There’s been plenty of debunking aimed at the Weekly Standard‘s claim that more US troops in Iraq always means less violence, but I haven’t seen this point. Stuntz argues that 18,000 more troops were deployed between November, 2004 and February, 2005, and the butcher’s bill fell. Well, it would. November, 2004 was the peak of…
Read More GoalpostsChristmas is coming, so it must be time to start raking over old quarrels and scratching at old wounds. The Ministry has at Torygraph hack Con Coughlin, among other things because of this WMD furphy from December, 2003. I remember it well. The weapons were supposedly WMD-tastic warheads for RPGs, which is incredibly silly, and…
Read More Risible claimsIn this post, we analysed the options open to the Iraq Study Group. Supposedly, the original brief foresaw 8. Number 8 was one last push, and it seems that this is exactly what we’re going to get. Note that it is sourced to the President and “Pentagon officials”, rather than the Group itself. In that…
Read More Option 8Commenter Fr8ter says Kuwait has banned Kyrgyz-registered (EX-) aircraft from landing or overflying the country, which is significant becase all flights from the south to Iraq enter Iraqi airspace over Kuwait. But the Dubai and Sharjah airport sites continue to show several flights a day to Baghdad and elsewhere, operated by British Gulf International and…
Read More Bleg to Fr8terCan Iain Dale really be so ignorant of the world as to wonder why no-one votes Conservative in Rotherham? Please. A bit of humility would be becoming. Responsibility is too much to ask, I realise, but it’s because you shut down their steelworks.
Read More What planet is he on?Not at all sure what to make of this UN Expert Panel report on Somalia. Some things are clear enough, for example that Ethiopia is supporting the old not-government and Eritrea the Islamic Courts in order to piss off the Ethiopians. But what is all this James Bond stuff about Iranians trading arms for uranium?…
Read More The what and the whyDavid Axe is out with the Queen’s Royal Hussars group again, and he is still in the grip of raging Brit Romanticisation Disorder. Please, enough with the Lawrence of Arabia stuff. Or, well, get a room, or a secluded tent at least. More seriously, he’s impressed by the tactics and the determination to keep the…
Read More BRD outbreak rages!Not so long ago, the Indy’s Patrick Cockburn suggested that the Sunni insurgents – the New-Old Iraqi Army, as I call them – are pursuing a strategy of encirclement as a counter to the Shia majority in Baghdad, pressing hard around Baqubah and Muqdadiyah to the north and the Mahmoudiyah/Iskandariyah area to the south in…
Read More A Bosnian strategy“How would a Galileo-based road pricing scheme fit into the code of practice requirement of a direct relationship with the user?” Good fucking question. We’ve got David Smith, the deputy information commissioner, and among others Richard Clayton of the Cambridge Computer Lab’s security engineering group – that’s right, the guy from Light Blue Touchpaper –…
Read More Confoblogging: Trust, consent, and standardsGareth Crossman of Liberty: “The only way the National Identity Register can fight terrorism is if the amount of information on it is increased to make profiling possible.” Next up: Simon Watkin. Former head of David Blunkett’s private office at the Home Office, he now runs the HO’s Covert Investigations Policy team and the ACPO…
Read More Confoblogging: The NIR and the surveillance that goes with it