Jamie K, hence the Madchester title, takes issue with a Johann Hari column arguing in favour of National Service on the grounds that it will make politicians less likely to go to war. Two points: first, as a commenter points out, making the army less efficient as a way of preventing war is stupid. It’s…
Read More why not just bounce it and see just what goes wellOK, Slugger O’Toole quotes the complete lobby briefing by PM’s Spokesman Tom “Walter Mitty figure” Kelly. What struck me is not just that the Big Kahuna moving through the joint is a cop these days. That was obvious enough, ever since Angus McNeil and Norman Baker punched through the crust of elite consensus. No-one had…
Read More Sheena’s party, that’s a case in pointIs it my imagination, or did the New-Old Iraqi Army cut back its activity during December, only to crank the voltage back up since the “surge” announcement? Since then, we’ve seen the resumption of mass-casualty bombings, the seriously weird assassination of a complete US Army Civil Affairs team in Najaf by men posing as either…
Read More Ours go up to 11It didn’t take me long to find out how to make one of those IEDs that supposedly have to come from Iran. After all, there’s always Wikipedia. Wiki has a neat short introduction here, with an even better photo of one. The idea is simplicity itself. Using the Misznay-Schardin effect, which states that as an…
Read More So how do you build an EFP anyway?Does “Paleoprog” contribute anything to the otherwise indispensable American Footprints at all? Consider this thread, where he is defending the Iranian-IED stories on the grounds that i base it on what the president, rice, gates and others are now saying. If I had decided to disbelieve any statement from any of these people out of…
Read More I talk, and talk, say nothingNeocon maniac Amir Taheri writes that A newspaper that had opposed the war would not tolerate “positive reporting” from Baghdad. One young British reporter who didn’t understand that was surprised to see himself shifted to Paris to become a European correspondent. He had made the mistake of reporting that Iraq looked almost like a success,…
Read More Amir TaheriA sinister tale from Iraq. But does anyone else find the scariest bit that the mystery voice who threatened her identified itself as the “Kata’eb al-Jihad”? Yes, that’s Kata’eb as in the Lebanese Phalange’s Arabic name. Not that the originals would have had any truck with jihad, but it strikes me that it’s a great…
Read More We are the goonsquad and we’re coming to townTony Blair doesn’t deserve to be allowed aboard one of HM Ships, let alone use one of them to speechify. Some of the press amused themselves by labelling photographs of Devonport Dockyard with the ships awaiting disposal. This wasn’t, perhaps, fair – the two biggest are Fearless and Intrepid, the two assault ships (LPDs) built…
Read More Blair: just an embarrassmentMy hunt for a readable Sunday paper goes on. The Fisk, Cockburn and Watkins Journal is OK, but they insist on including a lot of other stuff that’s nowhere near as good. The Obscurer would be good if it could finally puke and call off the pony hunt for a secular Blairite democracy in Iraq,…
Read More The orange ape that walks like a manThe US Uniform Code of Military Justice now applies to civilian employees, and a damn good thing too. Various people at BoingBoing wonder whether journalists might also be affected. Curiously, P.W. Singer is quoted as saying that “the Iraq war was the first where journalists could formally embed”. Really? I’m sure, completely so, that those…
Read More Contractors, and Journalists?