Strange doings in Ivory Coast. Well, no, actually; what’s going on in Ivory Coast is perfectly standard West African procedure. The strange goings-on are in the way the UN has been handling things and the press has been reporting them.
Posted on: April 5th, 2011 | Comments (48)
One of the more interesting questions out of Libya is the tangled problem of who’s who, and who’s on who’s side. I’m starting to get some idea of who’s against Qaddafi—basically the young men, the East, and the tribes loyal to the king he booted out to take power.
Posted on: April 4th, 2011 | Comments (43)
Thaddeus Stevens: Weird-looking, huh? That’s because he was a real American. Extinct now. Looks like they’re starting to find the mass graves in Ivory Coast right on schedule, but I’m going to leave the hard war news for the five…
Posted on: April 3rd, 2011 | Comments (106)
Grant: Never Got Over Junior High Friday nights I read Civil War books. I noticed a European said in the comments last week how sick he is of the US Civil War. Well, my hemispherically-challenged bud, you’re not going…
Posted on: April 2nd, 2011 | Comments (40)
Today the action moves south, off the Libyan beaches and into the rain forest of the Ivory Coast, where rebel forces have just taken the big city, Abidjan.
Posted on: April 1st, 2011 | Comments (42)
Libya is such a pitiful mess that it should keep the scriptwriters going for years. For the dummies, you’ve got a good and evil story, with Qaddafi as the bad guy.
Posted on: March 31st, 2011 | Comments (62)
The funniest story to come out of the Libya video game yet is the news that Qaddafi’s son, Khamis has outraged the LA engineering firm called AECOM that hired him by going home and shooting down heroic rebels.
Posted on: March 30th, 2011 | Comments (41)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
Yo ho ho ho time in Somalia! What’s the bestest present kids dream of in faraway Puntland, where piracy is more than a Disney marketing gimmick? A supertanker, that’s what. A Saudi supertanker is the ultimate in stuffed stockings: 100…
Today I’ll finally keep my promise and tell you about my favorite book on the Horn of Africa. Remember a couple columns back, I promised to tell you about a great book on the Ethiopian/Somali wars? Of course I promised…
What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw…
Laurent Nkunda: War Nerd Hero If you ever want to find a real hero, here’s one way to recognize him: the TV news will be making him into a monster 24/7. Today’s monster hero is the Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda,…
Can I time these articles or what? The day after I put up my article on Ethiopia’s troubles in Somalia, 5 car bombs go off in two Somali cities targeting the Ethiopian consulate in Hargeisa, the Presidential Palace (such as…
A couple of years ago I mentioned that Ethiopian troops were occupying Mogadishu and said it was the perfect experimental setup for us. Now we could find out if anybody could pacify that place. Well, the answer’s in, because the…
Zia ul-Haq: the Pakistani Dracula with the dead raccoon eyes. Well, time to ease out of my chair and get back to work, because people have been yelling at me to finish off that “Islamablog” series I started about the…
