Just hours from now, Ngo and Cerghizan will drive far away from Minnesota. They’re moving to Texas, to the town where Ngo was stationed in the Army. They’ll leave behind all the doctors, therapists, friends and family they’ve counted on.

“It’s a real big step in my life ”” moving,” Ngo says. “And a really big step in a relationship, ’cause we’re both going down there just by ourselves and it’s just gonna be us.”

Friends and family are here to help them pack up, but there’s one person missing ”” Ngo’s mother. She had been at his side throughout his injury. She hurried to the Army hospital in Germany and saw him with his head swollen grotesquely. She didn’t know if her only child would live or die. Then, at Walter Reed, she’d sit by his hospital bed and hold his hand till he fell asleep at night. And she would sneak back into his room early the next morning to hold his hand when he woke up.

Ngo and his mother don’t talk to each other anymore.

“She’s got to apologize to me and Ani before any contact will happen,” Ngo says.

A haunting reminder of the personal and emotional cost of the war. Read or listen to it all.

Even when military personnel aren’t injured physically or psychologically by experiences in war, long deployments take a toll on their families. The spouse left at home gets resentful, and the spouse who returns home from deployment often finds his or her role in the family has changed.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Iraq’s Prime Minister was staring into the abyss today after his operation to crush militia strongholds in Basra stalled, members of his own security forces defected and district after district of his own capital fell to Shia militia gunmen.

With the threat of a civil war looming in the south, Nouri al-Maliki’s police chief in Basra narrowly escaped assassination in the crucial port city, while in Baghdad, the spokesman for the Iraqi side of the US military surge was kidnapped by gunmen and his house burnt to the ground.

Saboteurs also blew up one of Iraq’s two main oil pipelines from Basra, cutting at least a third of the exports from the city which provides 80 per cent of government revenue, a clear sign that the militias ”” who siphon significant sums off the oil smuggling trade ”” would not stop at mere insurrection.

Read it all.

Unlike the soldiers of some previous wars, who were only occasionally able to send letters back home to loved ones, many of those who died left behind an extraordinary electronic testimony describing in detail the labor, the fears and the banality of serving in Iraq.

In excerpts published here from journals, blogs and e-mail, six soldiers who died in the most recent group of 1,000 mostly skim the alarming particulars of combat, a kindness shown their relatives and close friends. Instead, they plunge readily into the mundane, but no less important rhythms of home. They fire off comments about holiday celebrations, impending weddings, credit card bills, school antics and the creeping anxiety of family members who are coping with one deployment too many.

At other moments, the service members describe the humor of daily life down range, as they call it. Hurriedly, with little time to worry about spelling or grammar, they riff on the chaos around them and reveal moments of fear. As casualties climb and the violence intensifies, so does their urge to share their grief and foreboding.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.

Iraq’s prime minister on Wednesday gave gunmen in the southern oil port of Basra a three-day deadline to surrender their weapons and renounce violence as clashes between Shiite militia fighters and Iraqi security forces erupted for a second day.

At least 55 people have been killed and 300 wounded in Basra and Baghdad after the fighting spread to the capital’s main Shiite district of Sadr City, police and hospital officials said.

The ultimatum came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was in Basra to supervise a crackdown against the spiraling violence between militia factions vying for control of the center of the country’s vast oil industry located near the Iranian border. The violence has raised fears that the cease-fire declared in August by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr could unravel, presenting the gravest challenge to the Iraqi government in months.

Read it all.

These stories always do me in, but this one in particular really moved me. Maybe it was because he outlived both his parents, maybe because I have done military funerals myself and so could identify with many of the sounds, maybe it was because my mother grew up in Washington, D.C., and so I could see Arlington National Cemetery in my mind’s eye, maybe it was because it came on Easter week.In any event, you need to take the time to listen to it all–KSH.

