Dublin Opinion

Patrick Cockburn who has recently published Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq being interviewed by Pepe Escobar on the Real News Network.

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In our modern, Western, enlightened and post-feminist world referring to entities such as cars, warships, aeroplanes or countries as female is, if not frowned up, at least is considered no longer the done thing.
I’m sure we all remember those old World War 2 films in which it was perfectly acceptable for a fighter pilot […]

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So said Judge Peter Beaumont.
His words were to Samina Malik, a former Heathrow shop assistant, who was found guilty last month of writing poetry of such danger as to constitute a threat to the British state. Samina was a teenager when she wrote the poetry. The legislation fell under the British 2000 Terrorism Act. Here […]

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Taxi drivers get a lot of stick, mainly because they’ve a tendency to pontificate about things that they don’t fully understand yet still try to make out that they are the ‘world’s foremost authority’, to quote Tony Soprano. They’re a bit like Desmond Fennell actually.
Whenever I find myself in a taxi with an opinioned […]

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What is it about September the 11th that has the unhinged unfurling their mangled thoughts with a panache normally associated with the wildly drunken? Martin Amis, to celebrate the day, has taken his mutton fists to the keyboard again and slammed out this:
“September 11 entrained a moral crash, planet-wide; it also loosened the ground […]

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So George Bush says that Iraq is like Vietnam, despite denying the link before. That he should make the speech yesterday, which the New York Times says is the beginning of an ‘initiative to shape the debate on Capitol Hill in September’, before a bunch of hoary Army veterans is interesting.
Interesting not because it’s […]

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Currently, the most read article on the Guardian Unlimited site is this one about the US allegation that Iran has a secret plan for a summer offence designed to oust the US from Iraq. The very experienced reporter Simon Tisdall cites an unnamed US official as saying:
“Tehran’s strategy to discredit the US surge and foment […]

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Writing in the Guardian last week about the fourth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, Simon Jenkins was in no mood to celebrate what the last four years have left us with.
“We are bid to celebrate the fourth birthday of a lie. In 2003, they lied about Iraq’s weapons arsenal. They lied about Saddam Hussein’s […]

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In the print edition of The Irish Times today there was a Reuters report about Dick Cheney’s visit to Japan, where he said that the US has to succeed in Iraq to prevent terrorists attacking the US. It’s not on the site so I can’t link to it.
It was an eventful morning and I lost […]

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Play the song while reading the text below.
Last night Bush told the American nation that he’s ordering 21,500 more troops into Iraq. Comparisons with The Vietnam War continue to abound, and some have likened the move to that of President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to increase troops in Vietnam and imagine that it’ll achieve […]

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