It’s incredible what you can find out if you read the newspaper closely enough (said I.F. Stone, apparently). He wasn’t wrong. Yesterday, a soldier from the 4th Battalion, the Rifles (ex-Green Jackets, for those who aren’t keeping up..) was killed in Basra. Note the detail, though: Major Harding was killed by mortar fire onto the…
Read More News in BriefDan Hardie wants to know what is happening in the area between the southernmost US troops in Iraq – around Najaf if memory serves – and the northernmost British, now that the withdrawal to Basra Air Station is complete. Call it the grey zone – the populous, Shia-dominated gap astride the main supply route to…
Read More Welcome to the grey zoneBack in December, 2004 this blog was after the details of Bernie Kerik’s brief, mouvementé tour of duty in Iraq. We discovered that, essentially, he did nothing constructive, posed with South African mercs, and vanished into the distance after the first big carbombs, leaving the mess to DCC Douglas Brand of South Yorkshire Police and…
Read More Bearpark, Brand, and Kerik, againThis tale about Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifles was thin enough to start with, but it’s now been officially disavowed by the US Army’s press chief in Iraq, who states that no such weapon has ever been recovered anywhere in Iraq.
Read More Another Iranian-arms story officially deadTom Griffin links a stack of briefings prepared by the Reconstruction Operations Centre in Iraq, the coordination point for private security firms run by Aegis Defence Services. The first thing that strikes me is that they are impressively more sane, factual, and useful that anything I’ve seen emanating from the US Army. Not that this…
Read More IncomingContrary to what John Robb says, the supposed plot (no explosives, information from a sooper source, mystery men) to attack a jet fuel pipeline into New York (JFK) airport does not bear out his theories as anything distinct from good old-fashioned counterinsurgency. Robbo is right that the pipeline was a good target, but I suspect…
Read More Limits of RobbismIn any given period of history, the proportion of irony to available cases tends towards 1. The last people in the world who seriously consider that there might be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are working for the United Nations, and it’s Russia that wants to keep them on the job, and the US…
Read More The maximum irony generation principleNot depressed yet? You soon will be. Iraq is already a drugs transit route, but now it’s becoming a heroin producer. I’d cry, but in fact things are already so bad it’s hard to see how this makes anything in Iraq that much worse. The Iraqi insurgents do not seem to be constrained by money…
Read More the needle, and the damage doneThere is still, still not going to be a war with Iran. Carrierwatch: Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington are all in deep refit. Enterprise and Harry S. Truman are still at the stage of doing CARQUALs, in the Big E’s case for reserve squadrons, Ronald Reagan arrived back in San Diego on…
Read More There will still be no war with IranI can’t help thinking that if this LA Times story is accurate, those BGIA planes need a searching. In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda’s command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network’s operatives are raising substantial sums from…
Read More Just another planeload of cash