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I am writing while my roommate Alex waits on me so we can smoke a cigar to finish off the day. We do this a couple of days a week.
Prior to heading back to the tents or trailers, we smoke a cigar and talk about what we intend to do when this deployment is over. If we head out of here in late September as planned, then tonight is the 140-day mark before we leave the country, barring anything unexpected. . . .
I have had my family and friends from home send cigars over, as have a number of other officers on staff. Next to toothpaste and baby wipes, they rank third in quantity of care packages. I am still working on a box I received in December.
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Boris Johnson, a former journalist, gives police the item, which had belonged to Iraqi official Tarik Aziz. Johnson blames political opponents for launching an "idiotic" probe.
Scotland Yard has seized a red, leather cigar case from London's mayor in order to investigate whether it is a looted Iraqi artifact, officials said Tuesday.
Boris Johnson said he found the case five years ago in the bombed-out home of former Iraqi deputy premier Tariq Aziz while in the country as a reporter.
He spotted the case peeking out from beneath a piece of plywood when he was brought to see what looters had done to the villas of Saddam Hussein's regime, Johnson wrote in a column published Tuesday in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph.
"The circumstances in which I came by this object were so morally ambiguous that I cannot quite think of it as theft," the London mayor writes.
That seems so unusual, because here's the Don Rumsfeld you describe and everybody else -- this is a micromanager of the first magnitude.
Ah, but now he's into a piece of war fighting he didn't know anything about. . . .
How was their relationship? In the beginning, was it tough?
Really tough. Franks and he had it out a couple of times. One time Franks said [to me], "You're going to be the new CINC [commander in chief] tomorrow, because I don't think I'll be here the next day." The tensions were really high, and Franks was not getting any more sleep than I was. By the way, he drinks maybe 15 cups of coffee a day, smokes two packs of cigarettes, cigars and chews, so he's running on adrenalin and caffeine and nicotine, so it doesn't take much to scratch that line. He and Rumsfeld went at it a couple times, and finally Franks said, "Hey, either let me run it or fire me, but I can't keep being second-guessed."
Ban on smoking in public places and selling tobacco to people under 20 have cut sales of cigarettes in the GCC by 12 per cent, according to industry experts.
Total sales across the region are about 60 billion cigarettes a year and Saudi Arabia is the largest market with an annual total of 12 billion. Small- and medium-sized tobacco manufacturers expect their business volume to decline further due to increased taxes and restrictions in regional markets.
But global giants such as British American Tobacco and Philip Morris International (PMI), which dominate the market, recorded an increased sales in the first quarter of 2008 mainly due to higher turnover in East Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Eema).
Sometime this month, an Army captain in Iraq named Ryan Main will receive a small white box mailed from a shop just a few home runs from Coors Field.
When Main opens it, he'll find 25 premium cigars, fragrant with Dominican tobacco, hand-rolled and shipped by a total stranger.
The stranger's name is Clay Carl ton. Whatever his other claims to fame, one stands out: He's the only Coloradan holding both a barber's license and a federal cigar manufacturing license.
"We really don't know who we're sending these cigars to," Carlton said. "They generally just go to an Army Post Office address. But that's fine. We know the troops enjoy them. They've sent us letters from the field."
Carlton owns Palma Cigar Co., housed in a brick building at 2207 Larimer St. The one-man tobacco operation is in the front, his two-chair barber shop in back. . . .
There are few if any pleasures soldiering in Iraq, but Carlton is bringing a bit of comfort to the troops, one cigar at a time.
Many Iraqis are also drawn to work in the Green Zone, manning shops that cater to the huge pool of contract laborers who eat rich dishes and hummus in the Freedom Cafe and buy whiskey and beer in the two liquor stores serving the area.
A 23-year-old Baghdad native, who asked that his name not be mentioned for fear for his life, manages one of the Green Zone's tobacco shops, which features five enormous hookahs and a floor-to-ceiling humidor full of Cuban cigars that can fetch $200 a box.
"I can get more money working here and it is worth it, despite the danger," the man, dressed in a tan track suit, said on a recent afternoon.
"I've been working here for a year. My wife and family knows, but I tell my friends I work in a grocery store in Karradah," he said, referring to a Baghdad neighborhood just across the Tigris River from the Green Zone.
With the $500 he makes a month, the man said he is able to support his wife and help his father and brother with food and rent. He works 11 hours a day for two weeks, sleeping in quarters behind the tobacco shop, then heads home outside the Green Zone for two days of rest.
Boris Johnson, Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, is accused of purloining invaluable "Iraqi cultural property" in 2003 - to whit, a cigar case owned by Tariq Aziz, Saddam's foreign minister.
