Archive for September, 2010
This Clinton person is making sense, on Israeli politics, on settlements, and on this: Moreover, Clinton said, Hamas militants will soon have military technology that will allow their relatively low-damage attacks on Israeli population centers to have greater accuracy and lethality. “It’s just a matter of time before the rockets have a GPS system on [...]
Theo Farrell has published a new paper on the British Army in Helmand, which makes some more progress in explaining just how it went so wrong.
Elsewhere: how the Lib Dems learned to love Nemesysco’s fake lie detector and outsourcing to Crapita. Yes, really.
OK, so let’s remind ourselves of the rising chatter about a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan from a couple of months ago. We know that there was some evidence of Hezb-i Islami cooperating with ISAF. The first group targeted as part of the diplomatic effort were the Haqqani network. Since then, we’ve learned about the build-up [...]
Arising from this, it struck me that there is something very important about continuity in politics. In many ways, it’s a habit – the group of professional rightwing publicists who invented “teabaggers” in late 2008 were clearly very well aware that a movement survives by acting out its emotional rituals and internalised skills. Whether it’s [...]
If I hadn’t been fiddling with file permissions to get WordPress running last Sunday, I’d probably have been writing about the Haystack saga. I’m a bit gestört by some of the coverage of it – Evgeny Morozov, typically, has been doing good work in the general war on bullshit, but I’m less convinced of his [...]
You may have noticed that the blogspot version of TYR looks funny. The news is that we’re moving – with luck, our national nightmare of blog bifurcation and manually maintained archive links (there’s a reason the ones on TYR classic haven’t been updated in years) will be at an end. Before this happens, though, I’d [...]
A thought, while writing the last post. Thinking about international politics invariably involves a lot of rational-choice stuff, or rational-choice at one remove. Although this may not make sense in a platonic game-theory way, how do so-and-so’s interests, preferences, and meta-knowledge of their own situation have to differ from yours to make it work? They’ve [...]
Adam Elkus has a piece out entitled The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, in which he criticises what he sees as a tendency to over-rate the power of guerrillas in the light of the 2006 war. Having read it, I think the real question here is about expectations and goals. Hezbollah didn’t defeat the Israelis [...]
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