Ble Goude: Looks tough; good fall guy.
We’re in one of the lulls, war-wise, where the short bursts of action stop so the lawyers and whiners can sing their little songs. In Ivory Coast, the UN public-relations department is doing its best to make you believe that the losing side, Gbagbo and the coastal tribes, were the bad guys all along.
Posted: April 15th, 2011
A good empire needs torturers, but more than that it needs torturers who keep their mouths shut and tame professors who’ll never, ever mention what they find in the torture archives.
Posted: April 14th, 2011
All the gizmo freaks are drooling because the US Navy has supposedly demonstrated a fearsome new “ray gun,” the HEL, High Energy Laser, designed to burn planes, missiles or boats that get too close to surface ships. The trusting Dilberts over at Wired’s Danger Room just about came in their khakis at the news. (more…)
Posted: April 13th, 2011
The IMF: “Liberte, Egalite…Just Give Us the Frickin’ Money!”
It was a lively weekend. Down in Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo was ruining the script by holing up in his urban bunker in Abidjan, even though the IMF and their French errand boys had officially declared the upcountry Muslim Alassanne Ouattara the new President.
Posted: April 11th, 2011
I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to do the Sunday blog on war books. The only problem is, there are so many great ones it’s hard to decide which one to start with.
Posted: April 10th, 2011
Gen. Earl Van Dorn: Dixie girls thought he was handsome, more proof Dixie was insane.
If you ever need to remind yourself that military command isn’t as glamorous as people think, it doesn’t hurt to go over the short, ridiculous Civil-War career of Earl Van Dorn.
Posted: April 9th, 2011
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.
One thing you notice more and more the longer you hang around this sleazy world is the way mainstream types can’t admit to the obvious. They always have to act shocked. So it’s like, “Bond Mogul Convicted of Fraud”-oh, the…
When the fourth of July rolls around, you’re supposed to think of, I don’t know, the Constitution and backyard cookouts like in old Chevy ads—but for me, it’s really Gettysburg we’re celebrating. Greatest battle in American history.
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…
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…
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…
Cheech Marin moonlighting as the leader of the Tamil Tigers? I have to say “Thank you, God of War,” because we just saw a decisive victory in a war, for once. I never thought I’d live to see the day….
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…
