Iranian Unit to Be Labeled 'Terrorist' - washingtonpost.com

Iranian Unit to Be Labeled 'Terrorist' - washingtonpost.com

As much as I support and encourage confronting Iran I think designating the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization is a poor idea. The Revolutionary Guard is an agent of the state of Iran. Ipso facto whatever acts it takes to attack the armed forces and civilians of other countries are acts of war and should be regarded as such. This sort of tactic just plays the Iranian game of obscuring and avoiding responsibility.

List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations

List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations

Now here's a fascinating and useful tool for the discerning worldwatcher. A CalTech grad student has created a tool which searches Wikipedia edits and correlates them with known IP addresses. Basically this means it's a lot easier to detect anonymous axe-griniding and ego-editing.

For instance running a scan on the IP addresses of the BBC reveals a change in the entry on George Walker Bush to George Wanker Bush

Rather a few changes to entries on 'Criticism of the BBC' including a significant excision of a quote from
an official report on the BBC's impartiality which rendered the entry meaningless.

A change of Palestinian 'terrorists' to 'freedom figters' in an entry on the Caterpillar D9 Bulldozer.

And a
gossipy addition to the entry on Natasha Kaplinsky 'She dumped some geezer from Meridian TV.'

I predict many, many hours of fun to be had. I don't doubt that the reason I can't run a report on the wikipedia edits of 10 Downing St right now is because the site is overloaded with every political hack in the country digging for dirt.

Islam's poison cells | The Australian

Islam's poison cells | The Australian

It's hard to overstate the importance in a War of Ideas of authors like the one linked to above, former Islamists who can speak symptathetically to their co-religionists in language they can understand. Far more should be done to support such moderate Muslims as opposed to the faux-moderate Islamist mouthpieces of the MCB.

Baghdad Babylon: Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

There's a very good article on Iraq in the latest Der Spiegel.

Baghdad Babylon: Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

The upshot of it is that things in Iraq while far from rosy are less bad than they are generally thought to be:

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear...

The Americans may or may not have turned things around. If this report is right there is hope that they might have. And if that is the case then it is worth struggling on. It reminds me of Napoleon's saying '...never despair while there remain brave men around the colors.' It sounds corny I know, but there it is. To much of contemporary society words such as 'honor and glory of arms' sound anachronistic or even oxymoronic. We're much more likely to recall Sherman's 'I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine.' But the fact is they matter as much today as ever. The likely consequences of our withdrawal in defeat from Iraq for Iraqis are bad enough, but it would be a huge setback in the wider conflict which would have knock-on effects most immediately in Afghanistan. Which looks worse than Iraq to judge from the words of Canadian Major General Lewis Mackenzie 'NATO Countries are Shirking' and British casualty figures reported in The Times Britain’s frontline soldiers have 1 in 36 chance of dying on Afghan battlefield.

Max Boot interview about Iraq, Afghanistan and the Surge

I rather agree with Max Boot here on the connection between Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on the struggle with Iran. In a nutshell, defeat in Iraq is likely to hasten the same in Afghanistan and Iran effectively has been at war with the United States since 1979.

Kiwi SAS man is awarded VC

Corporal Apiata, the first New Zealander to be awarded the Victoria Cross since the Second World War, has said he was only doing his job.

He is to receive the elite award after carrying an injured colleague through enemy fire in Afghanistan.

A clearly overwhelmed Corporal Apiata said he was still trying to deal with the enormity of having received such a prestigious honour.

"I was only doing my job and looking after my mates," Corporal Apiata told a media conference in Wellington this afternoon.

"It means a lot to me, to my family and the unit itself."

Corporal Apiata said he often sees the man whose life he saved.

"Whenever I see him we catch up and have a beer. We're good mates," Corporal Apiata said.

When asked if he saw himself as a role model, he said: "I see myself as Willy Apiata. I'm just an ordinary person."

Prime Minister Helen Clark said today: "Corporal Apiata carried a severely wounded fellow soldier across open ground while coming under intense attack. He did this despite the extreme danger to himself."

Well done. The distance Corporal Apiata carried his bleeding mate to safety was 70 yards which is about the length of the hallway my office opens onto. I'm sure it looks A LOT further when you've got bullets whipping around you and a dying man on your back. I really admire the understatement of the man. It reminds me of a story about John F. Kennedy who once when asked how he became a war hero answered 'It was involuntary. They sank my boat.'