Five years ago today I had real hope that things would soon change in the nation of Iraq, after years of tyranny, dictatorship and suffering. Unlike any other non Iraqis I meet now in Iraq, I had been here before the war. I had experienced the fear and tyranny of the Saddam regime and I openly said we needed force to bring change. I knew that this could not be done by the Iraqi people. I feared what would happen to the people I loved during the days of the war. I was full of joy when the war finished so soon and I quickly returned to the nation I loved. On returning I found a sense of liberation, joy and freedom. There was a joy I had never seen before. Chaos was certainly there but we hoped it would soon cease. I will never forget the words of the top British General telling me to leave my return for a couple of weeks because ‘security should then be sorted out’. Five years later it has still not been sorted.

It is impossible to really describe what it is like here in Baghdad. I live in the fortified International Zone but even here I am surrounded by my bodyguards at all times and we can’t move without carrying the right pieces of plastic ID around our necks. When we do move we can’t move more than five miles an hour, have to stop every few yards a different security barriers and when we get to them the colour of your piece of plastic dictates how quickly you will be allowed through. All very intense, but it does not compare to my regular trips to St George’s Church.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Pope Benedict XVI issued one of his strongest appeals for peace in Iraq on Sunday, days after the body of the kidnapped Chaldean Catholic archbishop was found near the northern city of Mosul.
The pope also denounced the 5-year-long Iraq war, saying it had provoked the complete breakup of Iraqi civilian life.

“Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!” Benedict said to applause at the end of his Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square.

On Thursday, the body of Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found near Mosul. He had been abducted on Feb. 29.

Benedict has called Rahho’s death an “inhuman act of violence” that offended human dignity.

Read it all.

Still opposed to the US military and increasingly against the Shia-led Government of Iraq, Mr Abdullah dreamt of starting up a fresh resistance. But in late 2007 he was approached by two uncles and a cousin who had joined a new security movement, which was established by Sunni Arab tribes who had turned against al-Qaeda in Anbar province, once the heart of the insurgency. The concept ”“ arming local people and charging them with security for their neighbourhood ”“ appealed to Mr Abdullah even though the group’s members, which number at least 90,000, were under the payroll of the US military.

“I started to feel that the Americans were better than the Iraqi Government at that moment. I still look at them as occupiers. My feelings towards them have not changed. But my main concern is to stop the Iraqi people’s suffering,” he said. Agreeing to help to set up branches of the so-called Awakening movement in Samarra and other towns north of Baghdad, Mr Abdullah attended his first meeting with the US military just over a week ago ”“ something that he had resisted for months.

“When American soldiers turn up I feel very sad for myself, my country and the fact that I have to sit down and deal with them. I feel like wolves are eating my flesh during the meeting,” he said.

Read it all.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad visited Baghdad this week to show Iran’s support for the Iraqi government. The visit can be seen as a major diplomatic setback for the United States.

Listen to it all.

Joseph Stiglitz: The war has led directly to the U.S. economic slowdown. First, before the U.S. went to war with Iraq, the price of oil was $25 a barrel. It’s now $100 a barrel.
While there are other factors involved in this price rise, the Iraq war is clearly a major factor. Already factoring in growing demand for energy from India and China, the futures markets projected before the war that oil would remain around $23 a barrel for at least a decade. It is the war and volatility it has caused, along with the falling dollar due to low interest rates and the huge trade deficit, that accounts for much of the difference.

That higher price means that the billions that would have been in the pockets of Americans to spend at home have been flowing out to Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters.

Second, money spent on Iraq doesn’t stimulate the economy at home. If you hire a Filipino contractor to work in Iraq, you don’t get the multiplier effect of someone building a road or a bridge in Missouri.

Third, this war, unlike any other war in American history, has been entirely financed by deficits. Deficits are a worry because, in the end, they crowd out investment and pile up debt that has to be paid in the future. That hurts productivity because little is left over either for public-sector investment in research, education and infrastructure or private-sector investment in machines and factories.

Read it all.

If you’re looking for one measure of the impact of last year’s troop surge in Iraq, look at Gen. David Petraeus as he walks through a Baghdad neighborhood, with no body armor, and no helmet.

It’s been one year since the beginning of what’s known here as Operation Fardh Al Qadnoon. According to the U.S. military, violence is down 60 percent. One key to the success is reconciliation.

Read it all.

