Q&A: Iranian Diplomat on Tehran’s Role in Iraq | Newsweek International

IRAQ WAR
‘No Victory Dances’
Rod Nordland 8/21/2008 12:00:00 AM
Gen. David Petraeus is due to relinquish his role as the commanding general in Iraq in mid-September, moving up to head CENTCOM, the U.S. military's Central Command, in overall charge of the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He sat down for an hour and a half this week with NEWSWEEK's Rod Nordland, at the general's office in the American Embassy, in Saddam's old Republican Palace. Excerpts:
Official: Abducted Sheiks Freed
10/29/2007 12:00:00 AM
A suicide bomber on a bicycle blew himself up Monday in a crowd of police recruits, killing at least 29 people, police and hospital officials said. Separately, a group of kidnapped Sunni and Shiite sheiks were freed, a government spokesman said.
Bomber Kills 27 Police Recruits
10/29/2007 12:00:00 AM
BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber on a bicycle blew himself up Monday in a crowd of police recruits northeast of Baghdad, killing at least 27 people — most of them struck by iron balls packed with the explosives, police and hospital officials said.
What Obama Should Say On Iraq
Fareed Zakaria
Barack Obama needs to give a speech about Iraq. Otherwise he will find himself in the unusual position of having being prescient about the war in 2002 and yet being overtaken by events in 2008. The most important reason to do this is not political. Iraq is fading in importance for the public and, to the extent that it matters as an electoral issue, most people agree with Obama's judgment that the war was not worth fighting.
CAMPAIGN 2008
The World According to John McCain
Michael Hirsh
"We need to listen," John McCain was saying, "to the views … of our democratic allies." Then, though the words weren't in the script, the Arizona senator repeated himself, as if in self-admonishment: "We need to listen." A lot of meaning was packed into that twice-said line, which was a key theme of McCain's first major foreign-policy speech since becoming the GOP's nominee-apparent. McCain was telling America, and the whole world: if I'm elected there will be, at long last, a return to what Jefferson called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." There will be no more ill-justified lurches into war, no more unilateralism, no more George W. Bush. Above all, McCain seemed to be saying that while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tear each other to pieces, I'm going to be the wise and welcoming statesman patching up America's global relations even before I get to the Oval Office. Not surprisingly, after the speech last week at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, McCain's campaign could not talk enough about international cooperation—what McCain had called a "new compact." "He has such a deep relationship with so many Europeans and those in other regions, including Asia and the Middle East," said one adviser, Rich Williamson, who added that McCain has kept up his global profile by "going each year to the Munich Security Conference."
Things Fall Apart

The air changed early on the morning of Feb. 22, 2006. That day a gang of saboteurs, presumably Sunni, destroyed one of the holiest shrines of Shiite Islam, the gold-domed Askariya Mosque in Samarra. The restraint that Shiites had demonstrated in the face of insurgent attacks quickly evaporated. Over the coming months, more and more corpses turned up in the alleys and vacant lots of Baghdad, many of them bound and bearing marks of torture. Families fled mixed neighborhoods for the safety of sectarian enclaves—or left the country entirely. Roughly 10,000 civilians were killed in the capital in the year's last four months alone.