Cyberterrorism for the masses

The sophisticated use of information technology, in particular the appreciation of the importance of the virtual battlefield is a hallmark of the global Islamist insurgency. This article, 'Electronic Jihad Offers Cyber-Terrorism for the Masses', at Information Week describes the creation of easy, user-friendly tools for internet hacktivists.

The latest version of Electronic Jihad software, 2.0, is designed to quickly update its list of target sites and to work with different Internet connection speeds. The application is also described as being capable of using different proxies to override government Web site blocking technology, Abdul Hameed Bakier, an intelligence expert on counterterrorism, crisis management, and terrorist-hostage negotiations, wrote in a recent report for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank established on Sept. 11, 2003, to study and analyze global terrorism. “In the past, different jihadi groups practiced cyberattacks on anti-Islamic websites, but they were never able to sustain a long, organized campaign,” Bakier wrote in the June 26 edition of Jamestown’s weekly Terrorism Focus publication. He noted that Al-jinan is not only operating continuously but is developing new techniques to enhance the technology and methods of promoting electronic jihad. “With the spreading use of the Internet in the Arab and Islamic world, the number of users engaged in some form of electronic jihad is likely to increase substantially,” he added.

In addition to supplying the online weapons for cyberattack, the Al-jinan site also serves as a forum for learning attack techniques as well as other information that can be used in electronic jihad efforts. One emphasis is on the need for jihadis to organize synchronized mass cyberattacks on Web sites that they believe are critical of Islam. Electronic Jihad users set up an account name and password, which lets the site register the number of hours the user spends attacking targets and post the names of those who scored the highest. One attacker spent the equivalent of 70 days attacking sites.

The 'Long War' is above all a battle of ideas. That being the case it is foolish to dismiss these attempts to win that battle of ideas through intimidation and disruption.

Why graduate studies are important for officers

Forwarded to me by a friend is this recent article in the National Interest 'Beyond the Cloister' by Gen David Petraeus in which he makes the case for why officers ought to take part in civilian graduate studies. In a nutshell, because it:

1. Takes military officers out of their intellectual comfort zones;

2. Provides exposure to diverse and divergent views;

3. Provides specific skills and knowledge on which an officer may draw during his or her career;

4. Assists officers to develop and refine their communications skills;

5. Contributes to critical thinking skills; and,

6. Imparts a degree of intellectual humility.

Music to my ears of course, since I make my living running a masters programme the purpose of which is to provide just such things to people, such as but not exclusively, military officers whose occupational responsibilities tend to preclude taking a year out to live in central London as a residential student. Says Petraeus:

The most powerful tool any soldier carries is not his weapon but his mind. These days, and for the days ahead as far as we can see, what soldiers at all ranks know is liable to be at least as important to their success as what they can physically do. Some key questions before the U.S. military in changing times therefore must be: How do we define the best military education for the U.S. armed forces, and what are the best ways to impart that education? What should be the ideal relationship between soldiering and the schoolhouse?

Excellent question. Indeed I'm writing a paper for a Marine Corps conference on Pedagogy for the Long War just now on this question which perhaps no doubt I'll share with readers of this blog (all two of you). But, as my wry and always on target friend points out, an equally interesting question is whether and to what extent the relationship is two way. If it's such a great idea for warfighters to have experience of academia is it equally useful for academics to have experience of warfighting? I wonder if Petraeus has this somewhere in the back of his mind unconsciously; otherwise why title it 'Beyond the Cloisters' instead of 'Beyond the Barracks' which actually would have made sense?

That said, I reckon that if I walked into a British Army recruiting station as a 38 year old ex-Canadian Forces reservist I'd be quietly directed to the exit for geriatrics and lunatics and rightly so. Still I can't help thinking that if Petraeus really is right in the basic premise expressed in his first sentence that the most powerful weapon is the mind then the future ought to see the targeting for recruitment of the mature if not elderly. The main problem with maturity and wisdom is its strong correlation with physical decrepitude (or in my case more precisely expanding waistline); hence fresh-faced 18 year olds are still on the whole rather better soldierly material than deep-thinking 38 year olds, or 78 year olds for that matter. Yet the march of technological progress will change this; in fact we are already seeing a sort of such a convergence as recruitment ages rise and phsyical requirements diminish. The idea is explored a fair bit in science fiction novels such as Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and (my personal favourite) A Boy and his Tank by Leo Frankowski, both of which deal with protagonists enticed to join the military and to fight by the chance of a second healthy life, if only they can survive the term of service. But it's not so far as I am aware something which the military is thinking about which is odd when you think about it. If you're accustomed already to thinking about the technology of weapons systems and platforms such as aircraft carriers which you expect to last for 50 years or so, why assume (if we really are on the cusp of a Bio-tech revolution) that the current physical parameters will be constant and not variable?

