This post originally appeared at TomDispatch 

***

How about a moment of silence for the passing of the American Dream?  M.R.I.C.  (May it rest in carnage.)

No, I’m not talking about the old dream of opportunity that involved homeownership, a better job than your parents had, a decent pension, and all the rest of the package that’s so yesterday, so underwater, so OWS.  I’m talking about a far more recent dream, a truly audacious one that’s similarly gone with the wind.

I’m talking about George W. Bush’s American Dream.  If people here remember the invasion of Iraq -- and most Americans would undoubtedly prefer to forget it -- what’s recalled is kited intelligence, Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal, dumb and even dumber decisions, a bloody civil war, dead Americans, crony corporations, a trillion or more taxpayer dollars flushed down the toilet... well, you know the story.  What few care to remember was that original dream -- call it The Dream -- and boy, was it a beaut!

An American Dream 

It went something like this: Back in early 2003, the top officials of the Bush administration had no doubt that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, drained by years of war, no-fly zones, and sanctions, would be a pushover; that the U.S. military, which they idolized and romanticized, would waltz to Baghdad.  (The word one of their supporters used in the Washington Post for the onrushing invasion was a “cakewalk.”)  Nor did they doubt that those troops would be greeted as liberators, even saviors, by throngs of adoring, previously suppressed Shiites strewing flowersin their path.  (No kidding, no exaggeration.)

How easy it would be then to install a “democratic” government in Baghdad -- which meant their autocratic candidate Ahmad Chalabi -- set up four or five strategically situated military mega-bases, exceedingly well-armed American small towns already on the drawing boards before the invasion began, and so dominate the oil heartlands of the planet in ways even the Brits, at the height of their empire, wouldn't have dreamed possible.  (Yes, the neocons were then bragging that we would outdo the Roman and British empires rolled into one!)

As there would be no real resistance, the American invasion force could begin withdrawing as early as the fall of 2003, leaving perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 troops, the U.S. Air Force, and various spooks and private contractors behind to garrison a grateful country ad infinitum (on what was then called “the South Korean model”).  Iraq's state-run economy would be privatized and its oil resources thrown open to giant global energy companies, especially American ones, which would rebuild the industry and begin pumping millions of barrels of that country's vast reserves, thus undermining the OPEC cartel's control over the oil market.

And mind you, it would hardly cost a cent.  Well, at its unlikely worst, maybe $100 billion to $200 billion, but as Iraq, in the phraseof then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, “floats on a sea of oil,” most of it could undoubtedly be covered, in the end, by the Iraqis themselves.

Now, doesn’t going down memory lane just take your breath away?  And yet, Iraq was a bare beginning for Bush's dreamers, who clearly felt like so many proverbial kids in a candy shop (even if they acted like bulls in a china shop).  Syria, caught in a strategic pincer between Israel and American Iraq, would naturally bow down; the Iranians, caught similarly between American Iraq and American Afghanistan, would go down big time, too -- or simply be taken down Iraqi-style, and who would complain?  (As the neocon quip of the moment went: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.  Real men want to go to Tehran.”)

And that wasn’t all.  Bush’s top officials had been fervent Cold Warriors in the days before the U.S. became “the sole superpower,” and they saw the new Russia stepping into those old Soviet boots.  Having taken down the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, they were already building a network of bases there, too.  (Let a thousand Korean models bloom!)  Next on the agenda would be rolling the Russians right out of their “near abroad,” the former Soviet Socialist Republics, now independent states, of Central Asia.

What glory!  Thanks to the unparalleled power of the U.S. military, Washington would control the Greater Middle East from the Mediterranean to the Chinese border and would be beholden to no one when victory came.  Great powers, phooey!  They were talking about a Pax Americana on which the sun could never set.  Meanwhile, there were so many other handy perks: the White House would be loosedfrom its constitutional bounds via a “unitary executive” and, success breeding success, a Pax Republicana would be established in the U.S. for eons to come (with the Democratic -- or as they said sneeringly, the “Democrat” -- Party playing the role of Iran and going down in a similar fashion).