Every time there is a chance for the United States to escape from the trap it has created for itself in Guantanamo Bay, it slams the door shut.

The Pentagon’s decision this week to seek the death penalty for six men it accuses of the 9/11 attacks, and to try them under the hugely disputed version of military courts that it has devised, is one of the stupidest mistakes that the Bush Administration has made.

Everything about Guantanamo is an affront to the values the US says it is defending in the War on Terror. The principle of holding hundreds of people there without charge, for years; the fluid rules of the “military commissions” used for the very few who will be tried; the torture that the Administration acknowledges has been practised on these six: all these are an assault on the US Constitution.

To see the most powerful country in the world scrabbling on the edge of a nearby island, with whose leader it is not on speaking terms, for the sole purpose of evading its own laws and principles, is an embarrassment.

Read it all.

Healthcare remains another important point of difference. And here we have a three-way split. McCain would attempt to bring down costs and make insurance more affordable by stimulating competition and cracking down on the big pharmaceutical companies that he believes overcharge patients. Obama has some as-yet-unspecified plan to make insurance more accessible to those who want it. Clinton, clinging to the approach that proved politically disastrous when she headed her husband’s healthcare taskforce, would make insurance compulsory, even for young workers who neither need nor want it, and deduct the cost from their pay cheques if necessary.

Enough detail to make the broad point. This is one of the few elections that create for Americans what Ronald Reagan once called a time for choosing. In 1932 we elected Franklin Roosevelt and put paid to the notion that “that government is best which governs least”. In 1980 we elected Reagan, a Roosevelt-Democrat turned Republican, and put paid to the conservative war against Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This year we will have to choose between a man who is confident that America can ”“ indeed, must ”“ play a leading role in maintaining world order, even at the expense of domestic spending, and a man or woman who believes that America must concentrate its resources on the home front, while relying more on international institutions to keep the world’s democracies safe from its enemies. Little wonder that this American election has attracted so much attention in Britain and around the world. What happens in America won’t stay in America.

Read it all.

Two women suicide bombers who have killed nearly 80 people in Baghdad were Down’s Syndrome victims exploited by al Qaida.

The explosives were detonated by remote control in a co-ordinated attack after the women walked into separate crowded markets, said the chief Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad General Qassim al-Moussawi.

Other officials said the women were apparently unaware of what they were doing in what could be a new method by suspected Sunni insurgents to subvert toughened security measures.

More than 70 people died and scores were wounded in the deadliest day since the US “surge” of 30,000 extra troops were sent to the capital this spring.

In the first attack, a woman detonated explosives hidden under her traditional black Islamic robe in the central al-Ghazl market. The weekly bazaar has been bombed several times since the war started but recently had re-emerged as a popular place to shop and stroll as Baghdad security improved. At least 46 people were killed and more than 100 wounded.

The second woman then struck a bird market in a predominantly Shiite area in south-eastern Baghdad killing up to 27 people and wounding 70.

Read it all.

Watch it all–makes the heart glad.

Retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey currently is an adjunct professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point). In December, he visited Iraq and Kuwait and was briefed by military commanders, including Adm. William Fallon (Commander Central Command), Gen. David Petraeus (Commanding General Multi-National Corps Iraq), and dozens of other flag officers and senior U.S. embassy officials in Baghdad. He also conferred with Iraqi army and police officers. He visited army training centers, markets, and other sites, including in Baghdad and Ramadi.

The purpose of his visit was to assess current “strategic and operational security operations in Iraq.” After returning to the U.S., he filed an “after action report,” dated Dec. 18, 2007, to the head of the academy’s department of social sciences. A copy of this report was forwarded to me by a flag officer and friend. What follows is a brief summary of what Gen. McCaffrey wrote:

–The struggle for stability in the Iraqi civil war has entered a new phase with dramatically reduced levels of civilian sectarian violence, political assassinations, abductions, and small arms/indirect fire and improvised explosive device attacks on U.S. and Iraqi police and army forces.

–The senior leaders of AQI [al-Qaida in Iraq] have become walking dead men because of the enormous number of civilian intelligence tips coming directly to U.S. forces.