Come back Blair

I just have one question. Why did you not say this when you were still Prime Minister?

In his most outspoken remarks on Islamists, the former Prime Minister warns that Britain is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream society confronts the threat.

Blair's remarks, in which he also attacks some civil liberty campaigners as 'loopy loo', were made in a Channel 4 documentary recorded last Tuesday on the eve of his departure from Downing Street.

'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.

'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'

Understanding Current Operations in Iraq

David Kilcullen reports from the field on current operations in Iraq in Small Wars Journal.

Also in the same journal a piece by Frank Hoffman on Neo-Coin which is a must read. Hoffman zeroes in on what I think is the key issue in Neo-Coin: the competition for perceptions. (He also quotes me on FM 3-24 which is nice).

As it happens we had a workshop here in the Department of War Studies organized by my colleague Dr John Mackinlay and myself which looked at the new British COIN doctrine which is being drafted. My job was to look at the 'Virtual Battlefield: Redefining Propaganda of the Deed in 2007'. Here's how I started my talk:

Implicit in the title of my talk is the idea that the contemporary operations environment with which the counterinsurgent commander is concerned has two dimensions: the literal, physical field of battle in which bullets fly, bombs explode and blood is shed, sometimes yours, sometimes theirs but most times and in greatest volume by those stuck in the middle; and the virtual, informational realm in which belligerents contend with words and images to manufacture narratives which are more compelling than those of the other side and better at structuring the responses of others to the development of events.

To begin, therefore, I wish to quote approvingly the words of General Rupert Smith in his perceptive work, The Utility of Force:

We now come to the manner in which we fight and operate amongst the people in a wider sense: through the media… Whoever coined the phrase ‘the theatre of operations’ was very prescient. We are conducting operations now as though we are on stage, in an amphitheatre or Roman arena. There are two or more sets of players—both with a producer, the commander, each of whom has his own idea of the script. On the ground, in the actual theatre, they are all on the stage and mixed up with people trying to get to their seats, the stage hands, the ticket collectors and the ice-cream vendors. At the same time they are being viewed by a partially and factional audience, comfortably seated, its attention focused on that part of the auditorium where it is noisiest, watching the events by peering down the drinking straws of their soft-drink packs—for that is the extent of the vision of a camera.

Then I shall make three assertions which I shall endeavour to defend as I go on and in the discussion which follows. The first assertion is that the virtual now dominates the real. ‘Successful’ operations on the ground make no difference if they are not translated into advancements of one’s strategic narrative in the informational realm. This, it seems to me was well illustrated in a recent Los Angeles Times article which described the tour of General Mattis through Marine outposts in Al Anbar province. Mattis was asked by a sergeant ‘How are we supposed to fight a war when people back home say we've already lost?’ Mattis gave the best answer he could under the circumstances to his soldier: believe your own eyes, ignore the press. But at the end of the day this will not cut it. At the end of the coming months when the success or failure of the operation known as 'The Surge' is judged, the morale state of the Marines in Anbar will not count for much if the people at home have been convinced the thing is a lost cause.

I am sure if we put our minds together we could come up with a very long list of recent examples in which perception of events trumps the reality; arguably this has always been the case in military history—if it were I would not be surprised; but the immediacy of the virtual battlefield, its proximity to the centre of gravity in COIN (that being the frontal lobes of the people both in the ‘theatre’, as Rupert Smith describes, and at home as I would argue), and the low level of Western public commitment to these conflicts makes for a large qualitative difference between COIN now in the Information Age and COIN before it.

This leads to the second assertion I would like to make which is that contemporary COIN is an Information Operation with a military annex (among a multitude of other annexes some of which may supersede it).

The third assertion I would like to make is that we are failing at COIN now because we fail to recognize the truth of the above. We act as though Information Operations are the annex whereas the other side treats it with resolute consistency as the main event to which everything else is subordinate with the effect that with relatively few exceptions we concede the virtual battle.

