Roll out the red carpet for Hollywood’s take on Iraq and Afghanistan. Hollywood, in its collective wisdom, has decided that now is a good time to make a handful of movies about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They are antiwar movies, of course. Rest assured that they won’t exclusively depict G.I.s and Marines as bestial rapists, [Read more…]
Military/Defence
Defusing the Iraqi Conflict. November 7, 2007 Few Britons have any idea of what our troops actually do in Iraq. The media’s coverage is generally limited to casualty reports, abuse claims and the odd, ill-informed screed about soldiers having the wrong equipment. In four years no British media organisation, including the BBC, has bothered to establish [Read more…]
OCTOBER 30, 2007 MRAPs, A-10s, Personal Radios and How Genuinely “Supporting the Troops” would mean recognizing that Iraq is a real war. There is real war and then there is “war” — the politician’s overwrought metaphor. The best-known examples of the latter are the “war on drugs” and “war on poverty”: Campaigns that were inherently open-ended [Read more…]
The Western media, wittingly or not, are aiding our enemies. Islamabad — The week I was in Afghanistan this winter, two big stories hit the international press. The first involved the publication of photographs of German NATO troops apparently “desecrating” the remains of dead Afghans. The second was about the accidental killing of up to [Read more…]
In the spring of 2005, I watched two U.S. Army units training Iraqi National Army soldiers at a base in Baghdad. One Iraqi brigade was in the care of a 100-man company belonging to an armor battalion of the Third Infantry Division. The company’s officers and men lived on the base with the Iraqis, went on [Read more…]
What The Surge Achieved (Pajamas Media March 2008)
Has the Surge made life better in Iraq? Even folks like Angelina Jolie — no fan of President Bush — are admitting that it has, writes Jonathan Foreman. March 17, 2008 The “Surge” has not “won” the war at a stroke. It has not brought all of America’s troops home. It has not enabled Iraqi parliamentarians to [Read more…]