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Obama Objects By Amir Taheri New York Post | Thursday, September 18, 2008 IN Monday's Post, I discussed how Barack Obama, during his July trip, had asked Iraqi leaders not to finalize an agreement vital to the future of US forces in Iraq - and how the effect of such a delay would be to postpone the departure of the US from Iraq beyond the time Obama himself calls for. The Obama campaign has objected. While its statement says my article was "filled with distortions," the rebuttal actually centers on a technical point: the differences between two Iraqi-US accords under...

What the Palestinians urgently need is a state of their own based on their national identity. They do not want to destroy Israel, let alone "pull down the American empire," as Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises. They do not want to die so that others can play heroics on TV and in their name. Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert is wrong in putting Ariel Sharon's policy of unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank on hold. For the two-state formula to work, it is imperative for Israel to decide exactly where it wants its frontiers to be drawn. Once it is clear...

For the past month or so, while the media have been obsessed with the activities of Moqtada Sadr and his fighters in Najaf, much of the really important news about Iraq has gone largely unreported... Students of journalism, however, know the difference between the events that furnish most of the daily headlines and the undercurrents that shape the broader context of a society’s political life. Now what are the undercurrents that, with eyes fixed on the current events, are largely ignored? The most important is that post-liberation Iraq, defying great odds, has succeeded in carrying out its political reform agenda...