The captive's tale

David Rohde, "Held By the Taliban".

• Part One: "7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity" (Oct. 17, 2009)


• Part Two: "Inside the Islamic Emirate" (Oct. 18, 2009)


• Part Three: "‘You Have Atomic Bombs, but We Have Suicide Bombers’" (Oct. 19, 2009)


• Part Four: "A Drone Strike and Dwindling Hope" (Oct. 20, 2009)


• Part Five: "A Rope and a Prayer" (Oct. 21, 2009)


• Epilogue: "Epilogue (Oct. 22, 2009

Rosie the Iraqi

Ernesto Londoño, "Iraqi Women Take On Roles Of Dead or Missing Husbands"

Nearly 1 million women in Iraq are widows or divorcees, or their husbands are missing, according to Samira al-Mosawi, a Shiite member of parliament who heads the women's affairs committee. She said the number, an estimate reached by several government agencies, includes women who became widows during Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s.

Mosawi said approximately 86,000 widows are receiving about $40 a month from the government. Aid organizations and government agencies are unable to help more widows because of a lack of funds and the challenges of doing social work in volatile neighborhoods.

"Frankly speaking, there's not much attention paid to the social issues in the country," Mosawi said in an interview. "Attention goes to security and defense."

Before U.S. troops strode into Baghdad in the spring of 2003, Abadi worked as a seamstress to complement the earnings of her husband, who worked at a government factory.

She was optimistic during the days after the invasion. Her impressions of Americans, shaped largely by a news story she saw on television, gave her hope. The story was about an hours-long effort to rescue a cat stuck in a sewage pipe.

"If those people are so good to the animals," she said, "I was expecting good things."

But the invasion and its aftermath brought more troubles than blessings.

When the family's rent rose from about $20 a month to more than $80, Abadi moved into the building that had housed Saddam Hussein's Baath Party after the structure had been looted and set ablaze.

"During Saddam's time, no one had a right to raise rent on the people," she said. "After the invasion, the rules were gone."

Sullivan: Two On the War

Andrew Sullivan, "What I Got Wrong About Iraq" (March 21, 2008).

I think I committed four cardinal sins ....

.... I was distracted by the internal American debate to the occlusion of the reality of Iraq. For most of my adult lifetime, I had heard those on the left decry American military power, constantly warn of quagmires, excuse what I regarded as inexcusable tyrannies and fail to grasp that the nature of certain regimes makes their removal a moral objective. As a child of the Cold War, and a proud Reaganite and Thatcherite, I regarded 1989 as almost eternal proof of the notion that the walls of tyranny could fall if we had the will to bring them down and the gumption to use military power when we could. I had also been marinated in neoconservative thought for much of the 1990s, and seen the moral power of Western intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. All of this primed me for an ideological battle which was, in retrospect, largely irrelevant to the much more complex post-Cold War realities we were about to confront.

When I heard the usual complaints from the left about how we had no right to intervene, how Bush was the real terrorist, how war was always wrong, my trained ears heard the same cries that I had heard in the 1980s. So I saw the opposition to the war as another example of a faulty Vietnam Syndrome, associated it with the far left, or boomer nostalgia, and was revolted by the anti-war marches I saw in Washington. I became much too concerned with fighting that old internal ideological battle, and failed to think freshly or realistically about what the consequences of intervention could be. I allowed myself to be distracted by an ideological battle when what was required was clear-eyed prudence.

• • •

Andrew Sullivan, " What I Got Wrong About the War" (March 5, 2006)

In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors. The first was to overestimate the competence of government, especially in very tricky areas like WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an overestimation of the risks we faced. And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system. When doubts were raised, they were far too swiftly dismissed. The result was the WMD intelligence debacle, something that did far more damage to the war's legitimacy and fate than many have yet absorbed.