OK, so “Not All That” Foxy Liam Fox is in trouble. “He is an odd bloke,” said one fellow minister. “He has fingers in so many pies that you kind of think one of them will land him in trouble somewhere along the line.” Another Tory MP said Fox’s tendency to name-drop and brag about…
Read More Liam Fox: Not Fit For PurposeWell, it’s not as if we weren’t warned; the Iraqi government had been threatening to move against Fadhila in Umm Qasr, and there had been increasing tension between the Iraqi government and the Sadr movement going back to Christmas. Not so long ago, there were demonstrations in Sadr City against Sadr; they thought the movement…
Read More Send lawyers, guns, and moneyThe commander of Iraqi special forces (i.e. the Badr Corps, ex-36th ICDC Battalion, ex-1st Brigade ING…) in Basra is clear about the threat facing British employees in the city; far clearer than the Government. “All the interpreters have to leave Basra because these militia will never let them rest. They will kill everybody they know…
Read More We stand down, they stand upChatter builds around the suggestion that security control of Basra might be handed over in early 2007. We’ve had quite a lot of this stuff before, tales that significant reductions in force might occur in six months’ time (one Friedman) and more recently announcements that such-and-such a province has been “handed over”. What we haven’t…
Read More Just one more FriedmanIn 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 8David 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!The 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 2Maps are nice, aren’t they? So let’s have a look at a few maps of Iraq. This one shows Iraq’s administrative divisions, its roads and its rivers. Note especially that there are essentially two major roads between Baghdad and Basra. One runs along the Tigris valley parallel to the Iranian border. The other runs just…
Read More Talk to Iran. Now.So, 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 theoryDefenstech’s David Axe is going back to Iraq, this time to the British sector. Should be interesting.
Read More Axe in Basra