If you follow the news, you’ll be aware of the “Chilcot Report” (named after the British civil servant in charge of the seven-year investigation which led to it), released Wednesday (6 July 2016), which denounced then-English PM Tony Blair’s leading his country into participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein.

That report naturally gave rise to its greatest impact and public commentary in Great Britain itself – just what that country needed while it was still reeling from the “Leave” Brexit referendum vote. However, we know quite well that it was not British troops alone who stormed across the Iraqi border back in March of 2003. Rather, they were largely American forces, by far – which raises the question of whether there could be an analogous independent inquiry into that invasion over in the US.

(It’s quite an idle question, however, in view of President Obama’s “just move on” attitude towards the deeds of his predecessor. Frankly, this writer would gladly give up the prospect of any American “Chilcot”-type inquiry – the original seems to do fine in broad lines for US circumstances – if we could instead get some disclosure and prosecutions of US torture during that period.)

In any case, George W. Bush hasn’t gotten around to reading the Chilcot Report yet (was really never big on reading anyway). Now, there were also Australian troops in on the Iraq invasion, and the media there is now wondering whether that country now needs its own version of the investigation.

But what I want to write about here is Spain, where they are wondering the same thing, reports El País.

That “Trillo” is Federico Trillo, pictured there, who was Spain’s Defense Minister in 2003, and who seems to have been the easy, available target for Spanish journalists once “Chilcot Report” became a thing. (In other words, the Spanish Prime Minister at the time, José María Aznar, showed himself more skillful at knowing just when to get out of Dodge and make himself un-findable. But also: see below.)

But here’s the key fact: Spain was not involved militarily in the invasion of Iraq! Those quotes you see in the tweet are Trillo’s assurances that Spain “sent no combatants to Iraq,” in fact “never fired a shot at anyone”!

Now, it’s true that Spain’s Aznar was quite prominent at the time in backing what were George W. Bush’s clear intention to invade and depose Saddam. In particular, just before the invasion was launched, in mid-March 2003, there occurred a high-profile summit meeting on the Azores Islands (Portuguese territory) featuring Bush, Blair – and, yes, Aznar.

But he drew the line at sending troops – or at least that is what his Defense Minister, Trillo, now maintains. Frankly, even if there had been a surreptitious Spanish troop contingent there, it surely would not have had much practical, military affect. It’s only function would have been to demonstrate allied solidarity with what was going on – that is, precisely to have been known about! (If you want to be mean: just like the Spanish troops who fought for Nazi Germany on the Russian Front, although they were actually real, and said to be volunteers.)

Pity poor Federico Trillo – harassed about Chilcot and things he did or did not do back in 2003 when, by all accounts, he’s (basically) innocent – INNOCENT, I tell you! You might ask: “Well, isn’t he out of public life by now, so that he could just demand that the journalists leave him alone?” Sadly, no – in fact, he’s precisely Spain’s current ambassador to the UK!

Don’t look now, but there is another big election coming up in Iraq soon, on Sunday, 7 March to be exact. It’s the second nationwide election for that new democracy since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and of course it will determine whether Nouri al-Maliki gets to stay in charge as premier.

Come to think of it, maybe you did have some inkling that something like that was about to happen, from the recent disputes you may have heard about involving attempts by the current government to disallow certain religious/political groups from standing as candidates. But this article from the Ritzau news agency in the Danish Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad deals instead with the results of a recent poll among eligible Iraqi voters undertaken for the government by the Iraqi National Media Center. A total of 63% across the sample stated to the pollsters that they intended to vote. This compares unfavorably with the 79.6% that we do know turned out to vote at that first free-and-fair national election, back in 2005. The poll’s results broke down further to show that Kurds and Shi’ites revealed themselves to be rather more ready to make it to the polls on 7 March than did Sunnis.

Whoever wrote this brief piece’s headline – whether it was the Ritzau agency or the Kristeligt Dagblad – clearly showed displeasure at this news by making it read “Only two out of three Iraqis want to vote.” But wait: Infoplease tells us that only 56.8% of American voters turned out to the polls even back in November, 2008 to either elect or try to stop Obama as president! In that light, 63% looks pretty good! Then again, you can still understand the tenor of that Danish reporting when you keep in mind that Danish voter participation is always pretty high: this Wikipedia article puts it at usually around 87%.

UPDATE: If you want further confirmation that things are really going rather OK in Iraq, here’s a guest blog-post, in English, on the Foreign Policy site from someone who definitely knows what he’s talking about. Hey, 63% – those Iraqis are simply getting more American every day, that’s all!