An American Nightmare 

When you wake up in a cold sweat, your heart pounding, from a dream that’s turned truly sour, sometimes it’s worth trying to remember it before it evaporates, leaving only a feeling of devastation behind.

So hold Bush’s American Dream in your head for a few moments longer and consider the devastation that followed.  Of Iraq, that multi-trillion-dollar war, what’s left?  An American expeditionary force, still 30,000-odd troops who were supposed to hunker down there forever, are instead packing their gear and heading “over the horizon.”  Those giant American towns -- with their massive PXs, fast-food restaurants, gift shops, fire stations, and everything else -- are soon to be ghost towns, likely as not looted and stripped by Iraqis.

Multi-billions of taxpayer dollars were, of course, sunk into those American ziggurats.  Now, assumedly, they are goners except for the monster embassy-cum-citadel the Bush administration built in Baghdad for three-quarters of a billion dollars.  It’s to house part of a 17,000-person State Department “mission” to Iraq, including 5,000 armed mercenaries, all of whom are assumedly there to ensure that American folly is not utterly absent from that country even after “withdrawal.”

Put any spin you want on that withdrawal, but this still represents a defeat of the first order, humiliation on a scale and in a time frame that would have been unimaginable in the invasion year of 2003.  After all, the U.S. military was ejected from Iraq by... well, whom exactly?

Then, of course, there’s Afghanistan, where the ultimate, inevitable departure has yet to happen, where another trillion-dollar war is still going strong as if there were no holes in American pockets.  The U.S. is still taking casualties, still building up its massive base structure, still training an Afghan security force of perhaps 400,000 men in a county too poor to pay for a tenth of that (which means it’s ours to fund forever and a day).

Washington still has its stimulus program in Kabul.  Its diplomats and military officials shuttle in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan in search of “reconciliation” with the Taliban, even as CIA drones pound the enemy across the Afghan border and anyone else in the vicinity.  As once upon a time in Iraq, the military and the Pentagon still talk about progress being made, even while Washington’s unease grows about a war that everyone is now officially willing to call “unwinnable.”

In fact, it’s remarkable how consistently things that are officially going so well are actually going so badly.  Just the other day, for instance, despite the fact that the U.S. is training up a storm, Major General Peter Fuller, running the training program for Afghan forces, was dismissed by war commander General John Allen for dissing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his generals.  He called them “isolated from reality.” 

Isolated from reality?  Here’s the U.S. record on the subject: it’s costing Washington (and so the American taxpayer) $11.6 billion this year alone to train those security forces and yet, after years of such training, “not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from U.S. or allied units.”

You don’t have to be a seer to know that this, too, represents a form of defeat, even if the enemy, as in Iraq, is an underwhelming set of ragtag minority insurgencies.  Still, it’s more or less a given that any American dreams for Afghanistan, like Britain’s and Russia’s before it, will be buried someday in the rubble of a devastated but resistant land, no matter what resources Washington choses to continue to squander on the task.

This, simply put, is part of a larger landscape of imperial defeat.

Cold Sweats at Dawn 

Yes, we’ve lost in Iraq and yes, we’re losing in Afghanistan, but if you want a little geopolitical turn of the screw that captures the zeitgeist of the moment, check out one of the first statements of Almazbek Atambayev after his recent election as president of Kyrgyzstan, a country you’ve probably never spent a second thinking about.

Keep in mind that Bushian urge to roll back the Russians to the outskirts of Moscow.  Kyrgyzstan is, of course, one of the former Central Asian SSRs of the Soviet Union, and under cover of the Afghan War, the U.S. moved in, renting out a major air base at Manas airport near Bishtek, the capital.  It became a significant resupply station for the war, but also an American military foothold in the region.

