The following is excerpted from a notebook in which I wrote about the first Iraq War or Gulf War. With talk of a third Iraq War, I went back to look and decided to share these fragments from 23 years ago.—PM Gulf War Notebook (1991) Feb. 15. Iraq’s Revolutionary Command…
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Conflict in the Middle East has been a constant for as long as I can remember, and the U.S. in on the verge of taking military action again.—PM Gulf War Notebook (1991) Feb. 15. Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council says Iraq is prepared to withdraw from Kuwait in compliance with U.N.…
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Lowell native Mehmed Ali has been serving with the US State Department in Iraq for the past few years. Last Saturday, the Sun published a photograph with caption noting that Ali had recently received the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy at the US Embassy in Baghdad. According to the…
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The top story in the NYTimes online at this hour is the loss of six more US soldiers in Afghanistan, killed when a van loaded with explosives blew up at an outpost manned by US/NATO and Afghan troops. Many Afghan and US soldiers were wounded in the attack, for which the…
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Not only because Lowell historian Mehmed Ali and others from the city, the Merrimack Valley, and beyond are on duty in Iraq, but also because the death and destruction goes on every day in that world turned upside down, we must remember there’s a war there. Each day in November,…
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“All the President’s Men” is one of my favorite movies, and I believe the dynamic duo of “Woodstein” should be remembered with a statue on the mall in Washington, DC, some day, but I’m not a fan of the Washington insider books that Bob Woodward has been churning out for…
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What to say about political and cultural commentator Frank Rich in today’s NYT? He’s on a tear against Left, Right, and Center. The only satisfaction he finds in our messed up world today is Jonathan Franzen’s new and already-blockbuster novel “Freedom,” which Rich says nails the psyche of the time like…
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I’m not the first to say this is a powerful book. Filkins won awards from the National Book Critics Circle and NYTimes Book Review. It was a best-seller in hardcover. I lent my first copy to someone, and it went into the book-loan twilight zone, which is why I bought…
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Writing for TIME, Joe Klein offered up a sober assessment of President Obama’s speech to the disabled vets a few days ago that marked the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq by our country. You can read the August 2 blog post here. It’s not unusual for a writer to…
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Columnist and “talking head” Thomas L. Friedman of the NYT has his fans and his detractors; he turned off a lot of people with his support for the Iraq invasion. The current mess in Afghanistan can be traced in large measure to the bad decision to start a second war in…
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