This news deserves more coverage in the US than Google News tells me it is getting; hopefully the fault is merely in the timing, namely around the 4th of July holiday. In any event, as the Dutch Volkskrant reports (in an article credited to Reuters and the AP), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now has a new chairman to succeed Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, who has occupied that post since 1997 (and who together with his organization won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005). The new man is Yukiya Amano, currently Japan’s resident representative at the IAEA and who boasts a long record of service in the Japanese diplomatic corps, who last Tuesday (30 June) needed six rounds of voting among national IAEA representatives to finally (barely) gain the necessary two-thirds vote for selection to the post.

This has to be an important development, in the first place because of the vital importance these days of the IAEA, which is more-or-less the UN’s atomic power/atomic weapons supervisory agency. (It is formally an autonomous organization, but reports to both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.) Just think of all the countries where possession/non-possession of nuclear weapons is currently an issue: North Korea, Israel, Syria – and then, of course, Iran. It’s also important because of the very troublesome relationship the US has had in the recent past with the IAEA, particularly under the George W. Bush administration (e.g. over whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was really necessary), which actively campaigned against the re-election to the post in 2005 of Dr. ElBaradei.

Again, these days the main atomic trouble-spot is Iran (if only because, in North Korea’s case, the cat is already long out of the bag). So what is Amano’s view on the alleged Iranian ambitions for nuclear weapons? “I see no sort of indication of that in official IAEA documents” – that is, put him on the skeptics’ side (when even Dr. ElBaradei, in a recent interview with the BBC that the Volkskrant article cites, maintains that his “intuition” tells him that that is what the Iranians ultimately are pursuing). Amano’s attitude here will certainly go down rather poorly among most ranges of American public opinion but, again, it is the official attitude of the IAEA itself, i.e. of the impartial experts who are supposed to know (and whose expertise was blatantly ignored in the Bush Administration’s rush to war in 2003). For what it’s worth, it is also the long-held view of leading Middle East expert Juan Cole, who has also covered past American attempts to fool the IAEA into detecting an Iranian weapons threat by supplying it with forged evidence.

Once the upcoming election has been conducted and the results made known, and as we get closer to inauguration on 20 January 2009, you can expect the usual flood of articles in all the world’s media evaluating the eight-year presidency of the departing George W. Bush. It’s been an eventful eight years, no? For some reason or another, though – apparently because he recently caught sight of Bush on TV looking “tired” and “grey” during his latest address to the nation about the financial crisis – the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung’s Washington correspondent Matthias Rüb has decided to get a jump on the competition with a new piece: What remains of George W. Bush? A man of great expectations.

But don’t worry: the FAZ will surely find itself having to try again later. For what Rüb has come up with is an article that may offer a few interesting perspectives, but which first and foremost suffers from a worrying short-sightedness about what this man has done to the country for which he served as president. (Could it be a coincidence that the pronunciation of this journalist’s last name is basically “rube”? And as to that illustration at the top of his article: it’s obviously supposed to be George W., but in fact looks nothing like him.) (more…)

In Denmark, as really most elsewhere in the world, the media are keeping close tabs on the US presidential election – passing on the polling numbers to their audiences, looking for that special insight that might provide a clue about what is likely to happen on Election Day. Of a piece with this is the latest US election coverage from Viggo Lepoutre Ravn of Denmark’s Jyllandsposten (A former Bush-advisor: We have lost). That former advisor is David Frum, actually a former presidential speech-writer, whose comments from an appearance on CNN are quoted to the effect (because this is a translation from the Danish back into English) of “We have to look it in the eye, that we [presumably meaning the Republicans] cannot win the presidential election. We have to concentrate on saving as many of our Senators as possible.” Accompanying this account in Ravn’s article is the news that Obama has now gone ten percentage points clear of McCain in the latest Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll, plus some electoral strategy analysis. (McCain’s only hope is somehow to win one large-population state that it now seems he will lose, etc., etc. – but we don’t need to occupy ourselves with that stuff, since either Ravn assuredly doesn’t know what he’s talking about or you and I have already read such an analysis, in English, somewhere else.)

No, it’s Jyllandsposten’s Niels Lillelund who gets into a more in-depth discussion of American electoral matters in an accompanying article entitled Farwell to Bush – whom will the intellectuals hate now?. (more…)

Wow – another EuroSavant post that simply writes itself! This time that delectable characteristic arises from the particular format employed (as you will soon see), and the article in question comes from Information, the Danish intellectual weekly newspaper, with the pungent title 20 reasons for the chaos we find ourselves in (and yes, it’s someone else’s fault).

