Summer Reading: Banquo’s Ghosts, by Richard Lowry and Keith Korman, Vanguard Press (2009), 352 pages.

You have to feel a little sorry for the two neocons who co-wrote Banquo’s Ghosts. The idea seems simple enough: a Tom Clancy-style thriller about a plot to kill an Iranian physicist before he can cook up a nuke for the mullahs. The problem is, where do you get your hero these days? Back in the day, when Clancy was keeping Reagan awake way past 9 pm with Hunt for Red October, it was easy to make US agents like Jack Ryan look good; after all, they were going up against the dregs of the poor old USSR. (more…)

It took me a while to figure out why everybody was nagging me to do a column on the Iranian elections. Everybody seemed to think it was all mysterious and world-shaking. Finally I realized, you’re all het up because every news service in the US and England has been selling these riots like a new Star Wars episode, and people are just trying to figure out what’s going on and what it all means.

Well, I can answer that in one note: nothing much is going on, just letting off steam; and what little is happening isn’t mysterious at all. Basically, this is simple steam release, something the Mullahs have to allow now and then when the kids, and there are a lot of young adults in Iran, need to remind everybody they’re tired of being bossed around. There’s a huge, huge difference between that kind of “revolution” and the kind that has a real foundation in tribal differences or religion or city/country, the real fault lines. What’s going on in Iran now is a lot like the big fizzle in Lebanon after Hariri’s assassination in 2005. So if y’all will permit me to digress, let me take you back to the Cedar Revolution that supposedly “gripped” Lebanon. All that really happened was that some of the few Christian/Sunni elite Lebanese kids who hadn’t emigrated yet got so pissed off at the Syrians for just blowing Hariri away in broad daylight that they came out and waved the Lebanese flag–the one with the Cedar tree on it. Well, you’d have thought the Berlin Wall had fallen all over again. The same Anglo news networks that are declaring an outbreak of democracy in Iran now were screaming into microphones all over Lebanon, just so touched by these rich Christian/”Phoenician” Lebanese kids announcing that no durn Hezbollah Iranian-puppet thugs were gonna repress their craving for freedom…and discos, and wearing about a quart of perfume, and all the other accessories that go with what they call a Western orientation in the Middle East. (more…)

Kandy Man with long name who fought the Brits.

Key fact: in Sri Lanka heroes were allowed to get fat, another reason to like the place.

You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just read something sicker than any Congo cannibal buffet. It’s an article by a posh little limey named Jeremey Brown condemning the Sri Lankan government for being too messy in putting down the LTTE, and demanding that we stop buying the cheap textiles the poor Sinhalese make their living churning out.

What’s sick about this is that the British establishment destroyed the Sinhalese people completely. Completely and purposely, sadistically. Stole their land, humiliated and massacred their government, made it Imperial policy to erase every shred of self-respect the Sinhalese had left.  You can talk about the Nazis all day long, but for my money nothing they did was as gross as what you find out when you actually look into the history of British-Sinhalese relations. If you can even call them “relations”; I guess a murder-rape is a relation, sort of.

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Velupillai Prabhakaran: LTTE’s Guerrilla Generalissimo

One thing you have to give the doomed Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka credit for: their supporters sitting in comfortable first-world cities have no shame when it comes to begging for help. Militarily the Sri Lankan Tamils are o-vuh, but when it comes to demanding favors from people who have every reason to hate their guts, these guys are world-class. For some hilarious examples of propaganda from a doomed army, check out the LTTE’s glossy but totally insane website, Tamilnet.

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There’s a new TV show called Warriors running on the History Channel that’s a current favorite of mine. I hesitate to mention it, because no doubt it’s pretty basic stuff. I hate to think what Gary Brecher would say about it—the merest ABCs of warfare!—but it can be riveting for those of us who never got a lot of schooling in war, for all sorts of reasons. These are some sample reasons:

1) You check the box marked “female.”

2) You, like Dick Cheney, had “other priorities.”

