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 to post my book report “tomorrow,” and it’s weeks later. Hey, “tomorrow” is a flexible concept, like “manana.”

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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 Eisenhower, a real general, playing out his martial fantasies this way. You can take the drink out of the drunk, but you can’t take the swagger out of a fool. (more…)

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, the leader of the “rebel” forces that are supposedly “closing in” on Goma in Eastern Congo.

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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 it is), a UN HQ, and the Puntland Intelligence Service.

That’s the first time I even knew there was a Puntland Intel Service, by the way. Puntland is the horniest part of Somalia, the coastline up there where it pokes up into the Indian Ocean and then heads west toward Djibouti. Puntland has been in the news a lot because it’s the home beach of the world’s coolest pirates. Maybe the Intel Service was getting in the way of the local business. I would’ve thought their main job was identifying promising ships, casing the joint as it were, and passing on the info to the local Long John Silvers for a cut. Well, if there were any Puntland crimefighters, they’re shredded meat now. That’ll teach those do-gooders to mess with the Horn. (more…)

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 Ethiopian army just announced that it’s quitting Somalia as soon as it can sign a phony agreement with the nearest Somali faction. They’ve had it.

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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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This is my third entry on the big blast at the Islamabad Marriott. God, the name says it all: “Islamabad Marriott.” Talk about two words that don’t fit together very well. The town just wasn’t big enough for “Islamabad” and “Marriott,” especially when you see pictures of Marriott’s big sign, in fancy Disney letters. You can have an Islamabad or you can have a Marriott, but you can’t have both—not for long.

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