Let’s go through these twenty reasons, then, shall we? – and see where we agree with the article’s author (with a very German name, I must say), Anna von Sperling. We might even keep a sort of running score; that nice, tapered, obviously feminine, nude (i.e. no rings) finger there pointing accusingly to the right at the article’s head starts us out with “one” . . . (more…)

“Thank God for the crises. They have brought America’s presidential candidates closer to us than they would like.” That is the verdict of former Die Zeit US correspondent Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff on how the latest US financial crisis has let us all see Messrs. Obama and McCain, namely under pressure and with their hair down. That evaluation comes at the very end of his recent article (In the headlights of the crises), and the conclusions he draws, at least, rather differ from what one would ordinarily have been led to expect. (more…)

The “surge” has succeeded, we are all told. Iraq is now a much more peaceful place; the government of Nuri al-Maliki is now in good shape, they say, increasingly able to take over the task of providing internal security with its own native forces. But “they”? “They” is primarily those with an interest in pushing the image of a peaceable Iraq today as a way somehow (and finally!) to justify the expenditure of thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Americans wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars since March of 2003. In other words, “they” is namely the Bush administration, and also the McCain presidential campaign – and the credibility of at least the first of those has been running on empty for quite some time.

No, far better to seek a judgment on the current state of Iraq from experts with a higher quotient of objectivity. One long-standing authority is Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan and both Arabic- and Farsi-speaker, mainly through his weblog Informed Comment. He recently offered his own summing-up of where we are now: “The level of violence at this moment in Iraq is similar to what prevailed on average during one of the 20th century’s worst ethnic civil wars [the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990]! It is still higher than the casualty rates in Sri Lanka and Kashmir, two of the worst ongoing conflicts in the world.” On the other hand, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins has to know something about conditions in Iraq, from where he reported from 2004 to 2006. (He also has a book coming out soon about that, The Forever War.) In a recent e-mail interview (The Progress in Iraq is Remarkable) he asserts that much of the improvement of conditions in Iraq is “astonishing,” that “parts of [the country] are difficult for me recognize,” although “the calm is very fragile.”

A large part of the basis for optimism is the hand-over last Monday of responsibility for the security of Anbar province to the Iraqi government, which Filkins himself reported on for the NYT. This is also covered by Rainer Hermann of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (From sanctuary for terrorists to model province), who adds some telling details. (more…)

Yes, the Olympics are coming up fast, and they will inevitably dominate what is normally the news-bereft August “cucumber season” – the term for the yearly summer low point in the daily news-beat used particularly in Central Europe, I suppose because August is harvest time there for cucumbers. You can expect this blog in the coming weeks to treat articles about the Beijing Olympics on a regular basis. But realize that my approach is a jaundiced one already and is likely to remain so. Frankly, the original Olympic ideal is dead, crushed between rampant commercialism on the one side and the biological/pharmacological progress that now makes it inevitable for athletes to cheat on the other. That latter aspect we have already had the occasion to address in connection with the Tour de France; as for the former, this excellent piece by Sally Jenkins in today’s Washington Post will set you straight for now, but I do have accumulated in my RSS reader some excellent recent articles about the International Olympic Committee which I hope soon to have time to bring up and discuss on this forum.

For now, though, let’s take up the following interesting article out of the august German weekly Die Zeit: Bomb Attack in Istanbul: BND Chief Doubts Involvement of the PKK. As reported here by CNN, on Sunday, 27 July, there occurred a particularly nasty double-bomb attack in a crowded area of Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul. An initial blast, no more than that of a stun grenade, was designed to draw people’s attention and mass them together, so that a second and much-stronger explosion, ten minutes later, could inflict that many more casualties, which turned out to number seventeen killed and at least 154 injured. (more…)

The alert is out: the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel snagged a scoop in the form of an interview with Iraqi Premier Nuri al-Maliki, in which (according to a Reuters report) he explicitly endorsed the idea of a 16-month timetable for American troop withdrawal, a plan which has been the centerpiece of presidential candidate Barack Obama’s intentions towards US engagement there. Blogosphere reactions are already here and here (among many others, no doubt, including forthcoming).

