Despite signs of a new season of hope on the horizon in Iraq, the vast majority of Iraqi Christian refugees will probably not return to their homeland, said two U.S.-based Chaldean Catholic bishops.

“No one in the United States will go back to Iraq or the Middle East because the future for children, (opportunities for) education and life are better here,” said Chaldean Bishop Ibrahim N. Ibrahim.

Also, experience has shown that once people have overcome the initial difficulties of adapting to a new culture, “no one will convince them to change it again” and rip up those freshly laid roots, said Chaldean Bishop Sarhad Y. Jammo.

Bishop Jammo heads the Eparchy of St. Peter the Apostle of San Diego, Calif., and has under his care Chaldean Catholics in the western U.S., while Bishop Ibrahim heads the Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle of Detroit, the diocese for Chaldean Catholics in the eastern United States.

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He drives to church in an armourplated car, escorted by 25 members of the Iraqi Army. As he preaches, he and his congregation are protected by soldiers cradling machineguns. Each week, familiar faces disappear ”” kidnapped, abducted or blown up by a suicide bomber. And each week politicians, generals, Muslim clerics and desperate mothers stream in to St George’s Anglican church to beg the help of an English vicar in ending violence, promoting dialogue and negotiating the release of hostages. For Canon Andrew White, fighting for peace has an all too literal meaning. His parish is the most murderous in the world: Baghdad.

He knows that he could be killed any day, but insists that the thought has never once troubled him. He takes few unnecessary risks, however. As the violence steadily grew worse in 2005, 11 of his church staff were kidnapped, shot or simply disappeared. Reluctantly, at the British Ambassador’s urging, he left his riverside house and moved into the fortified green zone and a trailer in an underground car park. It became too dangerous even to officiate at St George’s: services were held either in the Prime Minister’s office (a tribute to the esteem in which a Shia Muslim held this English Anglican) or that of an Iraqi friend. Baptisms were often conducted with a red plastic washing-up bowl.

He is simply an amazing and courageous man. I hope all blog readers have seen the 60 minutes piece on him. Read it all.

For the past several years, as this Army installation in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains became a busy way station for soldiers cycling in and out of Iraq, the number of servicemen implicated in violent crimes has raised alarm.

Nine current or former members of Fort Carson’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team have killed someone or were charged with killings in the last three years after returning from Iraq. Five of the slayings took place last year alone. In addition, charges of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault have risen sharply.

Prodded by Senator Ken Salazar, Democrat of Colorado, the base commander began an investigation of the soldiers accused of homicide. An Army task force is reviewing their recruitment, medical and service records, as well as their personal histories, to determine if the military could have done something to prevent the violence. The inquiry was recently expanded to include other serious violent crimes.

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The Veterans Administration says [Jason] Brunson is 70 percent disabled. He has post-traumatic stress disorder, among other medical problems. He and his wife, Ellen, live with their two children and their son’s fiancee in St. Augustine, Fla.

When Jason was in the Army, he earned $3,600 a month. Now, the family lives on less than half of that. After they pay for Jason’s medical costs, the bills and the rent, they have about $9 left. Jason’s wife, Ellen, said she considered moving the family in with her mother before she found help from nonprofit organizations that help veterans and their families. So far, the family says, it has received about $7,000 in financial assistance from the groups. They don’t usually get cash, though ”” the checks go directly to the Brunsons’ creditors.

Listen to it all from NPR.

A very wonderful story much in keeping with the spirit of the season–watch it all.

Negative views of the US military presence in the Gulf are part of a broader negative view of US relations with the Muslim world.

Most worldwide think the United States is disrespectful of the Muslim world, though only a minority thinks this is done purposefully. Given three options, only 16 percent on average across 21 nations say “the US mostly shows respect to the Islamic world.” Sixty-seven percent think the US is disrespectful, but 36 percent say this is “out of ignorance and insensitivity,” while 31 percent say “the US purposely tries to humiliate the Islamic world.” Only Americans have a majority saying the US mostly shows respect to the Islamic world (56%).

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An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag ”” particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army ”” the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces ”” the number would jump 20,000 a week! ”˜We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

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In the year after his return, Blaufus repeatedly enrolled in college classes and then dropped out. He got married four months after coming home, to a woman who left him shortly afterward. Looking back, Blaufus says the war changed everything.