Now Atambayev has announced that the U.S. will have to leave Manas when its lease is up in 2014.  The last time a Kyrgyz president made such a threat, he was trying to extort an extra $40 million in rent from the globe’s richest power. This time, though, Atambayev has evidently weighed regional realities, taken a good hard look at his resurgent neighbor and the waning influence of Washington, and placed his bet -- on the Russians.  Consider it a telling little gauge of who is now being rolled back where.

Isolated from reality?  How about the Obama administration and its generals?  Of course, Washington officials prefer not to take all this in. They’re willing to opt for isolation over reality.  They prefer to talk about withdrawing troops from Iraq, but only to bolster the already powerful American garrisons throughout the Persian Gulf and so free the region, as our secretary of state put it, “from outside interference” by alien Iran.  (Why, one wonders, is it even called the Persian Gulf, instead of the American Gulf?)

They prefer to talk about strengthening U.S. power and bolstering its bases in the Pacific so as to save Asia from... America’s largest creditor, the Chinese.  They prefer to suggest that the U.S. will be a greater, not a lesser, power in the years to come.  They prefer to “reassure allies” and talk big -- or big enough anyway.

Not too big, of course, not now that those American dreamers -- or mad visionaries, if you prefer -- are off making up to $150,000 a pop giving inspirational speeches and raking in millions for churning out their memoirs.  In their place, the Obama administration is stocked with dreamless managers who inherited an expanded imperial presidency, an American-garrisoned globe, and an emptying treasury.  And they then chose, on each score, to play a recognizable version of the same game, though without the soaring confidence, deep faith in armed American exceptionalism or the military solutions that went with it (which they nonetheless continue to pursue doggedly), or even the vision of global energy flows that animated their predecessors.  In a rapidly changing situation, they have proven incapable of asking any questions that would take them beyond what might be called the usual tactics (drones vs. counterinsurgency, say).

In this way, Washington, though visibly diminished, remains an airless and eerily familiar place.  No one there could afford to ask, for instance, what a Middle East, being transformed before our eyes, might be like without its American shadow, without the bases and fleets and drones and all the operatives that go with them.

As a result, they simply keep on keeping on, especially with Bush’s global war on terror and with the protection in financial tough times of the Pentagon (and so of the militarization of this country).

Think of it all as a form of armed denial that, in the end, is likely to drive the U.S. down.  It would be salutary for the denizens of Washington to begin to mouth the word “defeat.”  It’s not yet, of course, a permissible part of the American vocabulary, though the more decorous “decline” -- “the relative decline of the United States as an international force” -- has crept ever more comfortably into our lives since mid-decade.  When it comes to decline, for instance, ordinary Americans are voting with the opinion poll version of their feet.  In one recent poll, 69% of them declared the U.S. to be in that state.  (How they might answer a question about American defeat we don’t know.)

If you are a critic of Washington, “defeat” is increasingly becoming an acceptable word, as long as you attach it to a specific war or event.  But defeat outright?  The full-scale thing?  Not yet.

You can, of course, say many times over that the U.S. remains, as it does, an immensely wealthy and powerful country; that it has the wherewithal to right itself and deal with the disasters of these last years, which it also undoubtedly does.  But take a glance at Washington, Wall Street, and the coming 2012 elections, and tell me with a straight face that that will happen.  Not likely.

If you go on a march with the folks from Occupy Wall Street, you’ll hear the young chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!”  It’s infectious.  But here’s another chant, hardly less appropriate, if distinctly grimmer: “This is what defeat looks like!”  Admittedly, it’s not as rhythmic, but it’s something that the spreading Occupy Wall Street movement, and the un- and underemployed, and those whose houses are foreclosed or “underwater,” and the millions of kids getting a subprime education and graduating, on average, more than $25,000 in hock, and the increasing numbers of poor are coming to feel in their bones, even if they haven’t put a name to it yet.