–The Iraqi security forces are now beginning to take a major and independently successful role in the war. … The previously grossly ineffective and corrupt Iraqi police has been forcefully re-trained and re-equipped.

Read it all.

Here’s a mind-boggling fact: people who are opposed to the Iraq war look very favorably towards Sen. John McCain – supporter of President Bush and the troop surge in Iraq.

No, that is not a typo. In New Hampshire, for instance, exits polls show that he did very well with those opposed to the war. And he did poorly among big supporters of the war in both New Hampshire and Michigan.

Go figure.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

Master Sgt. Cindy Rathbun knew something was wrong three weeks after she arrived in Iraq in September 2006. Her blond hair began “coming out in clumps,” she says.
The Air Force personnel specialist, in the military for 25 years, had volunteered for her first combat zone job at Baghdad’s Camp Victory. She lived behind barbed wire and blast walls, but the war was never far.

“There were firefights all the time,” Rathbun says slowly, her voice flat. “There were car bombs. Boom! You see the smoke. The ground would shake.”

As the mother of three grown children prepared to fly home last February, she took a medic aside. Holding a zip-lock bag of hair, she asked whether this was normal. “He said it sometimes happens,” she says. “It’s the body’s way of displaying stress when we can’t express it emotionally.”

Read it all.

Maj. Jimmy Brownlee of Charleston is stationed in Iraq as a public affairs officer but is home for the holidays until Jan. 7 at his base at Fort Stewart, Ga. In the space of a week he has gone from his highest point, that of surprising his wife and two children by dressing as Santa Claus and showing up at home unexpectedly six days before Christmas, to his lowest point four days later. His 80-year-old stepfather, Vernon Mason, a World War II Navy veteran from West Ashley, died two days before Christmas. These are Brownlee’s reflections on the ups and downs of the past year…

Read it all.

If we are to win the so-called war on terror, it will not be because we killed all of our enemies. For one thing, there are too many of them, and besides, it only takes one fanatic to detonate a nuclear or biological weapon. No, if we win this war, it will be because we regained the moral high ground.

To do that, we have to win the hearts and minds of Muslims on the street. That takes us back to Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush or back further to Mr. Lincoln or, if you prefer, all the way back to Mr. Jesus. Turning our enemies into friends. That’s the only long-term strategy that makes any sense.

Ultimately, it is Muslims who must excise the scourge of radicalism from Islam. From within. We can help by behaving like the generous, just and benevolent society moderate Muslims once considered us to be.

Sorry, doves, but that doesn’t mean getting out of Iraq tomorrow. The military mission must be completed. But hawks must realize that there can be no lasting victory without a humanitarian mission as well. Not just in Iraq. In Bangladesh, the West Bank, anywhere in the Muslim world where there is suffering. Do that and who knows? Maybe by next Christmas we can start beating our swords into plowshares.

Read it all.

Heartwarming stuff.

Thousands of Iraqi Christians made their way to church through checkpoints and streets lined with blast walls, many drawing hope from a lull in violence to celebrate Christmas Mass in numbers unthinkable a year ago.

Death is never far in Iraq””two separate suicide bombings north of Baghdad killed at least 35 people and wounded scores more. But the number of attacks has fallen dramatically in the past few months””the U.S. military says by 60 percent since June.

“We did not celebrate last year, but this year we have security and we feel better,” said Rasha Ghaban, one of many women at the small Church of the Holy Family in Karradah, a mainly Shiite district in downtown Baghdad where many Christians live. “We hope our future will be better, God willing.”

Read it all.

IRAQI Christians who fled a district of Baghdad that declared itself an al-Qaeda caliphate have returned home to celebrate their first Christmas in two years.

Known as the “Vatican of Iraq”, the small but long-established Christian enclave in the mainly Sunni district of Doura suffered constant terror at the hands of

al-Qaeda gunmen who tried to impose a Taliban-style rule.

Churches were car-bombed, women were threatened for not wearing Islamic headscarves, and families had to pay off local mosques to keep them safe from kidnap gangs.

But now al-Qaeda has been rooted out of Doura and the hundreds of Christian families who left the area are returning.

