Dean's World

Welcome to the Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts from Iraqi and Afghani bloggers. This week we've got Newsweek, Thomas Friedman, car bombs, the weather, fresh fruit, and much more.

It looks like former Taliban are being brought into the political process in Afghanistan. More from Afghan Warrior.

I don't link to A Family in Baghdad very frequently for two reasons. First, the mom's, Faiza's, posts are translated so there's about a week's lag between the date the post was written and the actual posting date. It tends to lose currency. Second, multiple posts are aggregated into a single long, rambling post and it's not possible just to link to the good parts. However, I recommend you read all of this post. In this post Faiza writes on the Newsweek controversy, George Galloway's testimony before the Senate, and Guantanamo. Here's some of what she writes about Newsweek:

The Newsweek is a weekly magazine, and each time I buy it, every now and then, I prepare myself for the poisons it prints against Islam and the Muslims, I feel pain, and wonder at the Arabic silence towards what is issued by it, and other poisonous western media, (not all, but most).

Does anyone like Newsweek's coverage? I would have liked to have seen some specifics about what she doesn't like in the coverage.

Even moderates like Truth Teller of A Citizen of Mosul are starting to believe the story I've mentioned before: that Americans are responsible for the car-bombings.

Riverbend fisks a Thomas Friedman column.

There appear to be several differing opinions on the reason for the escalation of terrorist violence lately. As I mentioned above, A Citizen of Mosul is coming to believe it's the Americans. Riverbend believes it's the occupation:

It is outrageous because for many people, this isn't about Sunnis and Shia or Arabs and Kurds. It's about an occupation and about people feeling that they do not have real representation. We have a government that needs to hide behind kilometers of barbed wire and meters and meters of concrete- and it's not because they are Shia or Kurdish or Sunni Arab- it's because they blatantly supported, and continue to support, an occupation that has led to death and chao

Hammorabi blames the foreign jihadis (and their home governments):

Every day there are families in Saudi Arabia receiving news of their sons killed in Iraq. Thousands of them returned recently from Syria to Saudi Arabia (according Syria) and at least 300 Saudis are still arrested in Syria however this not meaning that Syria stopped its support but the reverse. Syria only stops its support for the insurgents after the Baath regime in Syria toppled.

Ali of Free Iraqi blames the Ba'athists, the foreign jihadis, and the lack of viable political organization among Sunni Arabs in Iraq:

I'd like to divide terrorists into two main groups; the hardcore Ba'athists and the Islamists who come mainly from outside Iraq. But these two parties are resented by the majority of Iraqis and have no real support. So how can they operate so smoothly at many times inside Iraq and why aren't Iraqis reporting them? To be more specific, why aren't the majority of Sunnis reporting these terrorists and Ba'athists and why are they silent and even sometimes supportive of their actions. I have so many Sunni friends who are far from being religious or Ba'athists and who are more westernized than the majority of Iraqis but who are watching everything going in Iraq as outsiders without supporting any party yet with more resentment towards the current Iraqi government and therefore to America as they see it as the one responsible for bringing this government to power.

The problem is that till now Sunnis have not found their representatives, as they don't have a Marji'ya like the She'at and they weren't oppressed just because they were Sunnis and therefore they didn't have such a tie to bring them together as one mass.

Read all of Ali's post.

Omar of Iraq the Model has thoughts about Memorial Day. Mohammed comments on Operation Lightning.

Abu Khaleel of A Glimpse of Iraq has an interesting post on traditional weather-reckoning folkways in Iraq.

Alaa, The Mesopotamian comments on city and country in Iraq. I've written about this before. IMO one of the problems in modern Arab Muslim society is the breakdown of the urban religious intellectual elite that formed a counterbalance to rural imams under the pressures of socialist states.

Imad Khadduri's view of Operation Lightning differs.

Although I read a lot of them I'm inclined to avoid linking to the blogs of ex-pat Iraqis for the Carnival. But here's a good post from IraqPundit about Riverbend. How representative is she of Iraqis?

Salam Pax comments on the new Iraqi constitution.

There's an interesting tidbit of information in this post from Baghdad Bacon and Eggs:

After we unpacked and cooled off a little Fozzy and I stopped by my uncle's 'wakeel' (The wakeel is the guy that takes charge of a farm when the owner decides not to do it himself. when this takes place the wakeel gets the larger part of the owner's share of the harvest.). In the guest hall of my uncle's wakeel I learnt that alot of the young men in the farm have now got jobs. The uni graduates got government jobs and the strong guys got jobs with the police or the army. As a result of all this employment, the quality of the labourers has gone down, and the price has gone up 3 times.

The good news would appear to be that wages are rising. The bad news is that they're mostly government jobs (just as under Saddam).

Finally, a little good news from hnk:

This week was happy, your pray was useful for me. Well I want to tell you something but please don't laugh, I ate cherry for the first time in my life, Well there is not cherry in Iraq and now it look like they began to import It from out side.This is one of the positive things that happened after the war. Now you can choose from Iraqi oranges, Syrian oranges, Turkish oranges, and Egyptian oranges. And of course you will not choose Iraqi oranges because it is too small in comparison with others.

Dave Schuler posts regularly to his own weblog, The Glittering Eye. The Carnival was originally conceived by Ryan Boots.