Fortunately, your friendly neighborhood EuroSavant was carrying his pager, and was able to receive the emergency message and leap into the nearest – no, not phone booth, you don’t see too many of those anymore – Internet café to get on-line. Let’s take a look at the original German-language article itself, which is on the Spiegel’s website. (more…)

“Whomever US citizens may choose: Europeans will wake up next year on a cold January morning – and find before them a government whose foreign policy decisions, although presented in new clothes, will appear almost like those customary to Bush.” That is the conclusion German-language readers of Spiegel Online get to digest today, in an article entitled Bush Leaves – His Foreign Policy Stays.

Crucially, though, take a look at who is the author: it is a certain Peter Ross Range, whose credentials are given in a short sidebar on the article’s first page: long-time Time magazine foreign correspondent, then editor-in-chief of Blueprint, the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council – in short, in all probability an American. That means this article is intended to be a warning from the west side of the Atlantic to the east, not to expect much to change in US policy with the next administration. (more…)

Time for a quick “day-after” survey of French press coverage of the Iraqi elections.

As usual, “day-after” is sometimes too early when it comes to significant, multi-dimensioned world events, as journalists and editors get all caught up with the reporting and don’t yet have time to sit back and think about what it all really meant. If you want an example of what I’m talking about here, and can read French yourself, I refer you to Le Monde’s editorial this morning, The Iraqi Wager. Spotlight on young French-Iraqi student; for her and her mother, being able to vote for the first time is truly a moving experience. (And this in what Le Monde explicitly labels its “editorial,” written collectively by the editors.) Yes yes, and you know, Iraq has truly never had elections. These first were admittedly imperfect: Sunni underrepresentation, the threat of violence. Still, they were at least a relative success, and hopefully Iraqis can look forward to much less imperfect elections next December. Right, moving on . . .

Libération is a bit better in analyzing what author Jean-Pierre Perrin terms in his piece’s title The Lessons of a Confessionalized Election. (more…)

The proverbial fly-on-the-wall managed to give his report of the interesting discussions that took place last week in Davos, during the annual World Economic Forum gathering of the world’s movers-and-shakers that comes to a close tomorrow. That “fly” was one of the publishers of Germany’s Die Zeit, Dr. Josef Joffe, and the star of the show (actually, a private dinner) was the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi (whose name in German is apparently spelled “Charazi”). Joffe found that if he closed his eyes (and of course made allowance for the accent) he could just as well have been listening to George W. Bush or Condi Rice, as he writes in American-Iranian Unison.

The subject was tomorrow’s long-awaited (long-feared?) Iraqi general elections. And Kharazi was delighted about them. Not only that, but he was also glad to give the Bush administration props (strictly within what he thought was the limited scope of a private dinner party, you understand) for its grim determination that they were going to happen on 30 January 2005, and not a day later. Postponing them in any way, according to him, would have been a victory for the Baathists and the terrorists. (more…)

It has already been well-publicized that President Bush’s first foreign trip of his second term in office will be at the end of next month, an excursion to Europe. He’ll be starting off in Brussels, to try to start mending fences with those of America’s NATO allies who became somewhat estranged over the disagreement concerning the United States’ determination in spring of 2003 to Iraq with its “Coalition of the Willing.” That “Coalition,” you’ll recall, included nations (most notably Britain) which some think should have shown rather more solidarity on the question with their other EU brethren.

But the President’s engagement was supposed to have been preceded by an appearance by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the yearly Munich Security Conference (this year on 12-13 February). Now Rumsfeld has sent word that he won’t be coming, reports Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung (Rumsfeld Cancels Participation at Security Conference). (more…)

As if there weren’t enough troubles already in Iraq, another tribe there is now in revolt. And this is among folks who would ordinarily be among the last you would look to for such trouble, the “good guys,” so to speak. I’m talking here about the 1,350-strong contingent of Dutch soldiers stationed there, and that’s a direct quote from the head of their union, the AFMP, W. van den Burg: they’re in opstand, or “in revolt.” What that means in practical terms? Increasing talk about some sort of “strike action,” whatever that is supposed to look like in the middle of Iraq.

At least the Dutch still have military forces helping out there, as one-by-one other national contingents slip away (the Hungarians being the latest such). After I first came aware of this story and commenced my usual Dutch press-scanning for it, it turned out that most Netherlands dailies have declined to cover it, at least on-line. The exception is Allard Besse, of the Algemeen Dagblad and his article Soldiers in Iraq Grumble Over Money, but quite a good exception it is. (more…)

How are things these days in Fallujah? – you remember, that hotbed of Iraqi resistance activity that needed to be rooted out by the USMC to clear the way for Iraqi citizens peaceably to go to the polls on 30 January? Oh fine, just fine now, reports the US military, even as it denies access into the city to Red Cross officials, not to mention to returning city-residents. The discerning reader is likely to feel rather less-then-fully-informed about the state of affairs there if this is all he has to go on; where is the alternative press when you need it?

