Day: January 1, 2007

The Iraqi government launched an inquiry on Monday into how guards filmed and taunted Saddam Hussein on the gallows, turning his execution into a televised spectacle that has inflamed sectarian anger.

A senior Iraqi official told Reuters the U.S. ambassador tried to persuade Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki not to rush into hanging the former president just four days after his appeal was turned down, urging the government two wait another two weeks.

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush briefly paid their respects Monday to Gerald R. Ford, joining thousands of ordinary Americans in saying goodbye to the former president.

At midafternoon on a rainy, overcast day, the first couple stood at Ford’s flag-draped casket and bowed their heads. Their stay at the U.S. Capitol lasted just a few minutes. Afterward, the Bush motorcade took the president to Blair House, across the street from the White House, where the Bushes visited former first lady Betty Ford for a half-hour and then walked back to the Executive Mansion.

The January junket to warmer climates — a postholiday tradition of sorts for some members of Congress — could be headed to the wayside.

An accelerated work schedule set up by the new Democratic leadership has put a halt on many January excursions funded by lobbyists. Given that Democrats are taking over the House and Senate in part because of GOP ethics scandals, some lawmakers are fearful of the voters’ wrath anyway if they go on the trips.

Iraq may have been top on the table at the high-level strategy meeting this week at President Bush’s Texas ranch, but nervous eyes at the Pentagon were focused like a laser on Somalia.

Suddenly we have come full circle in the Iraq strategy.

As the war began a distinguished retired general friend argued strenuously at a discussion club to which I belong (and that also included two former officials who would later be members of the Iraq Commission) that the Pentagon’s assigned manpower was woefully shortsighted.

He was echoing the criticism of other longtime military strategists, including the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, who had just been shoved rudely into retirement for telling Congress that it would take as many as 300,000 troops to pacify Iraq.

U.S. troops killed six people Monday during a raid on a possible safe house for al-Qaida in Iraq, the military said, while the death toll of American service members in Iraq surpassed 3,000.

The attack occurred near the west Baghdad offices of Saleh al-Mutlaq, a senior Sunni Arab politician of the National Dialogue Front, the U.S military and Iraqi police said. American troops received heavy gunfire and grenade launches from the building, the military said.

Perhaps no place illustrates the toll of the Iraq war more vividly than Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. In this "garden of stone," in ruler-straight rows, rest one-tenth of the Iraq war’s American dead, whose number has reached 3,000.

Privates lie beside officers. Soldiers beside Marines. Muslim troops beside Christians and those of other faiths.

Democrats assume control of the US House and Senate with President George W. Bush’s policies, starting with Iraq, weighing heavily on their agenda.

Public discontent with the Iraq war was a major factor in the Republicans losing control of Congress in the November 7 legislative elections, and the issue will be first on the agenda of the new majority.

Incoming Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden has already said he would oppose any effort by Bush to increase US troops in Iraq as part of a new war strategy.

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, targeting a potential Republican rival in 2008, dubbed plans for a short-term U.S. troop increase in Iraq “the McCain doctrine,” in an interview aired on Sunday.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, considered likely to be a Republican candidate for president, has been “the most prominent spokesperson for this for some time,” Edwards said in an early salvo of the 2008 campaign.

Edwards, a former senator who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, made his remarks in an interview on the ABC News program “This Week.”

Democrats take control of Congress from President George W. Bush’s Republicans this week with lawmakers facing a crucial question: can they halt the partisan sniping long enough to get much done?

After a decade of mounting political battles, Democrats and Republicans vow to seek common ground on divisive matters such as a new strategy in the Iraq war, upgrading health care and revamping immigration laws when the 110th Congress convenes on Thursday.