“I understood I could die any day. So I was constantly doing stuff that a 24-year-old shouldn’t be doing. I bought a house ”” I didn’t even look at the house before I bought it. When my marriage ended, the need for everything ended along with it.”

That house has now fallen into foreclosure.

Blaufus has been hospitalized twice since he got back for acute post-traumatic stress disorder.

The list of things he can’t do is long: sleep, eat in front of other people, go running or hiking. He even had to re-learn his favorite thing: playing the guitar.

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A very encouraging piece-watch it all.

Go here and then click on the link labelled “Suffering Soldiers” to view Bob Woodruff’s important and disturbing story.

The Rev. John Painter’s desire to serve abroad pulled gently at his conscience, then grew strong and clear when the Air Force Chaplain Service called in June.

Painter, who is a chaplain at the Ralph H. Johnson Veterans Affairs Medical Center, voluntarily deployed Sept. 5 to Ali Air Base in southern Iraq. He will forego Thanksgiving and Christmas, and his two children will turn a year older before he returns home in January 2009….

Today, Painter plans to lead a Thanksgiving observance service for Air Force and Army personnel and people from coalition forces, including Romanian and Ugandan, who share the base.

“It’s an American holiday. The other contingents do not register the holiday, but the concept did,” he said. People will sit around tables and get to know one another and share what they’re thankful for.

Personally, Painter said, “I’m thankful for freedom, family, good friends. It’s the little things like a hot shower.”

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

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It is Veteran’s Day–please take the time to watch it all.

He was an avid sportsman who loved soccer and the outdoors. But he also loved his country. On Wednesday, he died in Iraq.

Adam McKamey Wenger, 27, was the second Charleston-area soldier to have lost his life in the war on terror in about a month.

The circumstances are unclear and his family does not have many details. He had been in the Army for about eight years and leaves behind a wife and two young children.

His older brother spoke Thursday of someone who made sacrifices.

“He was a good kid,” said David Wenger, 31. “He loved his country. He wanted to serve his country. He wanted to do his duty.”

Please let us not forget those who serve. Read it all.

U.S. deaths in Iraq fell in October to their lowest monthly level of the war, matching the record low of 13 fatalities suffered in July. Iraqi deaths fell to their lowest monthly levels of the year. Eight of the 13 Americans died in combat, most of them in northern Iraq where al-Qaida and other Sunni insurgent groups remain active. The U.S. military suffered 25 deaths in September and 23 in August.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, 15 U.S. military deaths were reported for October. The monthly toll in that combat theater had been in the 20s since June, when 28 Americans were killed – the worst one-month total since that war began in late 2001.

The sharp drop in American fatalities in Iraq reflects the overall security improvements across the country following the Sunni revolt against al-Qaida and the rout suffered by Shiite extremists in fighting last spring in Basra and Baghdad.

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In northern Iraq, thousands of Christian families remain displaced from their homes in the city of Mosul.

Many are living with relatives or taking refuge in churches and monasteries in an area north of the city that’s known as the Nineveh Plain.

As they struggle to adapt to their new circumstances, many are questioning why they were targeted for violence and threats. Some say they see themselves as pawns in the struggle for control of their ancestral homeland.

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American troops acting on a tip killed the No. 2 leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, a Moroccan, in a raid on one of the terror group’s command centers in the north, the U.S. military said Wednesday.

The Oct. 5 death of the man known as Abu Qaswarah was a major blow to the terror network as American commanders have warned it remains a significant threat. The military statement described him as a charismatic leader who trained in Afghanistan and managed to rally al-Qaida followers in Iraq despite U.S. and Iraqi security gains.

The insurgent leader, also known as Abu Sara, became the senior al-Qaida in Iraq emir of northern Iraq in June 2007 and had “historic ties to AQI founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and senior al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the military said.

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Matthew Taylor wasn’t sure what life held for him after leaving Fort Dorchester High School. But he knew what he had to do months later when airliners struck the World Trade Center towers.

The next day, Taylor and his father drove to a U.S. Army recruiting station on Rivers Avenue. Taylor knew that if he was going to seek justice for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he’d need a frontline fighting position. He enlisted in the Infantry.

“It was patriotism. He felt for all the people who had been killed,” his father, Don Taylor, said Wednesday. “He had an extreme sense of duty.”

With the twin towers still smoldering, Matthew looked to his father and said, “We need to go and deal with that.”

