The Bath University RepRap project (to build a rapid-prototyping tool that can make copies of itself) is coming on with all due speed, and I especially like their latest test part, a natty Linux penguin. Which is fitting for a project that’s all open-source. Back when they got started, Phil Hunt of Cabalamat Journal posed…
Read More The Hunt questionDavid 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 strategyWidely reported that, due to the verdict on Saddam, most of Iraq is under an indefinite curfew and the airport is closed. Except for British Gulf International and Click, though. Two flights from Baghdad arrived in Sharjah today. 05-Nov 12:30 Baghdad International Airport British Gulf International Airlines BGK 1234 05-Nov 15:30 Baghdad International Airport Click…
Read More So much for the Iraqi curfewLe Monde reviews a new French book on the arms trade and our friend Viktor. Trafics d’armes : enquête sur les marchands de mort by Laurent Léger. The publisher is Flammarion. Another review here suggests that the author succeeded in interviewing Michel Victor-Thomas, the French aviation identity who co-founded TAN Aviation Network NV in Ostend…
Read More Book alert!Nibras Kazimi reports on the sniper propaganda some Iraqi insurgent groups have been putting out recently. The “Islamic Army of Iraq” (i.e. a chapter of NOIA) claims a large number of dead US soldiers, shows its sniper team preparing for action, using a US Marine Corps manual (nice touch), and then shooting various people. Interestingly,…
Read More Sniper at workThe chatter is building up that a serious change in policy in Iraq is afoot. Supposedly, there is talk of an ultimatum to the Iraqi government to do various defined things or face undefined sanctions (this is an old John Paul Vann idea from South Vietnam), but there are also reasons to imagine that the…
Read More Talking to Iran, part 2Iraqi parliament votes to revoke an MP’s immunity. Details: Earlier this year he was caught at Baghdad airport carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in a suitcase, reinforcing the belief of many that he was engaged in illicit profiteering. During the debate on lifting his parliamentary immunity, the head of the integrity commission said that…
Read More A quick Iraq round-upSo, the redeployment of the Queen’s Own Hussars battle group from Abu Naji to the border. How’s that going? Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post goes to the non-front and finds out. A few hundred British troops living out of nothing more than their cut-down Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the…
Read More Test the theoryThis is the kind of good news that only illuminates how terrible your problems are. Yeah, it’s cracking that the Iraqi spooks (supposedly) got to hear about a plot for the Final Shootout, but it’s pretty bad news that the speaker of parliament’s bodyguards were behind it. Worse, it looks like a hell of a…
Read More Near-miss