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While attending the Iraqi army’s artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words “God is great.” “It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this,” Omran recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani. […] Now al-Ani is a commander in the Islamic State group, said Omran, who rose to become a major general in the Iraqi army and now commands its 5th Division fighting IS....

“What We Know Now”: Iraq revisionism is not knowledge by Daniel Clark “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” That was the question that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly put to Jeb Bush about Iraq. The Florida governor’s answer, and his subsequent attempts at clarification, have since been roundly criticized. Little has been said, however, about the awfulness of Kelly’s question. Bush should have challenged Kelly’s premise, by asking her what it is “we know now” that should produce a different answer than he would have given in 2003. When critics of the Iraq War refer...

The detail hindsight forgets, and the fiction murky memories create We’ve been coming back to the Iraq War lately for two reasons. One is that the media keep bringing it up in the form of a knowing-what-we-know-now gotcha question aimed at Republican presidential candidates (although they offer no such question to Hillary Clinton concerning the 2011 withdrawl of all U.S. troops . . . not that she would answer). The other, more pertinent reason, is that ISIS is overrunning Iraq at the moment, taking advantage of the absence of a residual U.S. force and Barack Obama’s refusal to wage a...

<p>Probable Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush got himself into trouble by sort of, sort of not, answering the question whether he would have supported going into Iraq in 2003 — had he known then what we know now.</p> <p>Republican candidates vied in attacking Bush’s initial confusion about answering the question. Most reiterated that they most certainly would not have invaded Iraq, regardless of what they know now or thought they knew then. Politically, it appears to be wiser to damn the decision to invade Iraq and to forget the circumstances that prompted the war — and the later political environment that ended the American presence.</p>

RUSH: It's Josh in Williamsburg, Virginia. Great to have you, sir. Hello. Appreciate your patience. CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. So I want to do two things. The first is to say that Jeb Bush's answer to Megyn Kelly's initial question was not necessarily wrong. He could validly have that answer to her question. The second is to -- RUSH: Wait a minute, Josh. What -- CALLER: Yeah. RUSH: Just refresh people's -- what did he say? What was his answer to that first question? He would do it all over again, right? CALLER: Yeah. So the...

When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe. Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening...

A fugitive Iraqi militant leader and the former right-hand man of Saddam Hussein has reportedly been killed in a skirmish. Iraqi officials said Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri had died in fighting with government troops in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad. Al-Douri, 72, headed the Naqshbandi Order insurgent group, an important faction behind the recent rise of ISIS. He was one of Saddam's most trusted henchmen, helping to lead his 1968 bloodless coup. Both Al-Douri and Saddam came from the same Tikriti tribal background. He was then deputy to Saddam when he was deposed following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Following...

SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe. Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through...

On a recent Saturday evening, Ahmed al-Shabibi relaxed at a hookah café in England with other Iraqi friends – both Shiite and Sunni Muslims – when the conversation turned to the ongoing battle to reclaim the city of Tikrit from Islamic State jihadists. A Sunni in the group lamented Iranian interference in the fight and boasted that such meddling never would’ve occurred under the former Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein. Al-Shabibi said he and the others agreed because, “Saddam, as you know, had a very interesting idea of security.” Nostalgia for Saddam is hardly new, but it appears to be reaching...

The NY Daily News blasted the GOP on its cover today, calling them "traitors":   Regardless of President Obama’s fecklessness in negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, 47 Republican U.S. senators engaged in treachery by sending a letter to the mullahs aimed at cutting the legs out from under America’s commander-in-chief. We join GOP signatories in opposing the pact as outlined, but we strenuously condemn their betrayal of the U.S. constitutional system. The participants represented the bulk of the Republicans’ 54-member senatorial majority, vesting their petulant, condescending stunt with the coloration of an institutional foreign policy statement. They are an...

Violent attacks by Boko Haram have caused many to flee their homes, creating a humanitarian crisis within Nigeria and neighboring countries. Refugees say they have witnessed brutal acts of savagery, with men's throats being slit and women being held as "war booty." Chad has become the latest country on the border with Nigeria to be affected by a Boko Haram attack. The BBC's Tom Oladipo went to Yola village in Aadamawa state in northeast Nigeria and spoke to refugees there. ...

