Category: News

In the category…. In the category of articles you should not miss: Take a look at Wes Clark's new piece in The Washington Monthly on democracy, the Middle East and the how the Bush administration failed to understand how either works…. [Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall]

New Post: Global Guerrillas. Design Flaws:  Methods of attacking critical infrastructure.  A good way to unearth the vulnerabilities of a complex system/network is to list the planning assumptions made by the designers.  As with all posts to Global Guerrillas, this isn't final work product but rather rough drafts of ideas that I find interesting. [John… Continue reading New Post: Global Guerrillas

WP.  “There's no question: A small band of people can paralyze the country,” said Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of the (Iraqi) council. [John Robb's Weblog]

This UPI article is so true.  It's over Rummy.    Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3½ years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by… Continue reading UPI article

LOL.  Like Hersh, I wrote a “Gray Zone” post too, back in January. The US military is still talking about Baathist holdouts as the problem in Iraq.  I see something different:  a civil war in the making.  Lots of old scores to settle.  Lots of money (read Oil) and power at stake.  Years of repression… Continue reading LOL.  Like Hersh, I wrote a “Gray Zone” post too, back in January.

The US military is still talking about Baathist holdouts as the problem in Iraq.  I see something different:  a civil war in the making.  Lots of old scores to settle.  Lots of money (read Oil) and power at stake.  Years of repression to redress.

There are so many fault lines in Iraq that it will be impossible for the US to differentiate between friends from enemies.  This is a gray zone.  It is something that the US military (and our leadership) has historically had severe problems with.  In the gray-zone of Iraq, good and evil are terms that get you into trouble.

[John Robb's Weblog

After listening to John McCain on NPR's The Connection this morning, and then listening to a repeat this evening, the obvious thing for the Republicans is to privately ask Bush not to run for re-election and quickly get a McCain candidacy together. This is the best remedy for the United States, if not for the… Continue reading Untitled

Hard versus Soft America.  Michael Barone in today's LA Times (R): It has long been my observation that American 18-year-olds are more incompetent than 18-year-olds in other advanced countries, but that American 30-year-olds are the most competent 30-year-olds in the world. …Why should this be so? I think it's because from ages 6 to 18… Continue reading Hard versus Soft America

Getting Naked for Big Brother. People are willing to strip for Uncle Sam and accept surveillance technologies to protect them from terrorists, though the privacy invasions won't make them any safer. Kim Zetter interviews the author of The Naked Crowd. [Wired News]

Seymour Hersh drops a bomb on Rumsfeld.  A must read.  The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt… Continue reading Seymour Hersh

William Lind opines on US domestic politics ( Lind is one of the best, albeit grumpy due to years of institutional neglect, minds thinking about next generation warfare.  My bet is that Zawahiri reads Lind and Boyd as closely as Guderian read Hart and Fuller). But what of the world beyond Iraq? That is where one sees the… Continue reading William Lind