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Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors: The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid scars on his face and neck and hands, some even visible in his scalp beneath a fuzz of gray hair cropped short in a military cut. One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. Before I could finish dialing 911 he announced in a...

Former British PM Tony Blair testified in front of another Iraq inquiry today and for the second time this year he testified about the very real danger of Iran and al-Qaeda working together. Of course the storyline by the British papers, the biased MSM, and the lefty blogosphere, is regarding the regret offered by Blair over the loss of life: At the end of his evidence this afternoon he said it had never been his meaning. "Of course I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life," I'm sure everyone else would cheer the loss of life huh? I...

BAGHDAD, June 13 (Reuters) - An explosion struck a revered Shi'ite Muslim shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra on Wednesday that was badly damaged in February 2006, senior Shi'ite officials and a witness said. The witness said two minarets at the Golden Mosque were damaged in the blast. Last year's attack on the mosque triggered a wave of sectarian violence in Iraq that has killed tens of thousands of people.

by Mark Finkelstein February 24, 2006 If NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman is for many the voice of the center-left foreign policy establishment in the U.S., then his nuanced and not-altogether-bleak assessment of the situation in Iraq on this morning's GMA merits consideration. It was tempting to headline this entry with the provocative notion Friedman floated that perhaps only a Saddam was capable of holding Iraq's fractious components together. But Friedman was by no means endorsing Saddam's despotic rule, musing rather whether Saddam was a cause or an effect. As Friedman put it: "Is Iraq the way Iraq is because...

THE GOLDEN MOSQUE BOMBING By Michelle Malkin   ·   February 22, 2006 02:51 PM Source: Yahoo!/AP Via AP: SAMARRA, Iraq - Insurgents detonated bombs inside one of Iraq's holiest Shiite shrines Wednesday, destroying its golden dome and triggering more than 60 reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques. The president warned that extremists were pushing the country toward civil war, as many Shiites lashed out at the United States as partly to blame. As the gold dome of the 1,200-year-old Askariya shrine lay in ruins, leaders on both sides called for calm: But the string of back-and-forth attacks seemed to push the country...

An explosion has ripped through a Shiite holy site in Samarra, destroying the al Askariya "Golden Mosque."