Britain and Iran

The defence minister issued a report a couple of days ago about the capture of UK Marines and sailors a while back. It says, in a nutshell: mistakes were made, but not by anybody particularly. That's it then; nothing to see here move on. Well, no. It's not like this was the first time. Iran captured 6 UK sailors and Marines and forced them to confess to incursion into its territory in June 2004. Now the BBC reports Iran had also earlier tried unsuccessfully to capture an Royal Australian Navy boarding party:

The Australians, though, to quote one military source, "were having none of it". The BBC has been told the Australians re-boarded the vessel they had just searched, aimed their machine guns at the approaching Iranians and warned them to back off, using what was said to be "highly colourful language".

The defence minister clearly wants to be done with the political embarrassment of all this but something is rotten here and needs to be fixed. Why does the Naby keep making thsi same mistake? I agree more and more with Norman Podhoretz on this.

Update: I missed somehow this interview in the Times with General Petraeus which is really worth reading. Here's the interesting part as far as this discussion goes:

Who was behind the kidnapping of five Britons in Baghdad last month and what is being done to free them?

"We think that it is the same network that killed our soldiers in Kerbala in an operation back in January. We killed the head of that network less than a week before the operation that detained those British civilians. It was already planned and carried out by his followers. It is a secret cell of Jaish al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army) not all of which are under control of Moqtadr al-Sadr. That is the assessment at this point."

“They are not rank and file Jaish al-Mahdi. They are trained in Iran, equipped with Iranian (weapons), and advised by Iran. The Iranian involvement here we have found to be much, much more significant that we thought before. They have since about the summer of 2004 played a very, very important role in training in Iran, funding, arming."

"This is lethal stuff, like EFPs (explosively-formed penetrators), mortars, and rockets that are used against Basra Palace (the main British base in Basra). There is also a degree of direction, not in a strategic way but in tactical operations. We captured a wealth of documentation which showed how they account for what they have done, we assume so they can get paid for it, and get additional funding."

The evidence that Iran is backing with arms, training and funds attacks against US and British is frankly overwhelming.

What ever happened to common sense?

Politicians reacted in disbelief to the revelation that for over two hours yesterday, the BBC News website carried a request for people in Iraq to report on troop movements.The request was removed from the website after it sparked furious protests that the corporation was endangering the lives of British servicemen and women. But according to accounts last night, a story on a major operation by US and Iraqi troops against al-Qa'eda somewhere north of Baghdad contained an extraordinary request for information about the movement of troops. Last night the BBC confirmed the wording of the request was: "Are you in Iraq? Have you seen any troop movements? If you have any information you would like to share with the BBC, you can do so using the form below."

I'd put this down to rank stupidity rather than malicious intent but really are there no editors at the BBC with even a fraction of a clue? Is it so hard to see that this sort of information could get troops, British troops, hurt or killed?

Update: John Kelly is my kind of guy! Read

How to move a book on Amazon

I feel utterly compelled to get myself a copy of The Satanic Verses which I see is now number 11 in the Amazon UK rankings of sales 20 years after it was first published, even though I can't for the life of me imagine myself actually reading it. Why? Crap like this, this and this and this.

My Grand Narrative can Beat your Grand Narrative

My good friend Chris Ankersen has the annoying habit of being smarter and better written than me. (Thankfully I am better looking). Here's his take on the Michael Vlahos piece Fall of Modernity which I linked to earlier:

I came lately across a very interesting article which has been making the rounds, partly because it has been referred to by David Kilcullen, the current 'Brad Pitt' of the counterinsurgency world. Its title, 'The Fall of Modernity,' perhaps occludes the strength of its message. It paints a convincing picture that the age of American/Western supremacy is coming to the beginning of its end (compare, according to the article, today with Rome in the 3rd Century AD/CE: Empire is not over, but getting there). This message, and many others associated with an Imperial theme, are not new. Micheal Vlahos, of a Johns Hopkins-based think-tank, does a particularly good job in this rendition, however, and the article is worth reading for the sophisticated-yet-clearly

-explained concepts he introduces: Fall of Modernity.

What is most interesting, though, is that Vlahos implicates the American project in the downfall of the American project. This is not typical conservative thinking; indeed it resonates more with Marxian theory. You know the story: capitalism is capitalism's own worst enemy, and its own contradictions will eventually bring about its dissolution (contradictions such as its production of poor people at the same time that it makes others obscenely wealthy). The result is a rather all-consuming sense that 'it doesn't really matter what we do, because we are locked in our own death spiral'. In his words:

"We declare that “resistance is futile,” yet the opposite is true. The bigger we make the enemy, the bigger they become. Ours is the complicity of backhand legitimization. Whether we admit this or shout the reverse, effectively our war narrative works to set up superpower defeat—even if at first it seems only a drama of defeat played out in the media—because with one stroke, our narrative itself will have become a lie. This is doubly destructive. Not only do we fail myth—what are we? the D-list to the Greatest Generation—but myth is no longer there for us. World War II cannot save us because according to the strictures of our own myth, we are no longer worthy of being saved."

