Alternate Seat of TYR

So we had the world’s first military coup motivated by a 3G network licence, in Thailand; we had the shootout between the Chalabi Boys and Orascom security men in Baghdad. Now, there’s the Hezbollah/Amal coup de force (or de folie as Robert Fisk preferred), motivated in part by the Lebanese government’s desire to control their [...]

Az-zaman, via Cole reports that the Iraqi government “honoured” SCIRI…sorry…ISIC militiamen for their role in the Basra fighting, and that some 10,000 of them were officially signed up to the Government’s own forces (I thought they already were). The reason for this step is apparently that large numbers - thousands - of men in the [...]

Crack BBC journo Peter Taylor’s film The Secret Peacemaker, about Brendan Duddy, the man who maintained secret communications between the IRA leadership and the British government from the early 70s to 1993, was a cracker; it provided rich detail about the practicalities of ending the war, the missed opportunities of the first ceasefire, and moreover [...]

I promised more serious content; here goes.
Right, everyone is vexed about the RUSI report (PDF download) that was recently published under the names of Gwyn Prins (a minor hero of this blog’s, for his The Heart of War: Power, Conflict, and Obligation in the 21st Century) and the Marquess of Salisbury (no less, who hasn’t [...]

So Gates has been doing the rounds of EU capitals, looking for more troops (and money) for Afghanistan. He didn’t get very far; although Germany did agree to find half a battalion of light infantry as a quick-reaction force for the northern zone, this just relieves a Norwegian force that is currently doing the job. [...]

So what about those submarine cables then? There has been a mass of blogfroth about this, but I’m quite surprised by the degree of mis- or possibly dis-information that is circulating. For a start, Iran is not without Internet connectivity, whatever this webpage says. It shouldn’t be this difficult; after all, the route to anywhere [...]

This story about the US Democrats, and specifically the Obama campaign, and their strategy based on small, autonomous campaign groups working from a honking gurt database of voters, hooks into something I’ve been thinking recently; in all kinds of fields, it’s all about big enabling systems that small autonomous organisations can benefit from. This is [...]

It’s been said, I think by Alanbrooke, that strategy consists in the proper handling of reserves. Looking at the situation with this framework, what can we say about Iraq? It’s now been a year since the announcement of “The Surge”, the deployment of the US Army’s strategic reserve in Iraq. And what’s happened?
First, it helps [...]

Says Iranian foreign minister Manoucher Mottaki:
“America, today, in the international system is facing a serious challenge … Americans are in a very, very difficult situation.
“The people of Afghanistan would not allow America to use Afghanistan against any country. This is our … belief,” he said.
Mottaki said Tehran’s findings from three rounds of talks with U.S. [...]

So, I wonder if there’s anything stupid going on at Richard “Who are you going to believe - me, or the fact the Israeli Air Force *apologised* for the strike-in-error?” North’s place….and guess what? There is!
As CabaPhil (good to have him back in the ’sphere) points out, Dick North is deeply conflicted here - for [...]