Sunday, November 18, 2007
A tale of revenge within the Shiite community in Iraq, from Jon Lee Anderson’s “Inside the Surge“:
Amar was a lifelong friend of Karim’s. Three months earlier, Amar and his older brother, Jafaar, had been riding in the van of a friend, Sayeed, when a group of gunmen hailed them. Amar recognized them as Mahdi Army [...]
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There is a consensus forming about Iraq, and increasingly I suspect that the Democratic party is on the wrong side of it. The consensus is this: though we were certainly the cause of the current instability in the country, the violence is not principally directed towards American forces. In light of that fact, David Ignatius [...]
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Please read these two extracts from Clive Stafford Smith’s forthcoming book Bad Men, recounting his experience as a lawyer for prisoners at the military base in Guantanamo: “No fairytales allowed,” and “Have you received your gift pack?”
From the first:
One of the escorts told me that, on pain of punishment, soldiers are required to call them [...]
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The recent peaceful return of British soldiers to the contrary, (and so smartly dressed!) it appears we are currently involved with groups carrying out military operations in Iran:
Most recently, Jundullah took credit for an attack in February that killed at least 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard riding on a bus in the Iranian [...]
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Two recent “Intelligence Briefs” from PINR caught my eye: “Iran’s Covert Operations in Iraq,” and “The Implications of Strategic Withdrawal from Iraq.” As some readers know, I’m a big fan of PINR for supplying ‘open source intelligence,’ which is to say, generalized insights into foreign policy and educated guesses based on publicly available information. In [...]
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Check out the newest slang from the Global War on Terror: Bohica, Fobbit, Echelons Above Reality, Full Battle Rattle. I loves me some jargon. The title phrase means, basically, “The situation is bad, but deal with it.” Via Metafilter.
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Just pulled this off Metafilter. A St. John’s grad turned interrogator speaks about what he did to innocents in Iraq: Confessions of a Torturer. There goes Martha Nussbaum’s thesis that the study of the liberal arts will cultivate an ethical sensibility, right out the window. That said, Mr. Lagouranis has a lot more to tell [...]
Saturday, January 27, 2007
“300” is slated for release on March 9th. Call me a Hellenic fanboy, but I’m excited. The Battle of Thermopylae pitted 300 Spartan warriors, 400 Theban hostages, and 700 Thespian volunteers against an army of Persians reputed by Herodotus to be 5,283,220 strong.
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Saturday, January 20, 2007
The New York Times has a report on the proposed law regulating oil contracts. There’s no mention of production-sharing agreements there, but there is something a little fishy about the law, which centralizes the approval procedure for contracts for the oil under regional control. Here’s the relevant text from the NYT:
[The law allows] regions to [...]
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Thursday, January 18, 2007
Steve at Cows and Graveyards correctly connects the upcoming oil extraction agreements in Iraq to peak oil. Yes, Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and as the global demand (mostly due to 40% increase in yearly consumption caused by the burgeoning Chinese economy) outstrips supply, prices will skyrocket unless the US [...]
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