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WASHINGTON -- Frustrated over a stall in an arms sale to Saudi Arabia, Obama once questioned the necessity of maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge in the region, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Monday. Panetta was confirming a report from Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who attributed the claim to him in an article on Obama's foreign policy doctrine published last March. The former Pentagon chief said the White House, at the time, was deeply concerned that Israel was preparing to unilaterally strike Iran. Simultaneously, the administration was also hoping to complete with Riyadh a significant sale of fighter jets....

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN)"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," read the proclamation to the people of Iraq. These could have been the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair or President George W. Bush at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But it dates back to 1917, penned by Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, the commander of British forces in Iraq. The British occupation that followed was messy, though not as messy as its modern U.S.-led version. Then, the people of Iraq waged a bloody insurrection against...

Three years into the tenure of Hassan Rouhani who himself and many in the West promised to be a “moderate” and “reformist” poised to bring about change in Iran, we have only witnessed an unprecedented spike in human rights violations, including horrendous public floggings and especially executions. Overt 2,400 executions in the past three years is the report card Iran and Rouhani carry, with Amnesty International and many other international human rights organizations registering Iran sent nearly 1,000 people to the gallows in 2015 alone. Various religious minorities, including Arabs, Baha’is, Christians, Jews and others have also been targeted...

LONDON (AP) — The long awaited British inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq has been published. Led by former senior civil servant John Chilcot, the report took over seven years to prepare and runs over two million words. The report did not analyze the legality of the invasion and instead focused on the British decision-making process in the run up to the war in 2003.

Donald Trump, speaking in North Carolina, just praised deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as a killer of terrorists, noting that Hussein “didn’t read them the rights” before executing them. “Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, right? He was a bad guy. Really bad guy,” Trump begins. “But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights, they didn’t talk. They were a terrorists - it was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.” Hussein was labelled a major sponsor of terrorism by the American government for decades, a status...

UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05774970 Date: 09/30/2015 RELEASE IN PART B5,B6 From: H Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 10:34 AM To: 'millscd@state.gov' Subject: Re: iraq Odierno also asked for him and based on that we've already told him and our civ-mil B5 Baghdad team is expecting him. B6

Reuters, in its headline for a story reporting the death of Philip Agee, a former CIA agent turned traitor, labeled Agee a "CIA whistle-blower" ("CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee dies in Cuba [1]"). As the blog Little Green Footballs put it [2], Agee was "the traitor who exposed fellow CIA agents to violence and murder by revealing their names" in his 1975 book "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary." Agee, who had worked for the CIA for 12 years both in the United States and in Latin America, resigned from the Agency in 1968 after expressing "disagreement with U.S. support for...

It’s a well-known fact that Islamic State fighters enjoy using hardy Toyota pickups in their pursuit of cleansing the Middle East of people even slightly different from themselves, but they’ll need to restock after last week. Recent Allied military advances, including a huge, weeks-long push that liberated the Iraqi city of Fallujah, have ISIS on the run, and the U.S. Air Force’s best aerial hardware just caught a huge number of their vehicles making a break for it. The results, as Defense Department video of the strike shows, wasn’t pretty — for the insurgents or their trucks.

The Iraq defense ministry reported that Mil-28N attack helicopters received recently from Russia played an important part in the recent recapture of Fallujah and Ramadi from Islamic State or Daesh. Iraq is the first export customer for the Mi-28NE, having bought 15 of them as part of a package worth more than $1billion that was agreed in 2012, and that also included 28 Mi-35 attack helicopters. Iraq received the first of 11 factory-standard Mi-28NEs in 2014. The remaining four are improved Mi-28NME night-fighting versions additionally equipped with a mast-mounted radar and dual flight controls, for two pilots in tandem seating...

WikiLeaks on Monday published more than 1,000 emails from Hillary Clinton's private server during her time as secretary of State about the Iraq War. The website tweeted a link to 1,258 emails that Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee sent and received. They stem from a trove of emails released by State Department in February. WikiLeaks combed through the emails to find all the messages that reference the Iraq War.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An old Arab proverb says tyranny is better than anarchy. A year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, Iraqis have scarcely had a day free of bedlam. That point was driven home Wednesday with the devastating bombing of a hotel in central Baghdad that killed dozens of people just two days before the war's one-year anniversary. Perhaps the worst day of violence was March 2, when suicide bombers attacked Shiite shrines in the holy city of Karbala and in Baghdad, killing more than 180 people. That attack, more than any other, has raised...