Of course, such 'defeatist' talk is rife amongst the chattering classes, the media, and the academy. But, if we look at one of the sources cited in Vlahos's footnotes, it is not difficult to see from whence Vlahos derives his pessimism. He includes a link to a PowerPoint presentation made by member of the US Joint Staff, which explains the US strategy in the war against terror. It is worth a look, but will not inspire confidence. Seen after reading Vlahos's piece, it will almost seem a caricature, and a bad one at that.

If (and of course we must cling to idea, as Dickens's Scrooge did, that the future is conditional, not predetermined), Vlahos is correct, there are a number of implications. Not the least among them is that perfecting the tactics of the war on terror is akin to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (a metaphor which is acceptable, perhaps, due to the passage of 90 years since the catastrophe. A parallel metaphor, say 'remembering to turn the lights off in the World Trade Centre', jangles our sensitivities). It certainly makes the work of those such as Kilcullen and Petreas far more difficult and maybe just a little beside the point.

If the big picture is as badly and as baldly out of whack as Vlahos claims, we need more than fine tuning. But is it possible to generate a new Grand Narrative, one sufficiently big enough to counter the growing one of Alterity, supposedly the source of strength for our current enemies? One pure enough not to be brought to its knees through its own corrosion? One catchy enough to enlighten the masses 'at home and abroad'? Is such a trick possible 'on the fly' and if so, how long does it take and how do we do it? Vlahos, of course, points out that the need to 'beat' the other side with a bigger, better argument is part of the problem. His conclusion seems to point to a very postmodern position: not domination, but co-existance; plurality and indeterminacy, not monopoly and certainty. Not a single, or even an opposing pair of Grand Narratives, but rather many less sure, more fungible claims.

As usual, the question returns to the eternal 'Quid tunc?'

Gaza meltdown

Here's a good article by Martin Indyk in the Washington Post on the takeover of Gaza by Hamas
which goes beyond the obvious: A Two-State Solution Palestinian Style.

Whither Atlanticism?

It is interesting to read back to back these two articles Why we must break with the American crazies by Anatole Kaletsky in The Times and Come together, right now by Margarita Mathiopoulos in the International Herald Tribune. Well, I question Kaletsky's judgment here. Iran's President waxes lyrical about wiping Israel off the map, claims a green aura surrounded him and entranced his audience when he spoke at the UN, and eagerly awaits the arrival of the 13th 'Hidden' Imam, and it's Americans he calls crazy? Riiight.

To be fair he seems to be referring to specific American neo-cons as crazy not Americans in general in which vein he notes the recent piece by Norman Podhoretz The Case for Bombing Iran as being especially nutty. I've held the view for a long time that we should use a range of measures covert and overt (including bombing) against Iran which is not to say I agree entirely with Podhoretz's argument. I think the characterization of the Cold War as WWIII and therefore the current 'Long War' as WWIV is misleading and unhelpful (see Timothy Garton Ash's A long war? No, a long struggle). His claim that Iran puts religious objectives before national interest is not supported by the actual evidence of its relations with neighbouring states (for example its quiet backing of Christian Armenia in its war with Shi'a Muslim Azerbaijan; see the work of Ali Ansari including this Guardian piece Only the US Hawks can save the Iranian president now), and I'm almost certain that this story about the UK government's handling of the recent kidnapping of its sailors by Iran is an urban legend:

But then, as if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough, the British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The European Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request to threaten Iran with a freeze of imports. As for the UN, under whose very auspices they were patrolling the international waters in which the sailors were kidnapped, it once again showed its true colors by refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The most the Security Council could bring itself to do was to express “grave concern.” Meanwhile, a member of the British cabinet was going the Security Council one better. While registering no objection to propaganda pictures of the one woman hostage, who had been forced to shed her uniform and dress for the cameras in Muslim clothing, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt pronounced it “deplorable” that she should have permitted herself to be photographed with a cigarette in her mouth. “This,” said Hewitt, “sends completely the wrong message to our young people.”