It turns out that Jørgen Steen Nielsen of the Danish commentary newspaper Information has managed to cultivate some good sources in Iraq, so that his recent article (No Election in Fallujah) helps to fill in some of the blanks about what is really going on there one month after the massive US Army-Marine assault. (more…)

Le Monde Diplomatique is the leading French opinion-journal on international affairs, but it is a monthly. The November issue was already on the newsstands at the time of the US election. So it’s only now, with the appearance of the December, 2004, issue on the streets and on-line, that we get to hear their reaction to the result.

Is there any doubt what that is? This is France we’re talking about here, after all, not to mention one of that country’s leading intellectual flagships. Anyway, no less than Editor-in-Chief Ignacio Ramonet takes up his keyboard to record the paper’s displeasure at the prospect of Bush II. (more…)

If you keep tabs with the major American press outlets – in this case I’m talking specifically about the New York Times, although the usual line-up of blogs have thoroughly linked to it already – you will have already seen this article on the latest pessimistic assessments from in-country CIA personnel in Iraq. Ultimately though, as President Bush has already pointed out in this context, these folks are just guessing, and their guesses are pretty much as good or as bad as anyone else’s.

But another “guess” you likely haven’t seen, unless you regularly read the Dutch-language NRC Handelsblad, is that of UN special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, given in the course of a recent exclusive interview (UN Top Man: Elections in Iraq Not Doable Now) to that newspaper’s editor Robert van de Roer. (more…)

There’s an interesting analysis of Friday evening’s second Bush-Kerry debate from Denmark’s Berlingske Tidende. You get a heavy dose of the message in the very title: Good – But Not Good Enough, Bush. (more…)

Kate Brumback – a very un-French name, but there you go – writes today in the on-line Nouvel Observateur about an interesting book, published just yesterday (and only in French so far), entitled Chirac contre Bush, L’autre guerre (“Chirac Against Bush: The Other War), by Henri Vernet and Thomas Cantaloube. Both are reporters for the newspaper Le Parisien, and the research they conducted on American-French relations in the run-up to the spring, 2003 invasion of Iraq, by Coalition forces which of course did not include the French, turned up a couple of interesting revelations. (more…)

“He forgot Poland” George W. Bush famously complained during that first presidential debate last week. And so John Kerry apparently did. And what about Poland, and specifically its roughly 2,500 soldiers now serving in Iraq? We’re out of there by December, 2005, no matter what happens, is the essence of what Polish defense minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski announced in an interview published yesterday in the leading Polish national newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

A pretty definitive statement, you would think. And, by the way, a resounding scoop for Gazeta, since no other on-line Polish newspaper treated Szmajdzinkski’s remarks until today, and that mostly in reaction to the splash he had made in yesterday’s interview. But unfortunately it’s not so simple as all that: Gazeta had several pieces accompanying that interview – as do other newspapers today – basically passing on a message of “don’t listen to Szmajdzinski!” from other leading Polish politicians, to include such figures as the President and Prime Minister! The situation is muddled, then, to say the least. (more…)

As the American presidential campaign winds down to the last six weeks, with the first in the series of debates scheduled for next week, much attention and speculation surrounds the results of various polls seeking to track the horse-race. Then there is the other poll, that of the non-voters’ opinions, namely of those living on the European continent. Jean-Michel Demetz gives the run-down in the French news-magazine L’Express of results from the latest poll on trans-Atlantic attitudes commissioned by the German Marshall Fund of the United States together with Compagnia di San Paolo of Turin (Italy), and conducted in June, 2004. (Europeans Against American Leadership. Actually, Americans also figured under this poll’s sample of 11,000 respondents from 11 countries, which as we’ll see below makes for some interesting comparative results.) (more…)

As the rash of hostage-taking and hostage-executions in Iraq continues, so does the making-public of these terrorists’ handiwork – generally in the form of websites, and often specifically as downloadable videos depicting the brutal act itself. But who in heaven’s name would at all be interested in viewing such things? Oh, vast audiences indeed, claims Isa van Dorsselaer in an article in Belgium’s De Standaard (Why So Many Internet Surfers Seek Out Pictures of Beheadings). (more…)

