Archives for August 2009

There is an old saying in military affairs, that everyone wants to do strategy and tactics, but real men do logistics. That is, moving persons and materiel around and managing supplies seems tedious, but they are crucial to success. The Obama administration has substituted the Logistics of War for the War on Terror. It is […]

Things to worry about on a lazy August Sunday: Abdullah Abdullah, the leading rival to incumbent Hamid Karzai in the Afghanistan presidential elections, told a gathering of hundreds of his campaign workers from the southern provinces that he would not accept an outright victory by Karzai as legitimate. With 35% of the votes counted, Karzai […]

The BBC is reporting that Obama’s special envoy to AfPak, Richard Holbrooke, has had a shouting match with President Hamid Karzai over the desirability of a second round in the presidential election. At the moment, with 17% of ballots counted, Karzai is ahead of his nearest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, by 45% to 35%. That tally […]

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday that he did not believe the leaders of Iran’s protesters against the official presidential election results were instigated by the West. He added, however, that the protesters had planned out their campaign even before the elections were held. (Since they could not have even known whether their candidate […]

The big news in Iraq was the death from cancer in Tehran of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the clerical leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. He had been born in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf in 1950, into the household of Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, who served as the spiritual leader of Iraqi […]

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has put forward a plan for a Palestinian state to be attained within 2 years. This is the first time such a blueprint with a timeline has been offered and it is a very big deal. The reason it can be taken more seriously than most talking points generated […]

A massive truck bomb was set off near a Japanese construction company in the southwestern city of Qandahar in Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing about 41 and wounding some 65 persons. All the wounded were innocent civilians. It was set off at 7 pm as Afghans were breaking their Ramadan fast, about two hours after the […]

Senator Ted Kennedy’s death Tuesday night has deprived the nation of one of the most insightful and committed progressive politicians the country had. Kennedy all along had opposed Bush’s Iraq War, and saw clearly before most of the country the various scams used to get it up. It is worth remembering that the narrative most […]

The thing that concerns me most about the investigation of Central Intelligence Agency interrogators is that US law served as such a poor guide to them for what was permitted. Although administrations do break laws, I think if Congress had had the courage and the energy to actually enact clear statutes on torture, the CIA […]