Joe Biden claimed in tonight's debate that ''we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country.'' The claim sounds stunning, and Biden has made it before; he said the same thing in a March 2 New York Times op-ed and at a Senate foreign ...

If you flip-flop on an issue that itself flip-flops all the time, is that considered flip-flopping? That’s the question confronting Barack Obama, who hinted Thursday that he might “refine” his position on withdrawal from Iraq. Obama quickly held a follow-up presser to clarify his determination to pull out as quickly and safely as possible. But ...

Via the Washington Post and the military's press shop in Baghdad, I learned this morning that the first military prosecution of a civilian contractor in Iraq has ended in a guilty plea. According to today's story: Also Monday, the U.S. military announced that a Canadian man working as an interpreter for the U.S. military in Iraq was ...

You’d think that after an eight-hour testimony like Petraeus and Crocker's yesterday, the presidential candidates would now have a clear set of facts to debate. If only. The problem, as the Times puts it, is that Clinton/Obama and McCain “seemed to be talking about two different wars.” Clinton cited the war’s “tremendous cost to our national ...

To follow up my first post on Bruce Ackerman's and Oona Hathaway's op-ed, I'd also note that he and his co-author presume that Section 2(a)(2), authorizing military force to ''enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq,'' referred only to subsequent U.N. authorizations pertaining to Iraq. Of course, ...

Too often, people caught up in heated political debates assert that disfavored policies are not merely disfavored but illegal. Of course, the debate over the war in Iraq has been no exception to this sorry habit, as the Bush administration's critics long have declared the war ''illegal'' or ''unconstitutional.'' Bruce Ackerman, usually a ...

Via Scott Horton comes the news that the U.S. Marine Corps has charged an Iraqi-Canadian civilian contractor in Iraq with brandishing a knife and stabbing another contractor. The charges follow an important change to the Uniform Code of Military Justice in September 2006, which, in theory, extended the code's reach to include civilians and ...

Like Marty, Diane, and Deborah,  I, too, am excited about today's oral argument in Munaf and Omar.  Not just because I think this case raises thorny issues, but also because this case deals with a subject I have some personal experience with. I served in Iraq from 2005-06 as an adviser to the Iraqi police in Baqubah. My team also ...

No answers to questions by Eric and Deborah, but more questions about Munaf: There's something curious about the United States' position in Munaf v. Geren, on which the Supreme Court will hear oral argument Tuesday morning. Petitioning for a writ of habeas are Mohammad Munaf and Shawqi Ahmad Omar, both U.S. citizens who also hold citizenship ...

Suppose that U.S. troops are on patrol in country X. Perhaps they are engaging in joint maneuvers with that country's armed forces; perhaps they are there for some other reason. Some soldiers out on maneuvers run across a person whose face is on a ''wanted'' poster that they have seen. In violation of their own orders, U.S. law, and ...