Green Zone Better Than The Hurt Locker (By Far)

For all the movies ever done on Iraq I think Green Zone is the best I've seen. Even better than The Hurt Locker--by far.

I say this because it is in a competently different league: It's edgy; it tells a story about how the disbanded Iraqi military could have perhaps prevented the insurgency; it shows how the intelligence was crafted, not gathered.

The movie also shows how different American agencies were often competing against one another. In the movie the CIA is almost fighting a war of its own with the CPA over employing a Baathist General to keep security and... well, I don't want to spoil it.

At the very least, watch the preview:


I left the movie speechless, but also realizing the paradox of America: It is a country that invades other countries to insure its domination of the globe for the next generation; it is also a country that makes daming movies about the inhumanity of it all.

I highly recommend this movie. And knowing that it will soon hit the streets of the Middle East by way of bootleg, I look forward to hearing what my Arab friends have to say about it.

More issues with the Afghan Police

While I sit here at my desk and continue to work on my book, I occasionally slip up on work and check the news. Al Jazeera English has had some surprising good videos of late; they cover things I don't see anywhere else.

So if you care why NATO and the US are having a problem in Afghanistan, and only have two and a half minutes, then the video below is your ticket. Watch it. It is really good, though in a horrifying sort of way.

Not so good for Hamas

Russia and the Afghan-Pakistan front

Perhaps one of the biggest things happened today on the Afghan-Pakistan front.

Wanna guess? (Hint: It didn't even happen in Cen. Asia.)

If you've been following the news this week you've likely read that an underground rail in Moscow was hit by two female suicide bombers. Note again that the bombers were female. This was a tactic pioneered by al-Qaeda in Iraq, though I'm not exclusively saying it has any direct links.

Here's were it gets interesting: According to Haaretz this can be traced back to the Afghan-Pakistan front:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said militants operating on the Afghan-Pakistan border may have helped organize suicide bomb attacks that killed 38 in Moscow on Monday, Interfax news agency reported on Monday.

So will this be enough to invest the Russians back into Afghanistan?

Whatever happens, this will force the Putin government to further develop a strategy for dealing with transnational terrorists. What shall it look like?