And events in the Greater Middle East played no small role in that.  Think of it this way: if de-industrialization and financialization have, over the last decades, hollowed out the United States, so has the American way of war.  It’s the usually ignored third part of the triad.  When our wars finally fully come home, there’s no telling what the scope of this imperial defeat will prove to be like.

Bush’s American Dream was a kind of apotheosis of this country’s global power as well as its crowning catastrophe, thanks to a crew of mad visionaries who mistook military might for global strength and acted accordingly.  What they and their neocon allies had was the magic formula for turning the slow landing of a declining but still immensely powerful imperial state into a self-inflicted rout, even if who the victors are is less than clear.

Despite our panoply of bases around the world, despite an arsenal of weaponry beyond anything ever seen (and with more on its way), despite a national security budget the size of the Ritz, it’s not too early to start etching something appropriately sepulchral onto the gravestone that will someday stand over the pretensions of the leaders of this country when they thought that they might truly rule the world. 

I know my own nominee. Back in 2002, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with a “senior advisor” to George W. Bush and what that advisor told him seems appropriate for any such gravestone or future memorial to American defeat:

"The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality... That's not the way the world really works anymore… We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'''

We’re now, it seems, in a new era in which reality is making us.  Many Americans -- witness the Occupy Wall Street movement -- are attempting to adjust, to imagine other ways of living in the world.  Defeat has a bad rep, but sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Still, reality is a bear, so if you just woke up in a cold sweat, feel free to call it a nightmare.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture , runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), is being published this month. 

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt 

Source: TomDispatch 

Image by Tony the Misfit, licensed under Creative Commons.  

 

Sulaimani, Northern Iraq, April 9, 2011 

Today, almost eight years after George Bush delivered his “Mission Accomplished” speech, angry citizens protested in Sulaimani. This follows a protest the day before. And the day before that.  And the day before that.  Today is the 52nd consecutive day of anti-government protests in this city 150 miles northeast of Baghdad and 40 miles west of the Iranian border. The protests have often turned violent: a grenade and gunfire killed one person and injured more than a dozen others in late February. To date, at least eight people have been killed.

These incidents occur against a backdrop of protests-becoming-riots-becoming-revolts across the Middle East. Here in the Kurdish Region of Iraq, we have had nothing like the high drama in Egypt or the low deeds in Libya, but political violence has increased. This is especially worrisome for a region that prides itself on being the safest block in a very bad neighborhood.

These are the kinds of stories that make even well-intentioned Americans want to wash their hands of Iraq. If the Kurdish region, the friendly corner, “the model of democracy for Iraq,” is roiling with sometimes violent anti-government protests, what can we do?

The security situation is the most common argument I hear against Americans working in Iraq. The second argument is subtler, but possibly more dangerous in the long run. It boils down to this: “Contributing to the reconstruction of Iraq is tantamount to endorsing George Bush’s invasion.”

I respond that to not support the redemption of Iraq because of an aversion to George W. Bush is as immoral as the invasion that crystallized that aversion.

This is not an apology for the men who led us into war eight years ago. This is an argument that we should stop thinking about those men and get to work repairing the aftermath of their folly. The current needs and aspirations of 30 million human beings in Iraq should outweigh the American public’s dislike of a few past-tense politicians.

In the summer of 2009, I came to Sulaimani, a city of one million in the semi-autonomous Kurdish Region of Iraq. I took a teaching position at The American University of Iraq – Sulaimani. Here, educators, staff, administrators and, most importantly, 500 students work to build the only American university in Iraq and, in so doing, help to rebuild Iraq. 

Americans—precious few—come to Iraq to find many things: adventure, altruism, money, souls. For many, the dreaded Liberal Guilt Syndrome plays a role. Whatever my reasons for coming to Iraq, the students rapidly became my reason for staying.

