Issues Page

Mahmoudiya, a town south of Baghdad, was part of the area long known as the "Triangle of Death" because of the extraordinary number of Sunni insurgent attacks against coalition forces and Iraqi civilians it suffered - often half a dozen daily in 2006. Today, with violence down to only a few ineffective attacks in any given week, it has earned the moniker "Triangle of Love." The progress there is due in part to the new US strategy. It involved living among the local population to break the hold of the insurgents and now focuses more on partnering and empowering local Iraqi forces than depending on US troops to target and capture enemies. This switch in Mahmoudiya has spurred economic growth in the area and sheds light on how to manage a drawdown of US forces without sacrificing the hard-won security gains of the past 18 months.

Laith Kasshana left Baghdad, Iraq, early in 2007, when his 2-year-old daughter Media was an infant. In Baghdad, Kasshana's life was threatened and his brother was shot. "I felt so afraid," he told Catholic News Service. "Even today, when I talk about Iraq, I feel full of anxiety." But Kasshana, his wife and his two children -- 10-month-old Mathew was born in Lebanon -- left Sept. 7 for resettlement in San Diego. All through the family's troubles, Kasshana's 25-year-old wife, Ban, never lost faith that God would do something for her family.

President Bush has been embarrassed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Bush had set a goal of July 31 for a security agreement with Maliki's government. The key to negotiating such an accord, for Bush, was to avoid setting a firm date for withdrawal of US combat troops. Bush has insisted that the timing and pacing of a withdrawal had to be determined solely by conditions on the ground - a mantra that GOP presidential candidate John McCain has echoed faithfully. But now Maliki is demanding a "specific deadline" for the withdrawal not only of American combat troops but of all US forces of any kind.

Thousands of Iraqi refugees have arrived in the United States as part of a nationwide resettlement program to bring 12,000 Iraqis to the United States by the end of next month, officials said. About a quarter of the 9,000 Iraqi refugees already here arrived over the past month, according to a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR. Most come from secondary countries including Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. A resettlement program run by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Camden has received five Iraqi families in recent months — a total of 19 people — and more are expected, according to executive director Kevin Hickey.

Iraq's foreign minister insisted Sunday that any security deal with the United States must contain a "very clear timeline" for the departure of U.S. troops. A suicide bomber struck north of Baghdad, killing at least five people including an American soldier. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told reporters that American and Iraqi negotiators were "very close" to reaching a long-term security agreement that will set the rules for U.S. troops in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year. Zebari said the Iraqis were insisting that the agreement include a "very clear timeline" for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces, but he refused to talk about specific dates.

They've been threatened for not wearing a veil or simply for having the wrong name in a country torn by sectarian strife. They've had friends killed and fathers kidnapped. They've fled their homes and put their dreams on hold. But now 15 Iraqi students have resurrected their ambitions. They are on their way to the United States to join the class of 2012 at colleges and universities that have waived tuition to help them become Iraq's future architects, teachers, psychologists. The Iraqi Student Project was born of two American peace activists' desire to give something back to Iraqis in the wake of violence triggered by the US invasion in 2003.

The soaring price of oil will leave the Iraqi government with a cumulative budget surplus of as much as $79 billion by year's end, an American federal oversight agency has concluded in an analysis released yesterday. The unspent windfall, which covers surpluses from oil sales from 2005 through 2008, appears likely to put an uncomfortable new focus on the approximately $48 billion in American taxpayer money devoted to rebuilding Iraq since the American-led invasion. And in an odd financial twist, a large amount of the surplus money is sitting in an American bank in New York - nearly $10 billion at the end of 2007, with more expected this year, when the accountability office estimates a skyrocketing surplus.

After long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how can the United States plan to win in either country? What would an achievable victory look like? This question has new urgency, given the recent upswing in violence in Afghanistan and the sense emerging among many US leaders – from both parties – that military resources need to be speedily diverted there from Iraq. One thing is clear. Neither of these victories will look like your grandfather's victory in the Pacific in 1945. Back then, Japan's army chief and top-hatted foreign minister traveled to the USS Missouri to sign a surrender document and hand it with full pomp to Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

For many Democrats, Afghanistan was always the "good war," as opposed to Iraq. I think Barack Obama needs to ask himself honestly: "Am I for sending more troops to Afghanistan because I really think we can win there, because I really think that that will bring an end to terrorism, or am I just doing it because to get elected in America, post-9/11, I have to be for winning some war?" The truth is that Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Pakistan are just different fronts in the same war.

The Bush administration's embrace of a flexible timeline for pulling U.S. troops from Iraq has accelerated negotiations between Washington and Baghdad over a long-term security pact, officials from both sides said. The optimism marks a turnaround from just a month ago, when big differences seemed to have deadlocked talks over the terms of a continued American military presence in the country. In June, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the talks were at a "dead end," dimming hopes of reaching a deal by July 31 -- a goal the Bush administration has pushed hard to meet. This month, however, the White House said it had agreed to a "general time horizon" for troop withdrawals, breaking from its long-held public resistance to the notion. The change has helped overcome differences on other issues, such as immunity for U.S. troops, negotiators on both sides said.

