….

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Blackwater’s Brothers
JEREMY SCAHILL, The Nation
Every day, new revelations emerge in the mounting scandal rocking the Bush Administration and the mercenary company Blackwater Worldwide. Much of the attention focuses on the now infamous shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nisour Square on September 16, in which seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed and twenty-four wounded. FBI investigators are now alleging that fourteen were victims of unjustified and unprovoked shooting–some were shot while they were fleeing. Investigators also say they found nothing to substantiate Blackwater’s claims of being fired on by Iraqis. This comes a month after a US Army investigation determined there was “no enemy activity involved” and labeled the shootings a “criminal event.” But while Blackwater gets hammered in the press, the behind-the-scenes actions of the company’s paymaster, the State Department, grow more scandalous by the minute…

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Army Desertion Rate Soaring
Number Of U.S. Army Deserters Up 80% Since Iraq War Started; Highest Rate Since 1980
CBS/AP
Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam war, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year. According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year….

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British officials hold talks with Mahdi army
Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian
The British commander in southern Iraq confirmed yesterday that UK officials have been holding talks with supporters of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in the hope they would be drawn into the political process. Major General Graham Binns said the security situation in Basra province – to be handed over to Iraqi forces next month – was improving and attacks against British and Iraqi forces had fallen by 90% since British troops withdrew from their last base in the centre of the city in September. Confirming the talks with the Mahdi army, first reported in the Guardian, Binns said: “We may get to the point where the main Sadrist strain will support the Iraqi security forces – that’s the goal.”…

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Canada Shuts Doors to U.S. War Resisters
Aaron Glantz
Two U.S. Army deserters who fled to Canada and sought refugee status on grounds of their opposition to the war in Iraq have lost their bids to have the Supreme Court of Canada hear their cases. The court refused to hear the appeals of Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey Thursday, who were rejected two years ago by Canada’s immigration authorities. The board ruled they would not be at risk of their lives if they returned to the United States, nor were they at risk of “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”….

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Thanksgiving Hypocrisy
Stephen Lendman
In the US, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November to give thanks for the year’s blessings and bounty. At least that’s how it began. It’s not, however, the current practice. Most people defile the day’s spirit in how they spend it over a full four day holiday weekend – with overindulgent eating, parades, “can’t miss” football from Thursday through Sunday, and, key for merchants, the “official” start of the Christmas holiday shopping season. It begins Thanksgiving Friday, is now an orgy of holiday consumerism, continues through Christmas eve, ebbs for a day, then builds again for a final celebratory new year’s welcome with more overindulgent eating, drinking, partying, and binge-shopping for nonessentials. This holiday, like all others, is also replete with myths, and young minds are filled with them.

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Russian officials claim Syria will attend Annapolis
John Smith – IMEMC
Syria will attend and participate in the upcoming Annapolis peace summit, Russian governmental officials told Israeli representatives on Thursday. The comments were made by two Russian officials, Deputy Foreign Minister for Middle Eastern Affairs Alexander Sultanov and special envoy Sergei Yakovlev, who are currently visiting Israel. An unnamed official told the Israeli daily Haaretz that Syria wishes to attend the conference and hopes that it can negotiate with a willing Israel. “Syria does not want to be left outside … [Syria] only wants Israel to be a little more flexible,” the official stated….

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Why slur the left?
Xymphora
As Israel and its apologists continue on their moral decline at increasing speed, with the effects felt around the world, the ‘left’, such as it is, becomes increasingly preoccupied with the plight of the victims of Zionism, particularly the Palestinians. This has led to a new genre of writing, attacks on the left for being anti-Semitic. Mitchell Cohen (take a wild stab at what particular group he might belong to, or read to the end here) adds to the pile with “Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn”. This is pretty vile stuff, and I don’t recommend that you waste time reading it. I have just one question. Does Mitchell Cohen actually believe that anybody on the left who feels for the plight of the victims of Zionism is actually going to read Cohen’s piece, suddenly exclaim “OMG, I’m an anti-Semite’, and run off to join the IDF so he or she can shoot innocent Palestinians and steal their land? ..

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Israel detains physician to extract information on his patients
Report, PCHR
PCHR condemns Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) for detaining Dr. Nabih Abu Sha’ban last Tuesday as he was accompanying his son seeking medical treatment in Jordan, going through Beit Hanoun (Erez) checkpoint. The Centre calls upon the international community and relevant international organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to intervene and pressure IOF to immediately release Dr. Abu Shaban, who himself is suffering from illness. The Centre calls upon these parties to effectively intervene to ensure the safe passage of patients from the Strip to treatment facilities outside the territory so as to avert deterioration in their conditions….

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Congressional Democrats resume phony “antiwar” votes
Patrick Martin, WSWS
In a transparent effort to pull the wool over the eyes of millions of antiwar voters, the congressional Democratic leadership has taken up the issue of the war in Iraq for the first time in two months, scheduling days of debate and voting on measures that would not—even in the unlikely event they were adopted and signed by Bush—actually bring an end to the war. The House of Representatives held the first vote, approving by a narrow 218-203 margin a $50 billion emergency funding bill for military operations in Iraq that would require Bush to withdraw an unspecified number of troops (as few as one soldier) within 30 days, and set a nonbinding goal of December 15, 2008 for an end to most combat operations in the occupied country….

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US allies in Iraq angered by airstrikes that killed 45
Gulf Times, Qatar
US forces said they had killed 25 suspected insurgents in operations targeting Al Qaeda militants near the capital, but Sunni Arab tribal leaders accused them yesterday of killing pro-US fighters. The head of a Sunni Arab tribal group that has turned against Al Qaeda and joined forces with the US military said US aircraft had bombed his men late on Tuesday night, killing 45, as they manned checkpoints just north of Baghdad. US forces have formed alliances with Sunni Arab tribes in western Iraq and in provinces around Baghdad, offering mostly paid employment to nearly 70,000 tribal fighters and former insurgents as part of its strategy to combat al Qaeda….

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