Seven long months after parliamentary elections, Iraqis still don’t have a government. Yet Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was on another international road trip Monday ”” this one to Tehran, where he was soliciting the mullahs’ support for his bid to maintain power in Baghdad.

Mr. Maliki also was just in Syria and Jordan and is expected to visit Egypt and Turkey. Reuters reported that he is offering Arab states investment deals if they nudge his rival, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, toward accepting Mr. Maliki’s leadership. Mr. Allawi, whose Sunni-backed, secular-Shiite coalition called Iraqiya bested Mr. Maliki’s Shiite State of Law bloc by two seats in the election, has also been on the road trawling for support.

Iraq needs good relations with its neighbors. But more than anything it needs a legitimate government able to address its many deep problems. Rather than trading unseemly favors with other countries, Mr. Maliki should be working full time with Mr. Allawi and other leaders to break the political impasse at home. Mr. Allawi needs to be open to compromise.

Read it all.

We live in a culture of fear, and since 9/11 we have grown increasingly anxious about terrorism, pandemics, environmental disasters and nuclear annihilation ”” anything that can injure or kill us. Our method of coping is to make an idol out of any activity, agency or technology that will promise us security.

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow has written a new book Be Very Afraid that examines how we respond to the constant threats we see around us. His conclusion: Instead of freezing when they face a threat, Americans get busy and buy duct tape. Nothing frustrates us more than terrorism alerts such as the one recently issued by the U.S. State Department for travel to Europe. It warns us of potential danger but gives no specific guidance.

I believe that this idolatry of safety is a very unfaithful response. Whether one is Christian, Jewish or Muslim, the challenge of faith is to put trust in God, not in security precautions….

Read it all.

When Nuri Kamal al-Maliki began his bid for re-election as prime minister ”” exactly a year ago on Saturday ”” he pledged to unite a population splintered and suspicious after years of war. He has not, and while he is hardly alone in blame, the consequences could haunt Iraq for years to come.

The purging of ballot lists before the election, the contentious and inconclusive challenges to the results, and the protracted delay in forming a new government since then have all deepened the ethnic, sectarian and societal cracks in a newly democratic state as fragile as an ancient Babylonian vase.

Sunni leaders in particular are angry at the prospect that they may be disenfranchised once again.

Read it all.

The week that Army Spc. Thomas K. Doerflinger was killed in Iraq at age 20, a friend in the neighborhood brought his parents a felt banner with a gold star. Tradition holds that a grieving mother hangs it in her window until the war is over. As it turned out, the war outlasted the banner.

Years passed; the red border faded. Repairmen who came to their door on leafy Collingwood Terrace would innocently inquire, then stammer their condolences. The Doerflingers didn’t feel right displaying a kind of grief that was never going to go away, so after a while they put the banner in the hutch.

Endings can be complicated for families of the fallen.

When President Obama announced the conclusion of combat operations in Iraq this month, Lee Ann Doerflinger didn’t feel any closer to that magical “closure” everyone talks about. In some ways, she felt worse.

Read it all.

Mr. Blair has a pleasing capacity to take us with him into privileged places, whether it’s upstairs at the White House (where, over dinner, he finds Mr. Bush “unbelievably, almost preternaturally calm” before his major speech to Congress after 9/11) or to Balmoral itself, where he must dash down long corridors to the toilet facilities, which are both remote and old-fashioned”” Victorian water closets. He gives a frank account of how hard it was, in his early years as prime minister, to get on with Queen Elizabeth, who treated him with “hauteur.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Blair offers a robust defense of his role in taking Britain into the Iraq war, though he agonizes over the invasion’s violent aftermath. To this day he sees the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as the one true course for his country (and ours). More surprisingly, he notes that his close relations with the U.S., despite the war’s unpopularity, gave him increased stature with other world leaders, who assumed that he had Mr. Bush’s ear.

