As the Americans go to the polls, this is what I look like: waiting, knowing that Obama must surely win, but fearing he won’t.
I suspect the world is full of people who are paralysed by a mixture of hope and sheer fright, as those long queues shuffle towards the polling booths.

I was stricken with grief after John Howard’s last victory, because I felt we had a chance to demonstrate that the electorate will punish warmongers, even if no other institution of the state stops them. Likewise the ghastly victory of George Bush in 2004.
But Howard is gone now, Blair has retired and Brown seems [...]

I’ve just seen Brian Da Palmas’s Redacted, based loosely on the true story of a small group of American soldiers who butchered a family, and raped, shot and burned their fifteen year old daughter.
The appearance of films critical of Iraq while the war is still going on is utterly remarkable, a tribute to the [...]

If it’s in the paper, it must be true.
I am going to steal an entire story from a lovely account of “The Library in the New Age” by Robert Darnton in the current New York Review of Books. This creates a certain strange echo, because the article discusses the very process of copy theft and [...]

One of 30 deserters to the Mahdi army kisses a Koran. An obvious photo op, compared to the shortage of images from Basra
You can’t say that Basra is Tet 2, because the attack on US troops in Saigon and Hue was completely unexpected, and Maliki’s army has gone to the gates of Basra in scores [...]

“Fort Carson-based Army Major Andrew Olmsted is blogging from the war in Iraq, where his mission is to teach members of the Iraqi Army how to defend their country and provide security for their people. Major Olmsted is a veteran blogger and he is determined to make a difference in Iraq. “The sooner the Iraqi [...]

The man who took this photograph, in 2005 in Ramada, is called Bilal Hussein. He is a stringer for AP, and considered by the agency to be very much part of the team, which has won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the war in Iraq. Bilal also shot this image -

The New York Times bureau chief in Baghdad lives inside the American Green Zone beside the Tigris. We’ve all seen the images of walls and the queues of vehicles at the entry maze, and the mortar smoke drifting across the buildings as the insurgency occasionally hits home.
But John F. Burns admits to a domestic [...]

How this man manages to contain his rage enough to follow that particular rhetorical strategy to its conclusion, I do not know.

“We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees all look the same- there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.”
Riverbend got away. May she find peace and prosperity. In English she is a poet; what must she be like [...]