Free Republic

(Ayad) Allawi, the son of a Shiite businessman, joined the nationalist Baath party when he was a medical student, but in the 1970s, became an opponent of Saddam, who had already begun using brutal methods to steer the country. Today, 11 years after Saddam’s fall, violence, corruption and abuses of power still dominate daily life in Baghdad. Allawi blames Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for this chaos. […] “I have nothing against the Iranian leadership. In fact, I accommodated it often enough during my time as premier. But I am no proponent of a theocracy. I am a secularist. I wanted...

(CNSNews.com) - When he was running for re-election in 2012, President Barack Obama repeatedly took credit for ending the war in Iraq and bringing all U.S. troops home from that country. Today, at the White House, however, when talking about his decision to use military force against the al-Qaida-related ISIS terrorist group in Iraq, Obama said that removing all U.S. troops from Iraq was not “my decision.” “Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government,” Obama said. “In order for us to maintain troops in Iraq, we needed the invitation of...

Earlier this week, the campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., seized upon a column in the New York Post that described Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., as having urged Iraqi leaders in a private meeting to delay coming to an agreement with the Bush administration on the status of U.S. troops. "Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a drawdown of the American military presence," Post columnist Amir Taheri wrote, quoting Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, who told the Post that Obama, during his meeting with Iraqi leaders in July, "asked why we were...

The United States has yet to begin serious negotiations with Iraqis on an agreement to guarantee that American troops in Iraq will remain immune from arrest and prosecution by local authorities once a new Baghdad government takes over in June, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. The status-of-forces agreement, often one of the most sensitive pacts reached between the U.S. and countries that host American troops, will also set the rules for where U.S. troops will be based and the conditions under which they will operate. "All these things have to be negotiated and agreed upon -- the areas they...