As for the joint U.S.-British decision to seek (in vain) United Nations approval for the Iraq invasion, Mr. Blair has no apologies. He reveals that although Vice President Dick Cheney was adamantly opposed to involving the U.N., Mr. Bush did not take much persuading. In any case, the U.N. declined to authorize the use of military force, and the invasion went ahead anyway. Clearly, for Mr. Blair, it was better to have tried multilaterally and lost than never to have tried at all.

Read it all.

Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East on the Index of Political Freedom from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit ”” behind Israel, Lebanon and Morocco, but ahead of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis say they want a democracy, while only 19 percent want an Islamic state.

In short, there has been substantial progress on the things development efforts can touch most directly: economic growth, basic security, and political and legal institutions. After the disaster of the first few years, nation building, much derided, has been a success. When President Obama speaks to the country on Iraq, he’ll be able to point to a large national project that has contributed to measurable, positive results.

Of course, to be honest, he’ll also have to say how fragile and incomplete this success is. Iraqi material conditions are better, but the Iraqi mind has not caught up with the Iraqi opportunity.

Read it all.

Iraq’s prime minister has said the country is “independent” as the US formally ends combat operations.

Nouri Maliki said the country’s security forces would now deal with all threats, domestic or other.

Read it all.

The outgoing commander of American forces in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, said Sunday that a new Iraqi government could still be two months away and warned that a stalemate beyond that could create demands for a new election to break the deadlock that has lasted since March.

While General Odierno said he believed negotiations had picked up and would prove successful, he predicted politicians still required “four to six to eight weeks.”

“That’s a guess,” he said in an interview at his headquarters, whose plaster roof is still engraved with the initials of Saddam Hussein. “If it goes beyond 1 October, what does that mean? Could there be a call for another election? I worry about that a little bit.”

Read it all.

More than 30 people have been killed and dozens injured in a series of bomb attacks across Iraq.

There have been several blasts in Baghdad, including one in which 15 people died. At least 15 were killed in a suicide attack in Kut in the south.

Read it all.

For now, 50,000 troops will remain ”” combat ready but assigned primarily to training Iraqi forces, a shift made somewhat awkward by Obama’s rigid deadline. It will force the State Department, for instance, to hire an army of private security contractors to take over functions that would more appropriately be handled by the military.

That is odd and troubling. But it doesn’t alter the fact that a large combat force is no longer needed. By every measure in the comprehensive Iraq Index maintained by the Brookings Institution, violence has plummeted. Civilian casualties are down to 1,366 so far this year vs. 34,500 in 2006, the year before President Bush’s “troop surge” strategy reversed the course of the war. U.S. military fatalities stand at 43 this year in Brookings’ July measure, just 1% of the 4,415 who’ve given their lives since the invasion began in 2003. This year, 280 troops have been wounded, vs. 6,412 in 2006.

Stability, the overriding U.S. priority after post-invasion blunders sent Iraq tumbling into chaos, has been achieved. But whether Iraqis can keep it is an open question.

Read it all.

Nine months after an Army psychiatrist was charged with fatally shooting 13 soldiers and wounding 30, the nation’s largest Army post can measure the toll of war in the more than 10,000 mental health evaluations, referrals or therapy sessions held every month.

About every fourth soldier here, where 48,000 troops and their families are based, has been in counseling during the past year, according to the service’s medical statistics. And the number of soldiers seeking help for combat stress, substance abuse, broken marriages or other emotional problems keeps increasing.

Read it all.

Iraq’s top army officer has criticised as premature the planned US troop withdrawal by the end of next year.

Lt Gen Babaker Zebari warned that the Iraqi military might not be ready to take control for another decade.

The US says it is on target to end combat operations by the end of August and meet its deadline for removing all troops by the end of 2011.

It has 64,000 soldiers in Iraq. About 50,000 will remain until 2011 to train Iraqi forces and protect US interests.

Read it all.

Gina was a playful 2-year-old German shepherd when she went to Iraq as a highly trained bomb-sniffing dog with the military, conducting door-to-door searches and witnessing all sorts of noisy explosions.

