Robert Farley

It looks as if Hezbollah has succeeded in getting the Lebanese government to back down. The government was attempting to bring Hezbollah to heel by firing a pro-Hezbollah airport official and breaking up the organization’s phone network. These efforts led to violence and a near coup in Beirut, and demonstrated that Hezbollah is still the […]

Somebody in the McCain campaign noticed that the whole 100 years thing isn’t playing very well. The new plan is four and a half years. The catch is that the withdrawal of US troops in contingent on “victory”, and, as Ilan Goldenberg points out, McCain hasn’t had such a great predictive track record thus far: […]

The Chinese appear to be stealing an effective and marketable Russian weapon design. Russia’s response? Threaten a lawsuit: Russia is getting more and more upset at what it sees as Chinese making unauthorized use of Russian military technology. The latest irritation is the new Chinese diesel electric sub design, the Type 39A, or Yuan class. […]

Noah highlights the fact that about a third of the new war supplemental bill is for weapons not directly related to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan: The latest war-funding bill might pay for more than just the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could add billions of dollars’ worth of the latest manned and […]

Slate has a pretty interesting article on the finances of Slate has a pretty interesting article on the finances of Barack and Michele Obama; long story short, there’s a pretty vast gulf between the Obamas and either the McCains or the Clintons. In any case, prior to the publication of Barack’s two books the Obamas […]

In my latest Bloggingheads with Michael Goldfarb, I talked a bit about the geographic distribution of recent casualties in Iraq, and we both discussed recent bombings in Anbar province. I had assumed that April’s casualty uptick was largely a consequence of up tempo operations against Shia militias. Brandon Friedman tells me that I was wrong: […]

Jerome Armstrong: White Democrats moved from Clinton leading by 43% in OH, to Clinton leading by 28% in IN. Liberal voters moved from Clinton leading by 7% in OH to Obama leading by 14% in IN. In short, for Indiana, Clinton’s projecting of a more GE favorable image (she’s risen nationally in the polls in […]

Via Phil Carter and Eli Lake, Paul Wolfowitz on the mistakes of the occupation: “One was enough troops for the major combat. A lot of people said we didn’t have it, and obviously we did. There was a very difficult balance that had to be struck between surprise, which meant a smaller force, and enough […]

…or at least move it somewhere. A 246-foot tall, rocket ship-like monument to the late ruler of Turkmenistan, topped with a golden statue of himself that rotates to always face the sun, will be removed from the center of the Turkmen capital, state news media there have reported. A decision by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov to […]

Back in 2005, I sat on a panel at the University of Kentucky library on the future of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point the conversation became heated, with an interlocutor from the audience suggesting that those who opposed the wars should move to Canada, where (and I paraphrase) the people seemed […]