Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's party, the State of Law Coalition, lost the March 7 parliamentary elections in a fractured vote, but appears to have embarked upon a course of using political violence as a means of erasing the election results. “At least four Sunni Muslim candidates who appear to have won parliamentary seats in Iraq on the winning ticket of secular leader Ayad Allawi have become targets of investigation by security forces reporting to the narrowly defeated Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki,” McClatchy news service reported March 27.

Americans received yet another confirmation on February 16 that President Obama has taken on the mantle of his war-mongering predecessor with a statement by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs saying he “wouldn't rule out” war against Iran.

The deaths of three American soldiers in Pakistan February 3 has exposed “Obama’s secret war inside Pakistan," according to theLondon Times February 7. The American soldiers “were killed when their convoy was bombed as it traveled to the re-opening of [a girls] school” by a remote-controlled bomb in Waziristan in northwest Pakistan.

The CIA has forged an alliance with Ba'athist exiles from Saddam Hussein's Iraq for intelligence in Yemen, according to the London Daily Telegraph for January 6. In an article entitled "US forges alliance with Saddam Hussein officers to fight al-Qaeda," the Telegraph for January 6 also noted that this already-existing alliance with former enemies is on the upswing: "Co-operation with the former Baathist officers, who fled Iraq in the wake of the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam, is expected to grow further in the wake of the failed terror attack in the skies above Detroit."

The Times of London reported December 29 that in the wake of the botched airplane Christmas day bombing Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi has claimed there may be hundreds of terrorist plots against the West planned by al-Qaeda from Yemen. Specifically, al-Qirbi said: “Of course there are a number of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and some of their leaders. We realize this danger. They may actually plan attacks like the one we have just had in Detroit. There are maybe hundreds of them — 200, 300.”

The London Times reported that official British documents have revealed that the new Anglo-American strategy in Afghanistan is to buy off insurgents with bribes of “bags of gold.”

The U.S. Government will soon begin paying Taliban members who claim to switch sides in the insurgent war in Afghanistan, according to a report by the BBC.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC's Meet the Press Sunday that the United States faces 10 more years of war in Afghanistan.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney won the Wisconsin, Maryland, and District of Columbia primaries April 3, easily besting second-place Rick Santorum in Wisconsin and Maryland. Former Pennsylvania Senator Santorum didn't win ballot access in the District of Columbia, where Romney won 70 percent of the vote over second place Ron Paul (12 percent) in that primary.

President Barack Obama claimed in his third State of the Union address that he supported a policy of "no bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts." But he said this after he had outlined more than half a dozen new spending handout proposals in a speech that also praised bailouts. On taxes, Obama concluded of retaining outrageously high middle-class tax rates and increasing the tax rates on the rich: "That’s how we’ll reduce our deficit."