Mr Johnson would have got away scot-free but, like all criminal masterminds, he made one vital mistake: he confessed his sin within days to hundreds of thousands of readers of this newspaper, admitting to taking the case for safe-keeping and pledging to return it on demand. . . .
In a way, this ridiculous investigation is a compliment, for it shows that Mr Johnson's enemies are running scared. Yes, his tough-on-crime credentials may be mildly bruised, but it is their reputation - and Scotland Yard's - that will suffer more.
Scotland Yard has been accused of wasting taxpayers' money by launching an investigation into the alleged theft by Boris Johnson of a cigar case from the home of Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister five years ago.
* Read Boris Johnson on his decision to take the cigar case
* Mayor of London election 2008 in full
* Leader: Boris Johnson is a criminal mastermind
But as he prepared for a mission, Pendleton's image as a healthy, all-American graduate of West Point went up in smoke as he lit one cigarette after another.
It occurred to me that he could be the Marlboro man in another 10 years. Just put him in jeans, boots and a cowboy hat and plant him on top of a horse in the Rockies.
Cigarettes seem to calm the nerves here, and Pendleton's job has no shortage of stress. . . .
The violence has tapered off, but as Pendleton and a group of soldiers walked down that same boulevard last week you could see why he smokes so much.
A Marine reservist who killed an Iraqi soldier was sentenced Friday to a bad-conduct discharge but will serve no more time behind bars, a Camp Pendleton spokeswoman said.
Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes, 22, of Indianapolis, also was reduced in rank to private, said 1st Lt. Lisa Lawrence. . . .
Holmes' attorney, Steve Cook, claimed the Marine acted in self-defense after Hassin allegedly opened his cell phone and then lit a cigarette. Cook told jurors the men were not supposed to display any illuminated objects because of the threat of sniper fire, and Holmes tried repeatedly to get Hassin to extinguish the cigarette. . . .
Holmes told investigators that he fought with Hassin after knocking the cigarette from the soldier's hand.
A military jury sentenced Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes yesterday to time already served for stabbing an Iraqi soldier to death last year. . . .
Holmes stabbed and cut Pvt. Munther Jasem Muhammed Hassin more than 40 times during a predawn fight last New Year's Eve in an observation post in Fallujah. The confrontation began when the Iraqi soldier illuminated the post with a cell phone and then a cigarette.
Holmes apparently feared that insurgents would attack the post.
Prosecutors claim Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes murdered an Iraqi soldier while the two men stood guard together in Fallujah. But the 21-year-old Marine reservist says he acted in self-defense.
Now, jurors will determine whether he is innocent or guilty during a court-martial. The trial was to start Monday with jury selection. . . .
The killing occurred in the pre-dawn darkness after Hassin allegedly opened his cell phone, then lit a cigarette at the post, said Holmes' attorney, Steve Cook.
The men were not supposed to display illuminated objects because of the threat of sniper fire, and Holmes repeatedly tried to make Hassin extinguish the cigarette, Cook said.
Holmes maintains he knocked the cigarette out of the soldier's hand and the two got into a fight, falling to the ground.
Stan Pottinger, founder of http://www.CigarsStarsAndStripes.com, got the idea of sending cigars to the troops while talking on the telephone to his son, a Marine in Iraq. "I said, "What do you need?'" Pottinger says, "and he said, 'I could use a few cigars.' When I asked him why-he wasn't a big smoker-he said they were a good way to relax and good barter with civilian contractors for stuff they couldn't get at the PX. But the most unusual thing he said was they were a diplomatic ice- breakers with sheiks, local officials, and Iraqi soldiers.'"
Since then, Pottinger has spoken with servicemen and women who have had the same experience as his son. "Everyone considers cigars a unique moment of enjoyment in the midst of war," Pottinger says. "One guy said the smell of a cigar took him home quicker than photographs. For me, that alone was a reason to launch this Web site."
The Web site's biggest product is gift certificates.
Holmes was assigned to stand guard there with an Iraqi soldier he'd never met. Before the end of that night last December, the young Marine from Indianapolis says he found himself in a life-or-death struggle with the Iraqi soldier. The struggle ended with the Iraqi soldier stabbed to death and Holmes facing court-martial. Holmes said he worried the Iraqi's seemingly careless behavior -- smoking, using a cell phone -- on a dangerous post was putting him at risk. Military investigators came to a different conclusion, and Holmes was charged with unpremeditated murder and making a false statement. His trial, scheduled to begin Monday, is expected to take two weeks. The 22-year-old Holmes, who says he joined the Marines to help people, could be sentenced to life in prison if he's found guilty.