Remember all the waffle about Iran supposedly arming the Sunni insurgents (despite it being wildly contrary to Iranian interests)? Well, I think it may be gradually turning into a case of being right too early. Not that the New-Old Iraqi Army is getting arms from Iran, but that somebody may be trying to build up…
Read More Timing is everythingTapped has a useful suggestion: why not export Tony Blair to a Democratic Leadership Council thinktank? He’ll be happier there, and will do less damage. They suggest we might want Joe Lieberman in exchange. Not so sure about that. Apparently, Subhas Chandra Bose is not buried on Taiwan as previously thought, and the grave that…
Read More Links Now, Content LaterWere purchased from leftover Bosnian war stocks for the Iraqi security forces by U.S. agents in BiH, and flown out of the country by Aerocom in four runs with the Ilyushin 76 ER-IBV, serial no. 3423699. But where they were delivered remains a mystery, and it is feared that the weapons actually went to the…
Read More 99 Tonnes of GunsOne of the many events I should have blogged but didn’t over the last week or so, due to a combination of elections and unusually short deadlines, was the death of John Kenneth Galbraith. In memoriam, I’m rereading his book on the 1929 Wall Street crash, The Great Crash. It will probably surprise no-one that…
Read More Galbraith and the Core/GapRemember this post from July 2005? Regarding the full sickology of the Iraqi war economy, it covered epic CPA corruption, heroin smuggling, Iraqi girls turning up turning tricks all over the Middle East, and of course Viktor Bout. In comments, someone claimed to have heard from a Kroll securigoon that Russian planes were bringing in…
Read More We love the corruptionAmong the bad news from Iraq, I seem to have forgotten that our old friends the New-Old Iraqi Army are back. In early 2005, this blog covered a succession of big, sophisticated, company-sized or more assaults launched by Iraqi insurgents on a number of targets – notably Abu Ghraibh prison and the Palestine Hotel. Worrying…
Read More NOIA is BackThe Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor has a very interesting indeed report on Sierra Leone, diamonds, the curious connections with political Islam of various more or less violent kinds, and our favourite subject – mystery jets! Regular readers may recall that this blog has gone into the bizarre case of why Iraqi Airways’s planes are registered…
Read More 9L.There hasn’t been any Viktor Bout content here for quite a while..but fortunately, I now have some more interesting data. Everyone now knows about the flights between Baghdad International Airport and Dubai – they are still going on, by the way, under the IATA codes for Irbis, British Gulf, and Phoenix – but what about…
Read More New Mystery Jet Developments