She returned home to Colorado cowering and fearful. When her handlers tried to take her into a building, she would stiffen her legs and resist. Once inside, she would tuck her tail beneath her body and slink along the floor. She would hide under furniture or in a corner to avoid people.

A military veterinarian diagnosed with her post-traumatic stress disorder ”” a condition that some experts say can afflict dogs just like it does humans.

“She showed all the symptoms and she had all the signs,” said Master Sgt. Eric Haynes, the kennel master at Peterson Air Force Base. “She was terrified of everybody and it was obviously a condition that led her down that road.”

Read it all and check out the video as well.

Ikbal Ali, a bureaucrat in a beaded head scarf, accompanied by a phalanx of police officers, quickly found what she was out looking for in the summer swelter: electricity thieves. Six black cables stretched from a power pole to a row of auto-repair shops, siphoning what few hours of power Iraq’s straining system provides.

“Take them all down,” Ms. Ali ordered, sending a worker up in a crane’s bucket to disentangle the connections. A shop owner, Haitham Farhan, responded mockingly, using the words now uttered across Iraq as a curse, “Maku kahraba” ”” “There is no electricity.”

From the beginning of the war more than seven years ago, the state of electricity has been one of the most closely watched benchmarks of Iraq’s progress, and of the American effort to transform a dictatorship into a democracy.

And yet, as the American combat mission ”” Operation Iraqi Freedom, in the Pentagon’s argot ”” officially ends this month, Iraq’s government still struggles to provide one of the most basic services.

Read it all.

(Please note–the above headline is from the print edition–KSH).

Melanie Poorman swiveled in her chair and punched a button on the phone. The caller, an Iraq war veteran in his 30s, had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was watching a movie, “Body of War,” that was triggering bad memories. He started to cry.

And he had a 12-gauge shotgun nearby. Could someone please come and take it away, he asked.

Ms. Poorman, 54, gently coaxed the man into unloading the weapon. As a co-worker called the police, she stayed on the line, talking to him about his girlfriend, his work, the war. Suddenly, there were sirens. “I unloaded the gun!” she heard him shout. And then he hung up. (He was taken to a hospital, she learned later.)

Read it all.

President Barack Obama may have set his 30,000 Afghanistan troop surge deadline for July, but it could be September before all their necessary equipment catches up.

Case in point: Just this week a C-17 cargo plane took off from Charleston Air Force Base with nearly 100,000 pounds of ammunition stuffed inside its cavernous belly.

Stored not too far away are tons of bridging materials set to move in the coming weeks. That’s on top of the more than 1,700 heavy armored vehicles that have been loaded, chained and flown overseas by Charleston pilots since January.

Read it all.

When the Americans arrived, Hamid Ahmad, a former air force warrant officer imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, imagined a new life for his family, freed from the burdens of tyranny. In seven hard years, nothing went as planned.

He spoke good English and believed in America. He got a job, his family says, with the United States military. Late last month, he wound up dead at the hands of his 32-year-old son, who had turned into an insurgent who sought money and purpose in fighting the Americans.

“I didn’t say anything to him,” the son, Abdul, said in an interview as he stood barefoot with a bruised left eye in a jailhouse here in the city, not long after he confessed to the killing. “I just pulled the trigger and shot six or seven bullets.”

He said, “Everybody hated him because he worked for the Americans.”

Read it all.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine….

Read it carefully and read it all.

Thirty-two soldiers took their own lives last month, the most Army suicides in a single month since the Vietnam era. Eleven of the soldiers were not on active duty. Of the 21 who were, seven were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Department of Defense said.

Army officials say they don’t have any answers to why more and more soldiers are resorting to suicide.

“There were no trends to any one unit, camp, post or station,” Col. Chris Philbrick, head of the Army’s suicide prevention task force, told CNN. “I have no silver bullet to answer the question why.”

Makes the heart sad–read it all.

