I View the Checksum: It was Exum

Turns out Abu Muq was Andrew Exum all along. Which is interesting; I’d read and been impressed by Exum’s work on Hezbollah and Iraq, but I’d never have thought it was him, chiefly because the man behind the stylish blogger template was obviously both smart and struggling to overcome a deeply ingrained wingnut streak. There was the whinging about the Independent, and the occasional lapses into cheapo frogbashing, and the pathological Alex/Patrick Cockburn confusion thing – my challenge, by the way, is still open. It reveals a certain amount of cogdis when you’re simultaneously mocking racist buffoon Mark Steyn and still, in the year of Our Lord 2008, approvingly referring to the article in which he coined “fisking”.

I didn’t want to take part when I first heard of them – too many good military-related blogs did the same dull trajectory into domination by the scarlet-faced majors at the Base, and once AM started getting linked by fifteen-carat/carrot wankers like Mudville and Blackfive, it looked ominous. But the blog went on beyond that, despite a minor insurgency of trolls; its real commitment to understanding the politics of guerrilla warfare has so far kept them under control, and a truly interesting community has developed. Where else do you run into Ackerman, DeLong, Gian Gentile, Bob Bateman, David Kilcullen, Norwegians, and me in the same comments thread? Fantastic, a hybrid of Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Frank Kitson; precisely what the times require.