Ali is one of these students. Sectarian violence drove his family out of their native Baghdad. Ali studied briefly at the American University of Beirut, but chose to leave what is arguably the best school in the Middle East for our untested start-up because he “wanted to come home.” (According to the United Nations High Council for Refugees, almost 2 million Iraqis live outside the country as refugees. Very few have Ali’s courage.)

Sham is a bright student who asks questions in a soft, high-pitched voice.  She does not cover her hair, as do many of my female students, but she is generally quiet. However, when she is handed an exam or a basketball, she roars.

Karwan is a published poet and an aspiring politician. When I first met him, he would try to use every English word he knew, often in the same sentence. Eighteen months later, he conveys complex ideas and delicate nuance in English and dreams of building an Iraq with politics based on issues, not ethnicities.

Between lesson plans and endless cups of tea, I stay in contact with family and friends back home. Over scratchy Skype calls and in hurried e-mails, they express concern for my safety. They also express surprise, if not outright disdain, at my decision to work in Iraq. No one is quite cynical enough to say it, but the message between the lines is, “How can you work to support Iraqi reconstruction when that might mean Bush was right to invade?” Sometimes, the question is even more visceral: “How can you work to support Iraqi reconstruction when that might mean we were right to invade?”

If people of good faith avoid helping Iraq to rebuild itself because of an aversion to past leaders and their ideologies, we allow ourselves to be buffaloed once more. Say the invasion was morally wrong and technically clumsy; making a further mess of the reconstruction will not change that fact. Two wrongs do not make anything right. The invasion cannot be undone, but we can still contribute to the reconstruction. I encourage Americans of all political stripes to think about what they can do for Iraq now.

Violent protests and the continued presence of terrorists in Iraq eight years after the U.S.-led invasion indicate that America alone cannot stabilize Iraq. While we cannot stabilize Iraq, we can help the Iraqis who can: young, idealistic Iraqis like the students Ali, Sham and Karwan. 

The question is, “Who is more important?”  Ali and his fellow returnees are more important than Donald Rumsfeld and his few “dead-enders.” Sham and her questions are more important than Dick Cheney and his non-answers on Fox News. Karwan and his ambitions are more important than George W. Bush and his premature declaration of “Mission Accomplished.”

Karwan is a freshman in college, and Karwan is the mission. 

Geoffrey Gresk blogs at www.Iraq2point0.com. 

San Saravan contributed to this article. 

Image by United States Forces - Iraq, licensed under Creative Commons. 

“The litany of horrors is gut-wrenching.” That’s how Kelley Beaucar Vlahos describes the countless deformities that have appeared in Iraqi babies since the first Gulf War in 1991 due to the environmental impact of war on that country. The list is horrific: two-headed babies, eyeless, brain tumors in children younger than two years old. “It is widely accepted among scientists, doctors, and aid workers that war is to blame,” Vlahos writes in the April 2011 issue of The American Conservative.

The presence of so much expended weaponry, waste and rubble, massive burn pits on U.S. bases, and oil fires has left a toxic legacy that is poisoning the air, the water, and the soil in Iraq. Add highly controversial armaments that the U.S. has only hinted at using in this war—such as depleted uranium—and you get a potentially radioactive landscape giving rise to doomed children and stillborn babies.

While the Department of Defense denies the claim that war efforts result in long-term illnesses, Vlahos makes the argument that “[i]n a sense, what is happening throughout Iraq today isthe 21st-century’s Agent Orange.” And like the ill effects of the herbicide dumped over Vietnam decades ago, Vlahos sees the American public neatly tucking away the ugly memories of another failed war, this time in the Middle East.

Anyone not ready to buy so easily into President Obama’s claim in his State of the Union address that “our commitment [in Iraq] has been kept” will be served well by reading Vlahos’ exploration into what we are leaving behind.

Source: The American Conservative

Panel image by familymwr, licensed under Creative Commons.