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier.

At first, I didn’t recognize the place.

On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park ”” I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene ”” impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.

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Together, Iraqi and Coalition Forces have faced determined, adaptable, and barbaric enemies. You and our Iraqi partners have taken the fight to them, and you have taken away their sanctuaries and safe havens. You have helped secure the Iraqi people and have enabled, and capitalized on, their rejection of extremism. You have also supported the Iraqi Security Forces as they have grown in number and capability and as they have increasingly shouldered more of the responsibility for security in their country.

You have not just secured the Iraqi people, you have served them, as well. By helping establish local governance, supporting reconstruction efforts, assisting with revitalization of local businesses, fostering local reconciliation, and conducting a host of other non-kinetic activities, you have contributed significantly to the communities in which you have operated. Indeed, you have been builders and diplomats as well as guardians and warriors.

The progress achieved has been hard-earned. There have been many tough days along the way, and we have suffered tragic losses. Indeed, nothing in Iraq has been anything but hard. But you have been more than equal to every task.

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In this fourth volume of his quartet of books on the Bush White House, Bob Woodward reaches a damning conclusion about the presidency of George W. Bush. “A president must be able to get a clear-eyed, unbiased assessment of the war,” he writes. “The president must lead. For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut.”

“After ordering the invasion,” Mr. Woodward goes on, “the president spent three years in denial and then delegated a strategy review to his national security adviser. Bush was intolerant of confrontations and in-depth debate. There was no deadline, no hurry. The president was engaged in the war rhetorically but maintained an odd detachment from its management. He never got a full handle on it, and over these years of war, too often he failed to lead.”

In this respect, Mr. Woodward’s portrait of Mr. Bush in “The War Within” ”” a book Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, has called incomplete and misleading ”” amplifies the one he drew in his last book, “State of Denial” (2006), in which the president emerged as a passive, stubborn and intellectually incurious leader, given to an almost religious certainty about his decision making and inclined to make instinctive gut calls. It stands in striking contrast to the laudatory portrait in the first book in this series, “Bush at War” (2002), which depicted the president in Rovian terms as a strong, resolute, even visionary leader.

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As a nation and as individuals, we tend to view the world through the prism of our own experiences. Over the last few weeks, Russians, Georgians, Abkhazians and South Ossetians have reminded us that ethnic nationalism and secessionism are on the rise around the globe. I worry that the American experience leaves the United States and its citizens unprepared to confront it.

Not long ago, I had dinner with a conservative media figure who seemed perplexed that I’m a student of “identity.” “What made you do that?” he asked. “I think the world would be better without it.”

I tried to explain that it wasn’t something I was either for or against but that exists and needs to be understood. And just because one may not want to “believe” in identities — ethnic groups and ethno-religious groups — that doesn’t mean that they somehow disappear from the world. Absurd as it sounds, we have a collective blind spot on the topic. And our refusal to take the issue of ethnic and ethno-religious identity seriously has helped to undermine our foreign policy initiatives.

Just look at Iraq. The Bush administration — and all the “experts,” both Americans and exiled Iraqis, who guided its policy — made a fundamental error by relying on the assumption that Iraqis were nonsectarian nationalists, more concerned with preserving a nationalism that had been imposed on them by Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party than with the position and fate of their own tribes and mullahs. As plenty of critics have observed, even the faintest acknowledgment of the social cleavages on the ground could have helped the U.S. war effort.

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Bob Woodward, who wrote two books praising President Bush and then a third harshly criticizing him, is out with a fourth tome that renders a mixed verdict on Bush, lauding the president’s surge of troops into Iraq, but saying “too often he failed to lead.”

At 487 pages, “The War Within” is the fourth installment in Woodward’s series of books on the president. Its release is embargoed until Monday, although an advance copy was obtained exclusively by FOX News.

The new book is less critical than Woodward’s last tome, “State of Denial,” which savaged Bush for his execution of the war in Iraq. “Denial” ended with the line: “With all Bush’s upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become.”

Woodward repeats the line in his new book, adding: “My reporting for this book showed that to be even more the case than I could have imagined.”

