Don’t miss this interesting two-part al-Jazeera English report on the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood, the defense interests of major media companies and the public impact of propaganda movies about war.

Part I
Will update this post with Part II when it becomes available.
Update: Here’s Part II:

Just in from Reuters: EGYPTIAN MILITARY COURT HANDS JAIL TERMS TO 25 FROM MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, ACQUITS 15 - BROTHERHOOD LAWYER
Ikhwanonline has special front page for occasion. Some background in English from Ikhwanweb at “Final Session of MB Military Tribunal today” and “Journalists and MB Supporters Harrassed Prior to Military Verdict”
Pending detail of who got [...]

No clear end to occupation:
A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.
The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to [...]

US struggles to explain AFRICOM vision:

Gen Ward argued that AFRICOM ‘recognises the essential relationship between security, stability, economic development, political advances, things that address the basic needs of the peoples of a region and, importantly, the requirement to do those efforts in as collaborative a way as possible - not to take over the [...]

From Nir Rosen’s The Myth of the Surge in Rolling Stone, on the co-optation of former insurgents that had caused a decline in violence over the past year in Iraq :

But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. [...]

Paul Rogers on the Iraq Project:
In an echo of the Baghdad embassy, Balad has grown to become the largest US air-base anywhere in the world: a fifteen-square-mile mini-city with its own bus routes, fast-food outlets, two supermarkets and accommodation for 40,000 military personnel and contractors. The base - from which up to 550 air [...]

Next time you hear some one in the US say that voting for anti-war candidate (or a just war critic like Obama) is a disservice to the troops, consider this:

In the 4th quarter of 2007, individuals in the Army, Navy and Air Force made those branches of the armed services the No. 13, No. 18 [...]

Here’s another chapter in the bizarre relationship between North Korea and Egypt. I understand it all begun when North Korea effectively ran Egypt’s air force (at least in Upper Egypt) around 1970, later sold scud missiles and related services, in 1989 built a war panorama, but also furnished Cairo with some of its best foreign [...]

I’d mentioned before this story about the Egyptian military’s attempts to takeover an island south of Cairo in order to build a new development, which means kicking out the farmers and other inhabitants that live there. There has been anecdotal evidence that the military is getting increasingly greedy about encroaching on the civilian sphere, particularly [...]

I recently mentioned Victor David Hanson as one of the founders and board members of the new Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, a wannabe scholarly association that aims to challenge the MESA. The counter-insurgency blog Abu Muqawama points to a recent post at Small Wars Journal (an influential specialist blog [...]

‘The IED problem is getting out of control. We’ve got to stop the bleeding.’ - A fascinating WaPo piece on the history of the IED in Afghanistan and Iraq and the countermeasures developed against it.
Update: Part two of this series on IEDs is here: ‘The single most effective weapon against our deployed forces’.

I can’t claim anything as to its veracity, but below is an interesting anthropological-military analysis of what might have motivated the recent switch of key Sunni tribes from fighting with foreign jihadist elements to fighting against them. Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt (SWJ Blog):
The uprising began last year, far out in western Anbar province, but [...]

Andrew Exum offers reasons against war on Iran, from a military perspective:
Leaving aside the relative merits of a strike against the Iranians, why might America’s military resist such action? First, consider the fact that the US has at the moment 162,000 troops in Iraq, 30,000 in Kuwait, 4,500 in Bahrain and 3,300 in Qatar - [...]

Bizarre little story in today’s Le Monde: last Friday 12 swimmers drowned on a beach in northern Algeria after a giant wave suddenly appeared on a beach near Mostaganem, in Western Algeria. No one knows what caused the wave, which only appeared at that particular beach and was not part of a larger tsunami or [...]

Arm chair generals help shape surge in Iraq - Examiner.com:
WASHINGTON - When it comes to the troop surge in Iraq, a bunch of arm chair generals in Washington are influencing the Bush Administration as much as the Joint Chiefs or theater commanders.
A group of military experts at the American Enterprise Institute, concerned that the U.S. [...]

Uber-blogger and Middle East historian Juan Cole has a new blog on Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, the first modern invasion of the Middle East by a Western power. It’s called Napoleon’s Egypt and goes along with Cole’s new book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. Cole is appears to be going through the invasion [...]

I have this article on qantara.de on the WWII mines and other ammunition left behind on Egypt’s North coast. The Egyptian government wants to re-launch its efforts to clear the zones that are affected, but wants to have it all paid for by its international donors.
As Egypt has brought to perfection the art of [...]

Ashraf Marwan, maybe the most colorful person of London’s Arab community, has died under unclear circumstances. Some believe him to be ‘The Source’ which tipped off Mossad prior to the 1973 war - others say he acted as a double agent misleading the Israelis.
From The Times:

Mr Marwan’s death will send shockwaves across the Middle East [...]

Two essential pieces on Lebanon appeared in the last few weeks. The first, a review piece by Max Rodenbeck in the NYRB, looks at the last two-three years and draws a convincing portrait of what happened. Considering how confusing Lebanon’s politics are, that’s quite a feat. Plus Max gets the way I react to Lebanese [...]

Naomo Klein on Israel’s military-industrial complex:
Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-90s, when the country was in the vanguard of the information revolution - the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dotcom bubble burst in [...]