Over at the Small Wars Journal’s blog, they’re wondering if part of the problem in dealing with failed states, the aftermath of wars, peacekeeping and the like is that it’s nobody’s job to provide a police force, and specifically a real civilian one that does things like investigating crimes.
This was, of course, a bitter problem [...]

Saw this in the news the other day:
Kosovo official escapes death
13 April 2007 | 09:31 | Source: Reuters
PRIŠTINA — Head of Kosovo Telecommunications Agency (KTA) Anton Berisha was the target of a mortar attack on Thursday, a police source said.
“The car was hit by a mortar bomb. A Kosovo police officer is injured. [...]

Somebody is worried that Slobodan Milosevic might escape from death. And so, they dug up his corpse and drove a stake through his heart.
Seriously. They really did it.
One might also want to read this.

Sometimes it pays to read beyond the front page:
Federal and local law enforcement authorities are investigating a shooting in Prince George’s County that critically injured a prominent intelligence expert who specializes in the former Soviet Union.
Paul Joyal, 53, was shot Thursday, four days after he alleged in a television broadcast that the government of Russian [...]

Sorry for crossposting, but this needs wider visibility. This time, Blair seems to mean it about British troops beginning to draw-down their presence in southern Iraq. All the usual provisos still apply - so far, it’s just part of the extra force that is going, and the last squaddie is scheduled to leave in three [...]

The National Security Archive’s publication of the original powerpoint slides used in planning for war with Iraq has got a lot of attention, especially the prediction that by now there would only be 5,000 US soldiers in Iraq. But it’s also interesting as an index of tension with Iran.
The briefing includes several scenarios on what [...]

Everyone’s now blogged about Jacques Chirac’s unexpected remarks about Iranian nuclear weapons.
But I think there may still be some angular momentum to be had. Chirac stated that, should a hypothetically nuclear Iran launch a nuclear weapon, Tehran would be destroyed before it had gone 200 metres. This is a pretty basic statement of nuclear deterrence, [...]

No, this is not a Litvinenko post…or at least not primarily. Recently, the Georgian ex-KGB said it had caught a Russian smuggling highly-enriched uranium into Georgia, who was nailed in a sting operation where Georgian agents posed as representatives of an Islamist terrorist group that wanted to buy fissile material. He handed over a sample, [...]

Thomas P.M. Barnett, Pentagon thinker and tech entrepreneur, stands up in the centre of the circle and says…I am Thomas Barnett….and I…am shrill! You’ll feel better now you’ve said it, Tom. See his latest column, here, in which he says that:
That’s how we’ll master this allegedly chaotic world: recalling that we’re history’s first and [...]

It’s usually a charmingly naive belief that wars are the fault of leaders, and if the Ordinary People could choose we’d all live in peace. It doesn’t take long, considering some parts of the blogosphere, your local bar, the historical record and such, to realise this is absurdly simplistic. For one thing, there are always [...]