On Christmas Day they will congregate in the battle-scarred St Mary’s Church, where part of the crucifix on its tower is still missing after being shot at.

“We closed the church two years ago because of all the trouble,” said the priest, Father Younadim Shamoon, 45, who has decorated its bullet-cratered walls with modest fairy lights.

“But many people are coming back after word got around that the local Muslim people were welcoming us again. We thank God and hope that we can live together again as brothers.”

Read it all.

Sure, the season invites a lot of clatter, from deck-the-halling Pepsi commercials to the predictable prattle over some alleged “war on Christmas.” But for most of us, the holiday remains a time of family, a time of reflection, and a time of love.

Which is why, this Christmas, my thoughts keep returning to the 184,000 American soldiers currently stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, honoring our nation with their service while fighting wars whose consequences have nothing and everything to do with the humanity at the heart of the holiday.

It is easy to say “let us remember our troops” during the Christmas season, but how many of us really understand the painful nobility of this sacrifice? Who among us can actually put ourselves in the dusty boots of these men and women, and imagine what it must be like to spend this most beloved of holidays away from those who give our spirits their greatest nourishment, our lives their greatest purpose?

In Baghdad, it is hardly Christmasy. Temperatures are mild, sand swirls instead of snow, and the closest our soldiers can get to the serene sounds of church bells and caroling is the enchanting call to prayer from the local mosques ”” and even that is all too often disrupted by the thunder of gunfire and roadside bombs.

Read it all.

Yet none of this should detract from what has been achieved in Iraq so unexpectedly this year. First, the country will now have the time to establish itself. A year ago it seemed as if American forces would have been withdrawn in ignominious fashion either well before the end of the Bush Administration or, at best, days after the next president came to office. This will not now happen. The self-evident success of the surge has obliged the Democrats to start talking about almost anything else and the calls to cut and run have abated. If the US Army remains in Iraq in strength, continuing on its present path, then deals on a constitution and the division of oil revenues between provinces will be realised.

Secondly, the aspiration that Iraq could be some sort of “beacon” in the region is no longer ridiculous. It will never be Sweden with beards, but there has been the development of a vibrant capitalist class and a media of a diversity that is unique in the region. Were Iraq to emerge with a federal political structure, regular local and national elections and an economic dynamism in which the many, not the few, could share, then it would be a model.

Finally, Iraq in 2007 has illustrated that the words “intelligent American policy” are not an oxymoron. The tragedy is that the approach of General David Petraeus could and should have been adopted four years ago in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s enforced departure. One prominent American politician alone has spent that time publicly demanding the extra soldiers which, in 2007, have been Iraq’s salvation. That statesman is John McCain. Is it too much to hope (let alone predict) that he will reap his reward at the polls in 2008?

Read it all.

Iraq remains a violent place, but the trends are encouraging.

U.S. and Iraqi casualties are down sharply. Fewer of the most lethal Iranian-made explosive devices are being used as roadside bombs. In community after community, Sunni groups who were once in league with al-Qaeda have switched sides and are working with the U.S. forces.

On the Shiite side of Iraq’s sectarian chasm, something similar is happening. About 70,000 local, pro-government groups, a bit like neighborhood watch groups, have formed to expose extremist militias, according to Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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An Anglican clergyman in Baghdad, who has seen his flock murdered and forced into exile by Muslim extremists, says Christians there are worse off now than under Saddam’s rule and are probably suffering more than any time in history.

The Rev. Canon Andrew White, an Anglican priest known as the “Vicar of Baghdad,” speaks to 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley for a segment on the persecution of Christians in Iraq to be broadcast this Sunday, Dec. 2, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

“There’s no comparison between Iraq now and [under Saddam],” says White. “Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians – probably ever in history,” he tells Pelley, referring to the nearly 2,000 years of Christian history in the area. That’s because White estimates that 90 percent of Iraq’s Christians, once thought to number over a million, have either fled or have been murdered by Islamic extremists during the religious civil war.

Read it all and set your electronic recording device if you have such to record 60 Minutes tonight to catch the full segment on this