Summary: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared a new dawn as Iraq celebrated the departure of American troops under a Bush-era U.S.-Iraqi status-of-forces agreement. Television stations aligned with Sunni and Shiite extremist groups have dubbed “Iraq Day” the “Day of Defeating the Occupier,” the “Day of Fullfillment,” or the “Day of Evacuation.”
Summary: On the eighth day of his write-in campaign against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman, in line with his focus on national security, reported that Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab political party suspended all dealings with U.S. civilian and military personnel after U.S. and Iraqi forces carried out a raid in which a senior official of Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi’s Iraqi Islamic Party was killed. He also published links to personality profiles of presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, with implications for their likely leadership style as president, developed at the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics, which he directs.