PUBLIC MARKS with tags iraq & middle-east

Ahmadinejad mind-map bullet points: - Holocaust denier - US/Israel “soon to be destroyed” - “one bomb” will destroy Israel - North Koreans assisting Iran’s nuclear program - Israel very quiet recently - Israel political will and military resources to attack Iran unilaterally? - 2nd U.S. carrier group en route Persian Gulf - U.S. defend Iraq’s Iran / Syrian borders in response? - 2009 term limit, Parliament shortened Ahmadinejad’s term? - ‘Hojjatieh’ ultra-conservative Shia believer of the 12th Imam/Mahdi - Ahmadinejad wants his administration to ‘pave way for 12th Imam’s return - His administration politically weaker; forcing his hand? - Inflation, unemployment, building opposition to his policies - Ahmadinejad even scares Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - Ayathollah’s recent overtures (”goodwill”) to U.S. via Saudi King - Sec. of State - Condi Rice - making trip to Riyadh next week

Most of the corpses in Baghdad's mortuary show signs of torture and execution. And the Interior Ministry is being blamed.

The US military has funded a computer game to teach its troops how to use and decipher Iraqi body language.

The Iraq that exists in President Bush’s imagination and the real Iraq, the one in which 160,000 U.S. troops occupy a nation sliding into civil war, have never seemed further apart.

Did Bush deliberately deceive the American people to justify the war in Iraq? I don't know...and neither do you. But here's what we do know: The president doesn't think we should be asking in the first place. And that might be the biggest scandal of all.

An official assessment drawn up by the US foreign aid agency depicts the security situation in Iraq as dire, amounting to a "social breakdown" in which criminals have "almost free rein".

Literally people have been asking me: "How is it that you were so amazingly prescient about Iraq? Why is it that you were right about everything at precisely the same moment when we were wrong?"

A year after tearfully accepting a Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush for his disastrous reign in Iraq, preposterous pasha Jerry Bremer has rewritten history with a ghosted "diary" and started a book tour by saying, "I didn't do it."