I'm in the midst of Charles Tripp's excellent A History of Iraq, and I'm curious about the Russian interest in Persian Gulf stability during the war. The Soviets played footsie with the Iranians in the wake of the Revolution, but by 1982 sided decisively with...
Iraq
While I'm on the subject of Tom Ricks... Last month, Tom Ricks visited the Patterson School and gave a couple of talks about Iraq. One talk was for the Patterson.
Yglesias links to an interesting article by Sheri Berman on the relevance of early modern state-building to policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it would be fantastic if some.
This is a guest post by Dr. Emily Beaulieu, assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky.Contentious elections usually make us nervous. To be sure, elections aren’t the nicest of affairs. At best, elections are competitions where the accompanying rhetoric can, and often...
First, I don't think that there's quite enough appreciation of this:But the choice between a mindset that says “the main purpose of the military is to scare China & Russia”.
This is positively strange:Iraqi officials have discovered that they may have an air force, after all.The Defense Ministry revealed Sunday that it recently learned that Iraq owns 19 Russian-designed MIG-21.
It turns out that the T-72s carried by the MV Faina (the Ukranian vessels that was seized and held by pirates for several months) weren't destined for Kenya after all:But one mystery lingered: the true destination of the Faina’s cargo. Kenya’s government said the weapons...
Ackerman:It's a "carnival" in Baghdad, according to the Post's Ernesto Londono, filled with Iraqi troops grinning as they take their lives into their own hands and graffitti writers further south.
At least one Arab state can be expected to leap to Israel's defense:Of the various premises on which the U.S. invasion of Iraq was sold to the American people, one.
The coup that was probably a purge now turns out maybe to have been a failed purge: Iraq’s interior minister said all 24 of his officers who had been arrested in a security crackdown this week would be released. And in a bold gesture of...
Looks like Maliki is moving to consolidate power:Up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three.
I concur with Ackerman et al that Maliki is taking a very serious gamble by moving against the "Awakening" leadership. The success of the Iraqi Army in Basra and Baghdad.