3) You bought the crazy notion that even thinking about violence is bad.

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(Editor’s Note: Since this article was published yesterday for subscribers, Mr. Brecher has published a big follow-up which we post below after this article.)

I’ve been saying for a long time that aircraft carriers are just history’s most expensive floating targets, and that they were doomed.

But now I can tell you exactly how they’re going to die. I’ve just read one of the most shocking stories in years. It comes from the US Naval Institute, not exactly an alarmist or anti-Navy source. And what it says is that the US carrier group is scrap metal. (more…)

The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia

By Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

Yea, the Lord has heard thine prayers, and He, in His infinite Sadism, has answered thee: back on sale, newly printed up, is the record of The eXile’s early beginnings. It’s The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove), first published in 2000. Click the cover to order it through amazon, or order buy it from your favorite overpriced neighborhood bookseller. (more…)

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 hotel bomb in Islamabad. I warned you it was going to be a sample of what real-time war-nerding is about, and this time, durn it, it turned to be about me getting frustrated with how many possible angles there were here. I started to feel like it’d be easier for me to make a short list of everybody who definitely didn’t have a reason to bomb the Islamabad Marriott instead of trying to decide which of the two zillion good reasons was responsible for the bombing.

In fact, why not? Here’s my short list of who didn’t bomb the Marriott and why:

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It’s been tons of funs watching the dust settle over South Ossetia, watching everybody go crazy and do their best to avoid the fact that Putin kicked our proxy ass. If you’ve ever wondered how countries deal with military defeat, wonder no more, because you’ve just lived through it, and if you watched any tv, you saw loser propaganda in action 24/7.

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Here’s some more cool combat vids for you desk casualties. This time it’s Georgian troops shooting the Hell out of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on the day they rolled in to retake the province after Bush and Cheney promised them the Russians wouldn’t dare do a thing. So it didn’t work out all that great, but on that first day, when it was Georgian upgraded T-72s vs. Ossetian civvies with AK-47s, our little allies had themselves a real barnburner of a time, and luckily, one of them took these vids to show his little Facebook friends. (more…)

There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty of the video clips that have already come out of this war. I’m in heaven right now.

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In honor of today’s coup in Mauritania, EXILED ONLINE is reprinting a War Nerd classic about a previous Mauritanian coup in 2005, one of scores of coups that this War Nerd-friendly nation has been churning out since independence. (more…)

One of the best things about war is that it’s a huge IQ booster. The only people who use their brains in peacetime are the suits: salesmen, real-estate agents. The rest of us just slog along for the paycheck, get home and get on the computer so we can have a virtual war. But once real war comes to town, every guy turns into MacGyver, thinking up ways to convert harmless civilian items like alarm clocks and remotes into killing devices.

The Shia militias in Iraq have just demonstrated this kind of killer ingenuity by finding a new way to say “thank you” to their American friends using nothing but a few unguided 107mm rockets, propane tanks, and a used truck. It’s like the kind of problem they give you in those online intelligence tests: how can you use a crummy unguided rocket, a lowly propane tank, and a junker of a truck to blast a heavily-defended US base in Baghdad?
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Here’s another great war graphic, courtesy of Yasha Levine at eXile. This one shows every coalition casualty as a red drop, so like Yasha wrote me, you see this blood rain falling on a map of Iraq as the days click by from the invasion in the spring of 2003 right through 2007. And it really is like rain: first the storm front comes through, up from the Gulf dripping through Basra and up the river valleys all the way to Mosul. But once the occupation settles in—you may remember that was when we were getting out our suntan lotion and expecting fine weather—the rain started falling hard. (more…)

The hills are alive with the sound of RPGs

After six years of ignoring Afghanistan, things have gotten bad enough to force American officials to pay attention. For the past two months, U.S. casualties in Afghanistan have been higher than in Iraq. And on July 13, Afghanistan definitely got everybody’s attention when nine U.S. troops were killed in what Wikipedia is now officially calling “The Battle of Wanat.” Three days after the battle (more…)