Bishop Joseph A. Galante challenged leaders of Catholic pro-life, family life and social justice offices around the country to "tear down our cubicles" and "give up our turf" in order to model collaboration for the rest of the church. The bishop of Camden, N.J. called "Life, Justice & Family: Partners in the New Evangelization." Reminding his audience that the body of Christ includes everyone, from the moment of conception to the "the last breath breathed," the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned and the homeless, the bishop asked, "How can we dishonor, dismember, destroy that body? How can we kill the unborn, bomb the Iraqis, shun the one who is different from us?

The State Department cannot resettle in the United States about 25,000 Iraqi interpreters and other refugees who worked for the U.S.-led coalition over the next two years because of limits on the number of applications that can be reviewed, according to Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte. Human rights agencies, led by Refugees International, say roughly that number of refugees are in danger because they were employed by the U.S. government, the military or their contractors.

Barack Obama's plan to build up U.S. forces in Afghanistan while keeping perhaps 50,000 troops in Iraq has triggered a deep rift among antiwar activists, a reminder of the difficult tasking facing the presumptive Democratic nominee as he tries to broaden his appeal. In Iraq, Obama won a tacit Iraqi endorsement of a plan to withdraw U.S. combat troops in 2010, but he also said that he backs leaving a residual force in Iraq to help train military personnel, provide security for U.S. interests and thwart terrorist threats. The residual force might total up to 50,000 troops, his campaign advisers have told reporters.

Last week, President George W. Bush gave ground and agreed to a "general time horizon" for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq. He didn't mention any dates. On Monday, however, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with Sen. Barack Obama in Baghdad and supplied one: His spokesman said that Iraq wants U.S. combat troops out of Iraq by the end of 2010. That just about dovetails with Obama's promise to withdraw combat troops in 16 months. But al-Maliki's willingness to name a date is another major sign of how well things are going in Iraq. Violence is way down. Political reconciliation is bubbling up. The oil boom is filling the treasury. And with provincial elections scheduled for later in the year, the political pressure is growing for al-Maliki to speed the withdrawal.

Sen. Barack Obama met with Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq's once-troubled Anbar province on Tuesday before heading for Amman, Jordan, where he told reporters that Iraqis now needs to resolve their political differences. On Monday, Obama received a fresh boost to his troop withdrawal plan from the Iraqi government, which affirmed that it shares Obama's goal of pulling US troops out of Iraq by the end of 2010. Maliki told Obama he hopes the troops will go home "by the end of 2010," according to Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, marking the first time the Iraqi government has specified a time limit on the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq.

Barack Obama and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we "win" and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and "win" in Afghanistan. For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

Last year, when Democrats in Congress tried to lock in a timetable for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, their legislation was based on the notion that we'd already lost an unwinnable war. Now Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki proposes a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal, evidently for exactly the opposite reason: He thinks we've won. U.S. commanders urge caution on that score. But there's plenty of evidence for optimism and it's no stretch to believe that conditions in Iraq have stabilized to the point that the U.S. can anticipate even steeper troop withdrawals than those announced.

Bolstered by recent Iraqi military successes, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki proposed Monday that negotiators include a timetable for the departure of U.S. troops in any agreement to continue the American presence in Iraq beyond the end of the year. The suggestion, made during an official visit to the United Arab Emirates, appeared aimed at easing domestic fears that the deal would impinge on Iraqi sovereignty and clear the way for permanent American bases. The Iraqi leader also recognizes that American opinion has turned against the war and believes his country should not wait for a decision to be made in Washington to pull out troops.

The president recently restated his goal: to transform Iraq into democratic-capitalist modernity, much as Germany and Japan had been transformed during the military occupations that followed their defeat in World War II. But Iraq is an Arab country, and no Arab country has yet been able to consolidate democracy, and that includes Jordan and Lebanon, the two that are most developed. Literacy rates illustrate the difficulty of modernizing Iraq: in 2003/04, 57 percent of women in 15 Arab countries were literate. World Bank data show just 30 percent of Iraqi females as literate in 2003. And, of course, democratization in Iraq is vastly complicated by the longstanding hostility between the majority Shiite and the minority Sunni, and between those two Arab sects and the Iraqi Kurds.

We've spent roughly $1 trillion, lost more than 4,000 Americans, seen tens of thousands of Iraqis die. And the debate in this country over the war amounts to a bout of locker-room towel snapping. Republicans pretend Sen. Obama can't lead on Iraq because he hasn't banked enough Green Zone photo ops. The Democratic charade is that Sen. McCain, who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison, doesn't care how long young Americans die in the desert. With the primary season over and conditions shifting on the ground in Iraq, it's time for the media to bear down on these would-be commanders in chief with a few tough questions.