Middle East Update

A sharply divided House voted yesterday, March 23, to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq by next summer, attaching a timetable for withdrawal to the billions of dollars in war funding President Bush has demanded to prosecute an increasingly unpopular war.

Nearly six in ten Americans want to see U.S. troops leave Iraq either immediately or within a year, and more would rather have Congress running U.S. policy in the conflict than President Bush, according to a CNN poll out Tuesday, March 13.

Stepping into the ongoing American debate on Iraq, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned an AIPAC gala dinner Monday night March 12, about the danger “premature” withdrawal from the country would pose for Israel, echoing the words of US Vice President Dick Cheney to the same forum earlier in the day.

President Bush has approved a request to deploy 4,400 additional U.S. troops to Iraq, officials said.

This weekend of March 11, in Baghdad, Iraq’s neighbors and members of the U.N. Security Council will meet to discuss how the international community can help the Iraqi government stop violence, build its economy and create a political process that can reverse its free-fall into civil war.

The new commander of U.S. troops in Iraq has warned that military force alone will not be enough to quell the country’s violent insurgency.

Coalition forces began a massive “clearing operation” in Baghdad’s dangerous Sadr City neighborhood Sunday March 4, while in the southern city of Basra, the British military said a raid on an Iraqi intelligence office uncovered prisoners with signs of torture.

Black smoke filled the skies over central Baghdad just before midday Monday March 5, as a car bomb exploded in a busy commercial district, killing 18 people and wounding 42 others, Baghdad police said.

A car bomb exploded Wednesday February 28, near a market in southwestern Baghdad, killing at least 10 people and wounding 21 others, an Iraqi emergency police official said.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani fell ill and was flown from northern Iraq to neighboring Jordan on Sunday February 25 for treatment of what his son called “fatigue and exhaustion coupled with dehydration.”