Does the WikiLeaks video released this week, showing U.S. Blackhawk helicopter crew members boasting and congratulating each other as they gun down unarmed journalists and children, reveal that U.S. military personnel take glee in killing?

Well, if it doesn’t, these bumper stickers spotted on the Cherry Point and Camp Lejeune Marine bases in North Carolina—and posted on the right-wing blog One Man’s Thoughts—will help anyone with doubts round out the picture. If you don’t live near an armed forces base or socialize with soldiers, this is the noble and morally conscious military culture you’re missing out on:

 “Waterboarding Is Out So Kill Them All!”

“Interrogators Can’t Waterboard Dead Guys”

“U.S. Marines—Travel Agents to Allah”

“When in Doubt, Empty the Magazine”

“The Marine Corps—When It Absolutely, Positively Has to Be Destroyed Overnight”

“Marines—Providing Enemies of America an Opportunity to Die for their Country Since 1775”

 “Happiness Is a Belt-Fed Weapon”

“Artillery Brings Dignity to What Would Otherwise Be Just a Vulgar Brawl”

“A Dead Enemy Is a Peaceful Enemy—Blessed Be the Peacemakers”

“Marine Sniper—You Can Run, But You’ll Just Die Tired!”

“What Do I Feel When I Kill a Terrorist? A Little Recoil”

Let me be clear: I know people who serve in the U.S. military. I admire their resolve, their courage, and their sense of duty. They do not have stickers like this on their vehicles.

Source: One Man’s Thoughts

In “The Shrine Down the Hall,” a photo essay for the New York Times Magazine, Ashley Gilbertson takes us inside the bedrooms of young Americans killed in the Iraq War. According to the Brookings Institution, almost 4,400 U.S. soldiers have died since 2003. Some 9,400 Iraqi military and police have perished, as well as 108,000 Iraqi civilians. Gilbertson is the author of Whisky Tango Foxtrot and “The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce,” an essay from Virginia Quarterly Review that we had the good fortune to reprint in our March-April 2009 issue.

Sources: New York Times Magazine, Brookings Institution (pdf), Virginia Quarterly Review

Have you heard much about Iraq lately? Chances are you haven’t: Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review reports that coverage of the Iraq war typically fills less than 2 percent of the news hole. That statistic alone is deplorable, but even worse, according to Garber, is the scarcity of “nuanced treatments of Iraq that would flesh out our simplistic things were bad but they’re getting better narrative into something more substantial and therefore more valuable.”

Garber describes the current attitude of the press toward the war as largely apathetic, and all too willing to report nuggets of conventional wisdom—like "the surge is working"—with little critical analysis.

Whether the quality of Iraq coverage will improve is an open question. The quantity, however, is certain to keep dwindling. ABC, CBS, and NBC have all pulled their full-time correspondents from Iraq, according to the New York Times. CNN’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, told the Times, “The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it.”

You’ve undoubtedly heard by now that in Iraq, having a shoe chucked at you, as President Bush did on Sunday in Baghdad, is a huge slap in the face. If you’re still wondering why, Brian Palmer at Slate breaks it down: shoes are a choice weapon of disrespect “because they’re so dirty.” Though it’s unclear where the tradition originated, “Arabs—and perhaps Iraqis in particular—throw their shoes to indicate that the target is no better than dirt.”

Palmer goes on to explain the significance of feet in various cultures, noting that George W. isn’t the first member of his family to be sullied by shoes: “After the Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein installed a mosaic of President George H.W. Bush on the floor of the Al-Rasheed Hotel. Hussein delighted in releasing images of foreign dignitaries stepping on Bush's face.”

Disrespect aside, the shoe incident may be “the best thing that’s happened to Bush in a while,” John Dickerson opines also for Slate. The shoe is being interpreted by opponents and supporters of the Iraq war as a sign of the conflict's failure or success, Dickerson writes, and he analyzes what the reignited popular debate could mean for Bush in his twilight days. Dickerson expects, if nothing else, “a spark of patriotism will kick in when some Americans watch the tape.” If that’s the case, perhaps Bush is looking forward to the farewell he’ll receive from protesters who, according to Politico, now plan to pelt the White House with shoes on his last day in office.