US President George Bush’s fourth address to an opening session of the United Nations was yesterday, but in the European press I’ve surveyed so far there is little in the way of analysis of his remarks, as opposed to articles which more-or-less simply report to readers what it was he said. One paper that did get a jump on that was the Danish Berlingske Tidende, and getting reaction from a country which after all does still have troops engaged in the occupation in Iraq must surely be worthwhile. Berlingske author Ole Damkjær’s very title (Bush Goes Courting at the UN) already gives you some idea that he is willing to cut the American president some slack. (more…)

When I recently expounded my own evaluation of the settlement of the Najaf stand-off, naturally I was serious about presenting it “for . . . refutation.” You can’t escape that in this medium, anyway, and no definitive answer that I’m aware of as to “winners” and “losers” has emerged as of yet in any case, or may ever. In the meantime, an interesting contribution to the debate comes from “M.”, writing for the Danish commentary newspaper Information (Once al-Sadr, always . . .). (more…)

Over on his excellent weblog “Informed Comment,” Prof. Juan Cole has already posted his boxscore for the three-week-old Najaf confrontation that is seemingly coming to a close through the intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The losers: the Americans and their Iraqi interim government. The big winner: Sistani. And for Shia insurgent Muqtada al-Sadr it all was a “wash.”

I don’t quite see things that way. I think this is quite an excellent outcome for the American side, even the same sort of “divine intervention” for them that the remnants of the Mahdi Army hiding within the Imam Ali shrine (falsely) claim to be for themselves. True, I am no learned professor, and I don’t watch, hear, or read the Arabic press. (I did know Arabic in the past, but that was a while ago; that capability is now, let’s say, in remission.) But the following argument I offer for your comment and refutation. (more…)

Back to serious tragedies now, inevitably having to do with Iraq. In fact, today’s reports in the Polish press about the death of two Polish soldiers echo quite a lot of a similar incident I discussed here a few days ago which killed a Dutch soldier. (more…)

Late last Saturday the second Dutch soldier to die in Iraq was killed when the convoy of two vehicles he was riding in was ambushed near Ar-Rumaytah in the South of the country . . .

Stop right there, MAO, you interrupt. The second Dutch soldier to die in Iraq? Look, that’s part of the risks for any military contingent that is there. Are we going to get a bulletin on this weblog every time a Dutch soldier bites the dust, just because you happen to live in their country – this when the total of American dead is pushing 950 and counting? Why don’t you favor us instead with accounts of ten US Marines dying in one day (free registration required), but while on the attack – why don’t you give credit where it’s due for real pain and suffering on a somewhat more significant scale?

You certainly have a point, although articles like the one just linked to (reference thanks to Intel Dump) are in English, so you don’t need my help to know what they say. I really don’t intend to report every Dutch fatality in Iraq; hopefully there won’t be any more, but you have to think that that’s unlikely. More pertinently, though, this latest incident – definitely the most serious violent incident of the entire Dutch occupation presence (so far) – raises interesting questions about the rather different way the Dutch go about their military duties there. (more…)

A devastating debate with Howard Dean live on TV hasn’t been enough; neither have been appeals from countless Americans, from the prominent to the obscure. But maybe a collective entreaty from some guys (mostly guys; actually, they’re uomini) with that notable “continental style” will do the trick and convince Ralph Nader to withdraw from the American presidential race. The French on-line newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur is reporting (Anti-Bush Action From Italian Deputies) that 116 members of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, “in a rare gesture,” sent a collective letter last Saturday (24 July) to presidential candidate Ralph Nader urging him to bow out. (more…)

Remember back last winter, when a big fuss hit over the Pentagon announcing a policy prohibiting the awarding of contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq to states which hadn’t been active participants in the Coalition? (€S covered the reaction in both Germany and France.) It sure seemed a good idea then to be among the “ins” rather then the “outs” and so to look forward to the awarding of juicy reconstruction contracts to firms from out of your country.

Well, first of all doubts set in early – particularly in the Polish press – as to whether the Pentagon was really willing to steer those contracts to any other than American firms, with maybe the occasional British company thrown in. Of course, with the transfer-of-sovereignty last month, now it’s supposed to be the Iraqis themselves in charge of such decisions. But things have instead reached a stage where commercial calculations have taken another turn entirely. For instance, those in the transport business might be interested to know of a contract for trucking services that might be coming up for tender soon. The present holder, the Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Company, is under a bit of pressure – seven of its drivers were abducted in one day, last Wednesday, and are now being held hostage, under the threat of being beheaded, by Islamic militants! (more…)