Update: An NBC News segment on this may be viewed here:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In Army culture, especially in the elite unit filled with rangers and paratroopers in which I served, asking for help was showing weakness. My two Bronze Stars, my tours in Airborne and Special Operations units, none of these would matter. To ask for help would be seen as breaking.

But, finally, when in the middle of the day I was forced to hide, shaking and crying in a concrete bunker, railing against the noise and the images in my head, and when I understood that to continue was to endanger the soldiers I was sent to Afghanistan to lead, I asked for help.

Today, right now, we need to get more soldiers to ask for help. Reducing the stigma attached to mental health issues is the first step. When soldiers see their peers ridiculed, accused of malingering or cowardice, they don’t seek the help they need.

Maybe that’s why, in the first half of 2009, more American soldiers committed suicide than died in combat.

Read or listen to it all.

In Iraq, the pullout of U.S. troops is picking up pace. By Sept. 1, the number of U.S. forces in Iraq will be pared to about 50,000 troops, part of a massive drawdown to continue in 2011 under an agreement negotiated with Baghdad.

But many Iraqi soldiers, especially at installations recently placed in their control by the U.S. military, have come to rely on American largesse to keep the facilities running.

And as U.S. troops withdraw, many Iraqis feel a growing mistrust of the Iraq security forces that are supposed to protect them. Some of the Iraqi forces behave with impunity, and as a result, Iraqis say, they are now more afraid of them than the insurgency.

That has some Iraqi security officials wondering whether they can trust their government to fund the army and police as the Americans have. And the situation has some Iraqis wondering if they can rely on their own Iraqi forces.

Read or listen to the whole thing from NPR.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Caught this on the morning run–really inspiring. Watch it all-KSH.

They called it the Green Zone because within its fortified blast walls lay a sanctuary for Americans, a place so secure that weapons could safely be left unloaded ”” or green, in military parlance.

Outside was the Red Zone, the rest of Iraq, where bombs exploded, bullets flew, ordinary Iraqis lived and endured and no American soldier or official was permitted to venture without a heavily armored convoy.

But the Green Zone now is American no longer. On Tuesday, Iraq took full control of the 4-square-mile enclave in the heart of Baghdad that, to many Iraqis, symbolized so much of what went wrong with the U.S. military presence in Iraq….

Read it all.

It was a common phrase uttered across the nation over the weekend: “Happy Memorial Day.” Yet it sounds odd to Cindy Wiley of Dunwoody, Ga. Her 24-year-old son, Patrick, a Marine, is on his first tour of duty in the war in Afghanistan.

“I never really know what to say when someone says ‘Happy Memorial Day,’ ” she said. “Bless their hearts, they just don’t know. I didn’t know a couple years ago. ”¦ Before he joined the Marines, I was one of those civilians who was just oblivious to what our guys go through.”

As the United States continues to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Memorial Day Monday was a somber time of remembrance for many and a day to pray for troops in harm’s way. Yet some military families and veterans worry that there’s a growing cultural divide between families who sacrifice and serve and those who don’t.

Read it all.

U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq remembered friends and colleagues Monday in solemn Memorial Day ceremonies to commemorate all of their nation’s war dead.

As some soldiers paused, violence raged on in both places.

In Afghanistan, U.S.-led NATO forces launched airstrikes against Taliban insurgents who had forced government forces to abandon a district in Nuristan, a remote province on the Pakistan border. NATO also said it killed one of the Taliban’s top two commanders in the insurgent stronghold of Kandahar in a separate airstrike.

At the sprawling Bagram Air Field, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, about 400 soldiers in camouflage uniforms and brown combat boots stood at attention for a moment’s silence as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of some 94,000 U.S. troops in the country, led the ceremony.

Read it all.

[LUCKY] SEVERSON: Michael Abbatello joined the Marines September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attack on the Twin Trade Towers. Like tens of thousands of American soldiers coming home, he has struggled with the warning signs of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, symptoms like nightmares, insomnia, hyper-vigilance and guilt, and for him something even deeper””a wounding of the soul.

