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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave and impressive woman. Yet she’s also a crashing bore and a bully. Here she is today, fulminating again against feeble Europe for not standing up to the Islamic menace. Most of the article is, as you might expect, standard beware-the-Muslim-in-your-midst stuff. We should loathe multi-culturalism and remember that Islam [...]
Filed under: Iraq, Uncategorized, War
Nearly a year ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that eliminating the stigma of mental health from the military culture would be a Pentagon priority. Seeing that some one-third of soldiers returning from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are reporting mental health symptoms, particularly those associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), hearing him [...]
President Obama’s unscheduled stop in Iraq yesterday not only put Iraq back above the fold, but found reporters and analysts rushing to creatively package it. A popular theme to emerge is that Obama’s brief surprise visit, featuring a speech to U.S troops at Camp Victory outside the airport (sandstorms reportedly prevented him from traveling to [...]
The video of Dan Hannan verbally assaulting Gordon Brown at the European Parliament is still whistling around the Internet. Indeed, the clip is currently one of YouTube’s most popular posts (more than 700, 000 viewings in just over a day). And Fox News has even described Hannan, a Member of the European Parliament and a [...]
President Barack Obama has made it clear he is willing to talk with “moderate” members of the Taliban in an attempt to gain control — and perhaps bring to an end — the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Afghan President Karzai has been reportedly negotiating with members of the Taliban for a year and according to [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Iraq, War
Here’s an interesting phenomenon from Britain, reported by Jon Henley in the Guardian. Apparently, the above image–an old government poster brought out in 1939 to keep the population calm in the event of a German invasion–has, since the financial crisis began, started popping up all over the country — and even in the U.S. embassy [...]
Though the story of the U.S military’s dependency on contractors — particularly the behemoth Kellogg, Brown and Root, offspring of Halliburton — is well-ploughed, writer Pratap Chatterjee, who has made reporting on the seediness of war profiteering his obsession over the last seven years, embedding with U.S military and spear-heading CorpWatch, freshly explores today how [...]
Filed under: Iraq, Uncategorized, War
To follow up on Kelley Vlahos’ post below on Thomas Ricks’ sudden infatuation with and promotion of General Ray Odierno, Commander of the Multi-National Force Iraq (MNF-I), as a born-again counterinsurgency true believer (in his book Fiasco, Ricks described Odierno’s allegedly heavy-handed tactics as commander of the 4th Infantry as instrumental in the rise of the [...]
Pat Lang explores some of the ramifications of Bush’s last –it might seem his only– good deed: rejection of an Israeli request for overflight permission and perhaps military assistance in bombing Iran’s nuclear reactor. There’s been very little about this in the mainstream press– though it’s the kind of major incident that history often turns [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Iraq, Uncategorized
Upon news their company is being booted out of Baghdad by Iraqi officials who have denied the private security company an operating license there, Blackwater Worldwide executives said the North Carolina-based contractor is well on its way to making $1 billion in annual revenues over the next year or two anyway. And while their guards [...]