Image by Van Damme M., licensed under Creative Commons.

Since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 2 million Iraqis have been driven out of the country, and observers have criticized the U.S. government’s reluctance to shoulder the responsibility for taking care of these refugees. The State Department has been slow to resettle displaced Iraqis within U.S. borders. By its own admission, the department has accepted only 4,238 Iraqi refugees into the country as of April 2008. 

In a feature last week, Detroit’s Metro Times takes a more intimate look at the lives of these refugees, explaining the United States' obligation to them better than any set of figures can. The piece focuses particularly on people who have been subjected to violence because of their connections to the United States: Iraqis who worked with the U.S. government or businesses in Iraq, and with Chaldeans, a Christian minority group subjected to violence because the religion is associated with American culture.

One young man interviewed for the piece fell into both categories and fled Iraq after some harrowing harassment. Six of his coworkers were murdered, and he grew fearful for his own life after being followed home by cars of armed men and receiving anonymous phone calls demanding the names of his company’s Iraqi employees.

Metro Times also highlights the difficulties faced by Iraqi refugees upon arrival in the United States: struggling to master English, find jobs, and build communities while dealing with the emotional consequences of war. Some Michigan-specific organizations have cropped up to support them, but it's clear there are no easy solutions. 

Last year, Congress passed the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act, which forces the State Department to create concrete strategies to resettle more Iraqis in the United States. As more refugees make their homes here, it's important to keep these stories visible in the continuing discussion about the United States' responsibility to Iraq.   

(Thanks, AltWeeklies.)

Every year, somewhere between February and mid-April, sweet thoughts of indulgent write-offs and sneaky loopholes tickle the American taxpayer’s fancy. For most of us, these thoughts have their root in a Jeffersonian disdain for federal governance, or plain old-fashioned greed. But for some, tax resistance is a way of making a political statement, a way as old as taxation itself. 

The War Resisters League has been advocating war tax resistance and other forms of pacifist action since 1923. The nonprofit has an extensive section dedicated to tax resistance on its website, and has published a handbook on the subject. While it may be too late this year for most of us to make a statement on the war in Iraq by withholding tax dollars, there’s always next year. And perhaps many years to come, depending on the upcoming presidential election.

 —Morgan Winters 

The U.S. media’s perpetually disappointing coverage of the Iraq war is well documented, and continues to be hashed out on both the right and the left. And for the most part, the media has earned its reputation. But five years in, the earsplitting squall of fervent criticism has drowned out a lot of the good work being done, too, some of which Greg Mitchell calls attention to at TomDispatch.com. Mitchell, the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher, writes:

Allow me—for once—to focus on the positive by suggesting that many of the most critical and important journalistic voices exposing the criminal nature of, and the many costs of, this war have emerged from an "alternative" universe that includes former war correspondents, reporters for small newspapers or news services, comedians, aging rock 'n rollers, and bloggers, among others.

Mitchell’s picks extend beyond the usual suspects. He includes Stephen Colbert, for one (before you roll your eyes, read the essay), and Lee Pitts, an embedded reporter with the Chattanooga Times who was largely responsible for the 2004 outcry over poorly armored vehicles.

It's a year old now, but for an unequaled roundup of reporters' perspectives, check out the Columbia Journalism Review's outstanding Iraq issue (Nov.-Dec. 2006). Splicing together bits of interviews conducted with 45 journalists, CJR's editors constructed a gut-wrenching oral history of war reporting from 2003-2006, juxtaposed with some of the best Iraq photos I've seen.

What's your go-to source for information on Iraq? Compare notes in the Media Salon.

(Thanks, Media Matters / Altercation.)

—Danielle Maestretti