[MICHAEL] ABBATELLO: Something is changed. You know, you feel down to your spirit. You know that you’re different now. You know, we don’t really have a consciousness of our own spirit until it’s wounded, and then it needs help.

SEVERSON: With the increase in crime and suicide among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the notion that war can actually damage or warp the soul has been gaining traction among experts in the field. Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University, has studied and written extensively about the hearts, minds, and souls of soldiers.

PROFESSOR NANCY SHERMAN (Georgetown University): I like to talk about the moral emotions of war, and they include wounds, but they’re the hard, bad feelings that may erode at your character. That’s the really deep ones.

Read or watch it all.

Of more than 900 men in my battalion, I was one of only two Jewish soldiers. While serving in this predominately Muslim country, Lieutenant Schwartz had opted to translate his last name from the German and go instead by Lieutenant Black. My last name, Brewster, did not pose the same problem, but I had my own difficult choice to make.

My father is a fourth-generation Episcopal minister from a blue-blooded New England family who fell in love with a Jewish girl. Rather than prescribing a religion to any of their children, my parents raised my brother, sister and me in both religions and allowed us to decide for ourselves. While not rejecting my Christian heritage, I have considered myself Jewish since shortly after my bar mitzvah.

For safety’s sake, I ordered two sets of dog tags before my deployment, one that identified me as Jewish, the other as Episcopalian. In my first three months in Iraq, while I worked in intelligence ”” mostly relegated to a windowless office ”” I wore the dog tags that said Jewish. My switch to platoon leader meant leaving the base daily and facing increased danger. The night before my new duties, I sat for close to an hour staring at each set of dog tags. I thought of the Maccabees ”” choosing death at the hand of the Assyrians rather than renouncing their faith. I also recalled Daniel Pearl ”” the Wall Street Journal reporter who had been beheaded in Pakistan, in part for being Jewish. I knew the chance of my capture was relatively low and that my dog tags would probably remain hidden under my uniform. But the idea of hiding my religious identity weighed on me heavily.

Read it all.

If anyone still doubts that George W. Bush and Tony Blair were the closest of allies, the text of a July 2002 note from the U.K. Premier to the U.S. President, revealed in a new book, should dispel any lingering skepticism. “You know, George, whatever you decide to do [about Iraq], I’m with you,” Blair assured his friend.

The End of the Party, an account by British political commentator Andrew Rawnsley of how Britain’s Labour government came to squander a huge popular mandate to face possible defeat in the forthcoming parliamentary elections, identifies a multiplicity of contributory factors. Blair’s unwavering determination to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with a martial U.S. is prominent among them.

The damage may be permanent. On March 28 an influential cross-party committee of MPs in Britain weighed in on the wider impact of that policy. “The perception that the British Government was a subservient ‘poodle’ to the U.S. Administration leading up to the period of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath is widespread both among the British public and overseas,” states a report from the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. “This perception, whatever its relation to reality, is deeply damaging to the reputation and interests of the U.K.”

Read it all.

Iraq election workers began tallying votes from 47,000 polling stations across the country Monday, a day after the country pulled off a landmark vote despite scattered dozens of explosions that went off in Baghdad and in other parts of the country.

At the bustling headquarters of the Iraqi High Electoral Commission (IHEC), cheers went up as the first boxes of tally sheets from individual polling stations arrived. The boxes, from polling sites from the Rasafah district of Baghdad, were put through metal detectors before dozens of IHEC employees began unsealing the envelopes.

The IHEC said 62.4 percent of eligible Iraqis voted. That’s down from an official figure of 79.6 percent in the last parliamentary elections, when Shiite Arab and Kurdish voters turned out in huge numbers, but represents the first national parliamentary elections with wide Sunni Arab participation.

Read it all.

Iraq’s second parliamentary election since the 2003 invasion has been hit by multiple attacks, with at least 24 people being killed.

Two buildings were destroyed in the capital and dozens of mortars were fired across Baghdad and elsewhere.

The border with Iran was closed, thousands of troops were deployed, and vehicles were banned from roads.

Read it all.