(CNN) — Nearly two days after a suicide truck bomb ripped through Baghdad, families are still hoping that rescuers searching through the rubble can locate the bodies of their loved ones. The Saturday night attack on a busy shopping district was the deadliest single incident in the Iraq's war-weary capital in years, killing at least 200 people, Mohamed al-Rubaye‎, the deputy head of the security committee of the Baghdad Provincial Council, said on Afaq TV Monday.

For the third time in a week terrorists carried out a mass slaughter of civilians - with ISIS claiming responsibility. A suicide car bomb killed 125 people, including 25 children, Saturday evening in a busy shopping district in Baghdad. It was the deadliest attack in Iraq in many years. Families had gathered in the popular area to break the Ramadan fast and watch the Euro 2016 soccer tournament in a cafe when a suicide car bomb exploded, ripping through a multi-level building that also housed stores and a gym.

Obama retreats from Putin in Syria — again By Editorial Board July 2 at 4:46 PM FOR SEVERAL years, the Obama administration’s Syria policy has been stuck in a cycle of failure. Secretary of State John F. Kerry negotiates deals with Russia to end the fighting or create a new government in Damascus, while warning that if they are not respected by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the United States will consider other options, such as stepping up support for Syrian rebels. In every case, the Russian and Syrian regimes have betrayed their commitments, continuing to...

At least 91 people were killed Sunday in two bombings in the Iraqi capital, including a large-scale attack claimed by the Islamic State group that killed 86 people — among them 15 children — in a central shopping district, officials said. The bombings demonstrated the extremists’ ability to mount significant attacks despite major battlefield losses, including the city of Fallujah, which was declared “fully liberated” from IS just over a week ago. The deadliest attack took place in the central Karada district of Baghdad, where a suicide bomber blew up his explosives-laded pickup truck outside a crowded shopping center, killing...

A suicide car bombing claimed by Isil killed at least 75 people in a Baghdad shopping district in the early hours of Sunday, officials said, the deadliest single attack in the capital this year. The blast, which ripped through a street in the Karrada area where many people go to shop ahead of the holiday marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, also wounded more than 130 people, security and medical officials said. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) issued a statement claiming the suicide car bombing, saying it was carried out by an Iraqi...

President Barack Obama is expected to disclose as early as Friday the number of civilians killed in U.S. military and CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa since he took office and will issue an executive order that makes protecting civilians a more integral part of planning U.S. military operations, according to activists and other individuals familiar with the report. The White House is to disclose the casualties with a range of numbers indicating that an estimated 100 civilians have been inadvertently killed by 500 drone strikes since 2009. The estimate is said to cover drone strikes in Pakistan,...

Chobani, owned by a Turkish Muslim immigrant, has filled 30 percent of its 600 positions at the world’s largest Yogurt plant in Twin Falls, Idaho, ... This comes at a time when Twin Falls is embroiled in a firestorm of controversy involving a sexual assault of a 5-year-old special-needs girl by refugee boys from Sudan and Iraq. The city’s mayor, Shawn Barigar ... was instrumental in recruiting Chobani to Twin Falls back in 2011, and he now plays a dual role of elected official and president/CEO of the local Chamber of Commerce. ... Goldman Sachs, United Parcel Service, HP ,...

The U.S. military’s efforts to confront the Islamic State in Syria suffered another setback Wednesday after the militants routed the only group to have survived intact an ill-fated Pentagon program to train and equip moderate rebels last year. The U.S.-backed New Syrian Army said it was forced to withdraw its forces to its base at Tanf near the Jordanian border after launching what to have been a poorly conceived offensive aimed at capturing the strategically important eastern Syrian town of Abu Kamal on the Syrian-Iraqi border. Islamic State claims published by its Amaq news agency that its fighters had killed...

A series of American airstrikes killed at least 250 ISIS fighters driving in a convoy outside Fallujah on Wednesday, a senior U.S. defense official confirmed to Fox News.