RE SUNDAY’S ARTICLE: To update, taking account of the change of Iraqi general in charge of Falluja, substitute new paragraphs 6 and 7. Full amended text follows. 4 May 2004 Iraq: It’s All Over Now By Gwynne Dyer The situation in Iraq is “disintegration verging on collapse,” said Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the …
2 May 2004 Iraq: It’s All Over Now By Gwynne Dyer The situation in Iraq is “disintegration verging on collapse,” said Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the United Nations, on the last day of April. It was a month that saw more American troops killed than during last year’s invasion, a decisive US defeat …
1 September 2003 To Help Or Not To Help By Gwynne Dyer “Bring em on,” blustered President George W. Bush a month ago, so the terrorists blew up first the UN headquarters in Baghdad, and then Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, Iraq’s most prominent Shia leader, and a hundred other people in Najaf. “It is necessary …
19 August 2003 Iraq: La Politique du Pire By Gwynne Dyer United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is outraged. US President George W. Bush makes his usual clumsy attempt to paint the Iraqi resistance as just another bunch of ‘terrorists’, and to link them with some worldwide conspiracy of terrorists who attack the United States because …
20 April 2003 Iraq: Unanswered Questions By Gwynne Dyer Wars always leave loose ends, but this one is over-fulfilling its norm. There is, for example, the enigma of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which allegedly posed such an urgent threat to the world that the US government was unwilling to wait for the UN arms …
6 April 2003 The Battle of Baghdad: How Bad? How Long? By Gwynne Dyer There is no way that the US army could lose the battle of Baghdad. The questions are how bad will it be, and how long might it last? Right now, US commanders will be wresting with the temptation to try to …
30 March 2003 Rumsfeld’s War By Gwynne Dyer American generals are not political innocents, though they have to act as if they were. When Lieutenant General William Wallace, the commander of American ground forces in Iraq, ruefully told journalists last Thursday that “the enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against” and …
19 March 2003 The Probability Tree By Gwynne Dyer Of all human enterprises, war is the least predictable or controllable. Even when an attacker enjoys such a huge advantage as the US armed forces have over the Iraqis, things can go wrong. Here is a day-by-day check-list of what should be happening in Iraq once …
18 January 2003 Iraq: The Schedule Slips By Gwynne Dyer It gets quite warm in Iraq between May and September, and the last conqueror of Baghdad, General Sir Stanley Maude, avoided the worst of the Mesopotamian summer by leading his British and Indian troops into the city in March of 1917. However, the Arab warriors …
26 December 2002 Iraq: Will They Fight? By Gwynne Dyer “If they come, we are ready,” Saddam Hussein told his most recent biographer, Con Coughlin, last September. “We will fight them on the streets, from the rooftops, house to house. We will never surrender.” To anybody who recalls Saddam’s hollow threats about the coming ‘Mother …