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Six months into my junior year at Bowdoin College, I was deployed to Iraq with the Marines. I went from sitting in my Middle East politics class in a quaint Maine town to patrolling the war-torn city of Fallujah. My two lives could not have been more different: I didn’t write papers, play soccer or see kegs in Anbar province. But both Bowdoin and the Marines have made me who I am today. I joined the Marine Reserves for the same reasons I chose Bowdoin: to learn, to meet new people, to improve myself and to gain new perspectives.

When I returned to school after my yearlong tour of duty, I re-entered my Middle East politics class and wrote my final paper on the political choices facing Iraq. Knowing how to detect an IED doesn’t help much with a 12-page essay. But I was a better Marine for learning about the Arab world in the classroom, and I was a better student because of the eight months I lived on the front lines of the Arab world.

When I switched from campus to combat zone, I still carried my other life with me, just like my fellow Marines who left their civilian lives to serve our country. I was always eager for the arrival of the mail convoy, which carried with it notes from friends and family, professors and staff at Bowdoin. Back home, people still ask me why I joined. There isn’t a single answer. As a kid, I kept a poster of a Marine in my room and was always interested in the military. In the Maine town where I grew up, most people do not go to college. Bowdoin seemed like another world. I wanted to get an education and do something honorable; joining the Marine Reserves was a way to serve others and to move the country forward.

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In the final days of his campaign to bring Iraq under control, Gen. David H. Petraeus sat in his office at the American Embassy here looking drawn, exhausted, and more than a few years older than when he took command 18 months ago.

More than once as he spoke of his tenure, the general stopped to cough. An intensely energetic man who prides himself on besting young recruits in tests of strength and endurance, General Petraeus, 55, said Monday that he had been forced to scale back his punishing daily workouts to three a week.

“There is not much in the tank at the end of the day,” he said.

Yet for all the signs of fatigue, General Petraeus is preparing to leave Iraq a remarkably safer place than it was when he arrived. Violence has plummeted from its apocalyptic peaks, Iraqi leaders are asserting themselves, and streets that once seemed dead are flourishing with life. The worst, for now, has been averted.

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National Guard and Reserve combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to develop drinking problems than active-duty U.S. soldiers, a new military study suggests.

The authors speculate that inadequate preparation for the stress of combat and reduced access to support services at home may be to blame.

The study, appearing in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to compare Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ alcohol problems before and after deployment.

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he United States and Iraq have agreed to seek “a general time horizon” for deeper reductions in American combat troops in Iraq despite President Bush’s once-inflexible opposition to talking about deadlines and timetables.

Iraqi officials, in a sign of growing confidence as violence decreases, have been pressuring the United States to agree to a specific timeline to withdraw U.S. forces. The White House said today that the timeframe being discussed would not be “an arbitrary date for withdrawal.”

Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki talked about the timing issue as part of discussions over a broader security agreement to keep American troops in Iraq after a U.N. mandate expires on Dec. 31.

The White House says the two leaders, in a conversation on Thursday, agreed that the accord should include “a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals, such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.”

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Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki raised the prospect on Monday of setting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops as part of negotiations over a new security agreement with Washington.

It was the first time the U.S.-backed Shi’ite-led government has floated the idea of a timetable for the removal of American forces from Iraq. The Bush administration has always opposed such a move, saying it would give militant groups an advantage.

The security deal under negotiation will replace a U.N. mandate for the presence of U.S. troops that expires on December 31.

“Today, we are looking at the necessity of terminating the foreign presence on Iraqi lands and restoring full sovereignty,” Maliki told Arab ambassadors in blunt remarks during an official visit to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

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Wenza Ali Mutlaq walked a bit uncertainly up the long street near the main government offices here on June 22, the hot wind stirring her heavy black abaya. She passed the concrete barricades put up to ward off suicide car bombers and made her way alone, almost haphazardly.

Suddenly, a police car zoomed in. A policeman got out to talk with her. And then their lives were over ”” torn apart, along with 14 other people, by the huge blast of fire from her concealed explosive vest.

Ms. Mutlaq, who was in her 30s and whose attack was captured on a security video, was the 18th female suicide bomber of the war to strike in Diyala Province, which has been hit by female attackers much more frequently than any other province of Iraq, according to Iraqi police records and the American military. So far, 11 of the 20 suicide bombings carried out by women in Iraq this year have occurred in Diyala.

Why so many women? Why now? In a particularly painful twist, the phenomenon seems to have arisen at least in part because of successes in detaining and killing local members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence officials say is led by foreigners.

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