As the U.S.-led coalition force enters its fifth year in Iraq, a look back at two pivotal insurgencies from the mid-20th Century provides crucial lessons for our future actions in Iraq. Both the British experience in Malaya and the French experience in Algeria contain exceptional insights that are worthy of reconsideration as we refine our counterinsurgency actions. Though they differed in some important ways, those two counterinsurgencies show how the basic aims of most insurgencies, and therefore the strategies needed to defeat them, are fundamentally the same. These similarities remain despite the technological modernization and profound advances in warfighting that [...]
WASHINGTON — Blame the sign, or the sumptuous location in the heart of what the world’s diplomatic capital calls “embassy row.” The affair, held on a freezing afternoon in late January, certainly had draw. More than two dozen people, nearly all men and nearly all somewhat dodgy looking in that classic discrete-agent-of-a-foreign-government sort of way, gathered to bid on a hulking, neglected row-house boasting a fabulously curious sign: “BANK AUCTION, FORMER LIBIAN EMBASSY.”<<ad>>Any auction is bound to make the heart beat fast, regardless of whether the crowd features shady characters from various diplomatic outposts. But when they do drop in [...]
HARBEL, Liberia — White latex oozed from the vein of the rubber tree, dripping into a small plastic bucket. Saa Morris, an illiterate 48 year old and father of nine, used his knife-edged pole to slice into the vein. Then the “tapper” moved on to another tree on one of the world’s largest rubber plantations, owned by American tire maker Firestone. By his own account, Morris taps no less than 750 trees in a day and sometimes as many as 903. That earns him his daily wage of $3.30. “We doing hard work in the bush here, but no good [...]