The U.S. government suppressed information about chemical weapons it found in Iraq, and several servicemembers were injured by their exposure to those weapons, The New York Times is reporting. In an article published late Tuesday, the newspaper says it found 17 American servicemembers and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to mustard or nerve agents after 2003. They were reportedly given inadequate care and told not to talk about what happened. "From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam...

Gone With The WMD: Recalling the fleeting facts about Iraq by Daniel Clark The Ocober 14th New York Times story revealing a stockpile of 5,000 chemical weapons in Iraq was not news. That’s why baffled conservatives like National Review’s Deroy Murdock are mistaken when they wonder why George W. Bush would “cover up” this information. The bulk of these pre-1991 weapons were stored at Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons facility in al-Muthanna, and had actually been declared to the United Nations at the end of that conflict. The existence of al-Muthanna’s chemical weapons stockpile had been revealed in the Duelfer Report...

The founder and former CEO of the Blackwater Worldwide security firm said Thursday that the conviction of four of his former employees for their roles in the 2007 fatal shooting of 14 unarmed Iraqis was unexpected, and raised questions whether they received a fair trial. “Well, there was certainly a lot of politics surrounding this and the fact that the federal government spent tens of millions of dollars on this, now trying it seven years after the event, and 7,000 miles from where it happened,” said Erik Prince, in a phone interview. “Certainly, it adds a lot of politics to...

SOUTH OF KARBALA, Iraq — Four soldiers from the 2nd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, with red sores on their faces and hands, were sent by ambulance to a rear MASH unit Tuesday. They were told they would be examined for possible contact with nerve or blistering agents. Once at the 30th medical brigade's mobile hospital at the 101st's headquarters south of Karbala, the soldiers were isolated from other troops and photographed. A doctor at the MASH, Maj. David Wolken, interviewed each soldier and measured his pulse and heart rate in a tent with a dirt floor. One soldier...

The U.S. Marines who guarded the sprawling complex in northwest Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s 1980s war machine churned out some of the most deadly chemical and biological weapons known to man had a name for one especially mysterious bunker: The Dragon’s Egg.

"Many people have asked how closeSaddam Hussein is to developing a nuclear weapon. Well, we don't know exactly, and that's the problem." -George W. Bush, Cincinnati, Ohio, Oct 7, 2002 In wake of ISIS possibly acquiring and using chemical weapons in Iraq, The NYTimes' C.J. Chivers came out with a piece earlier this week that has reignited debate over the issue of Iraq WMD. Chivers' article that covers old munitions and the plight of OIF soldiers exposed to chemical weapons leakage, is not exactly new news. "Nothing found" is a lie, which much of mainstream belief has embraced due to...

What a difference a decade makes! When it was first reported in May 2004 that Saddam-era chemical weapons shells had injured U.S. troops, the editors of the New York Times dismissed that, “Finding some residual weapons that had escaped a large-scale destruction program would be no great surprise and if the chemicals had degraded, no major threat.” Now, a major New York Times report on the issue has been followed by an editorial warning of “A Deadly Legacy in Iraq”: some 5,000 chemical shells have been discovered over the years in Iraq by U.S. or U.S.-trained Iraqi forces. Many more...

WASHINGTON — Jurors who have for weeks been deliberating in the murder and manslaughter case against four former Blackwater Worldwide security contractors passed a note to the judge on Wednesday that suggested they were leaning toward conviction on at least some counts. In their note, jurors asked whether the firearm charge applies to defendants convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors are seeking convictions for voluntary manslaughter. The note suggests that, at least for some of the counts, jurors are leaning toward convicting, but for the lesser charge. Manslaughter carries a sentence of up to 15 years per count, or up to...

When people ask me how I feel about the latest events in Iraq, I tell them I feel sad. All these people — both Americans and Iraqis who have died since 2003 — died for nothing. And as the Islamic State insurgency unfolds, and as Iraq tries once again for a peaceful political transition, I’m mourning not just those who have died over the past decade, but for a country that I haven’t been able to recognize for a very long time. I grew up in Baghdad in a middle-class family. My father served in the Iraqi Air Force and...