Professor at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA, Vijay Prashad comments on the latest in Libya as the war between rebels and Muammar Gaddafi drags on even as NATO bombing continues. A Newsclick Presentation

Two events have happened almost at the same time. The decision to hang Tariq Aziz, the former Foreign Minister of Iraq for being a party to Saddam's crimes, the other Wikileaks (http://wikileaks.org/) treasure trove of documents that shows the complicity of US officials and military in crimes committed against civilians in Iraq.

Americans have largely stopped thinking about Iraq, even though we still have approximately 110,000 troops there, as well as the largest “embassy” on the planet (and still growing). 

How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating U.S. presence in the Middle East. These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of Vice President Dick Cheney's secretive task force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq's monstrous, largely untapped energy reserves -- more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and Iran -- including the quadrupling of Iraq's capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - At least four car bombs killed 112 people in Baghdad on Tuesday, leaving charred buses and scattered body parts in a blow to the government's efforts to show it can defend Iraqis before U.S. troops withdraw in 2011.                   

A former Marine who fought in Iraq, joined the State Department after leaving the military and was a diplomat in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan has become the first U.S. official to resign in protest of the Afghan war, the Washington Post reported early Tuesday.

A federal judge on Wednesday tossed out a series of lawsuits filed by alleged Iraqi victims of the contractor once known as Blackwater USA, but is allowing the plaintiffs to refile their claims.

As the war in Afghanistan entered its ninth year, the Labor Department recently released new figures for the number of civilian contract workers who have died in war zones since 9/11. Although acknowledged as incomplete, the figures show that at least 1,688 civilians have died and more than 37,000 have reported injuries while working for U.S. contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.