Free Republic

Ali Allawi's memoir The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace certainly deserves the praise and attention it has been getting (even from writers like Maureen Dowd, so eager to score cheap points against the Bush administration that—even while rebuking others for having insufficient grasp of Iraqi reality—she confused the author with his cousin Iyad Allawi and called him a "puppet" into the bargain). The book is written with a very strong combination of heart and mind by someone with an enviable command of English who both knows and cares a good deal about Iraq. He does not...

LONDON (AFP) - The interim Iraqi government will have "final political control" over coalition military action following the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday. Blair was speaking less than an hour after Iraq's interim defence minister, in London for a meeting with the prime minister and others, said he expected foreign troops to remain in his country for "months rather than years". Blair's comments add flesh to a plan for guiding Iraq towards self-rule outlined the previous night by US President George W. Bush. This would see a transitional administration take over on June...

Is Saddam Hussein's old army coming back into the fold? THE good news for the United States is that Fallujah, the city at the heart of Iraq's insurgency has, for the time being, fallen strikingly quiet. American forces have lifted their three-week siege and withdrawn beyond the town's perimeter. Many of the 100,000 residents who had fled have come home. Americans and Iraqis who were fighting each other have agreed to create a “Fallujah brigade”. Insurgents who hours earlier were shooting at Americans happily accepted American offers of cash, radios and uniforms. Many Americans—and Iraqis—in Iraq worry that these short-term...