She didn't actually say that. Did she? We aren't that badly governed are we? Still, Podhoretz's argument is not crazy and Kaletsky's characterization of it as such is sloppy and lazy. What does he propose to do differently with Iran? More of the same (which is to say nothing)?

Here's what Mathipoulos says:

We in Europe need to wake up to the reality that we cannot afford a weak America.

Far from enhancing Europe's position in global affairs, America's failures have also been ours, from securing peace in the Middle East to curbing Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.

Conversely, success has come to us when Europe and the United States have acted in close partnership, whether it was winning the Cold War or building a global economy.

I agree.

Defeat: A self-fulfilling prophecy

I happen to be reading a British Army document on counterinsurgency at the moment. It says in one place that

Experience has shown that in any insurgency about 90% of the population do not support either side and generally remain neutral in their affiliations until one side is perceived to be winning.

This makes execellent intuitive sense: you have momentum so long as people think that aligning their wishes with yours is more likely to lead to their fulfillment than aligning them with the other side. In practice establishing common goals is fiendishly difficult particularly when your own strategic narrative is incoherent. Listen to this fascinating interview with Dr David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency advisor to Gen Petraeus, on the issueof winning te battle of competing narratives.

Getting back to the doctrine, it seems to me that the statement does not go far enough. It's not merely the perceptions of those in the theatre of conflict which are vital; the perceptions of one's own domestic base is equally important. AQ understands very well that insurgency and counterinsurgency are Information Operations with a military annex and plans and chooses its battles accordingly; I think we are begining to understand this but there's a long way to go yet. For obvious reasons the military is chary of any talk of the management of the domestic perceptions of the conflict. But the fact is that the real target of AQ's operations is the frontal lobe of the Western voter; that being the case ceding this vital battlefield is strategically suicidal. Clearly soldiers grasp this. On a tour through Marine outposts in Al Anbar province Gen Mattis* was asked by a sergeant

How are we supposed to fight a war when people back home say we've already lost?

Read the article. Mattis gave the best answer he could under the circumstances: believe your own eyes, ignore the press. But at the end of the day, or rather at the end of the coming months when the success or failure of the 'surge' is judged, the morale state of the Marines in Anbar won't count for much if the people at home have been convinced the thing is a lost cause.

*Incidentally, I met him at a conference last week. He was, as a colleague put it, as charming as only a hard-bitten Marine can be.

One other thing, aside from our own Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman whose recent Adelphi paper The Transformation of Strategic Affairs is a must read, the guru of 'strategic narratives' is the Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Vlahos. His article on the bankruptcy of the Long War and GWOT narratives, The Long War, A self-defeating prophecy, is very worthwhile, as is his longer piece in The American Conservative, The Fall of Modernity which begins

We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality. This is a well-established condition of successful societies, a condition that inevitably grows more worrisome with time and continuing success. In fact, what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America’s case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity.

'For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that...'

If you are not reading Michael Yon's dispatches from Iraq then you are missing something very good. At the moment he is embedded with the Queen's Royal Lancers on the border near Iran. The latest dispatch Death or Glory Part III of IV begins rather depressingly with:

American soldiers think our press is bad to them, but we get off light compared to the Brits. One British soldier told me that when he made a journey of several hours across London, in uniform, not a single person acknowledged him. I said he should go to America where British soldiers are always welcome.

I must admit this observation rings true with me. The British public does not seem to care to be very aware of the remarkable bravery and professionalism of it's citizens in uniform which is, well, it's just appalling. On the other hand I can't remember the last time I saw someone in military uniform where I live or near where I work in Central London. I wonder if there's some cause and effect there?

This site Support our Soldiers seems a worthy way to make your thanks count. Of course the Americans always seem to take these things to the next level. That said, I think Adopt a Sniper is also a worthy effort. I wonder if my vicar will let me put their flyer up? Hmmm...

Wolfowitz resigns. Who is to head the World Bank?

Paul Wolfowitz is to resign as head of the World Bank. Personally, I think it is a stitch up as is described in this Wall Street Journal feature The Wolfowitz Files from a while back. Oh well. So the question is who should be the next head of the World Bank. There is someone qualified who is in between jobs: why Tony Blair should head the WB.

Keep up the good work!

Via a friend who has been feeding me things to post on my poor negelected blog:

Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things

I've not yet achieved the illustrious rank of Professor so I'm picturing my esteemed colleague Theo Farrell, Professor of War in the Modern World, demonstrating the parallels between things and, ummm, other things with the appropriate hand gestures.