Female Marines

Utilizing female Marines to gather Intelligence:

"The marines have a different attitude towards this. As they put it, "every marine a rifleman." In practice, this means that the majority of marines, who have combat support jobs, continue to get infantry training. So the marines in Iraq called these all-female teams (3-5 women) Lionesses. Again, no shortage of volunteers, as female marines, even more than their sisters in the army, were eager to get into the fight. But that's not what the lioness teams were created for. What the marines had also noticed was that the female marines tended to get useful information out of the women they searched. Iraqi women were surprised, and often awed, when they encountered these female soldiers and marines. The awe often turned into cooperation. Most Iraqi women are much less enthusiastic about fighting the Americans than their men folk (who die in large numbers when they do so.) Being a widow is much harder in the Arab world than it is in the West."

Tyranny Unveiled

Michael Ramirez.

The Ayatollahs

"It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison."

Christopher Hitchens.

Defiance in Iran

Pictures from Iran

On Flickr.

State-sponsored Madrasah

Christopher Hitchens has an interesting take on GITMO in Slate:

"Suppose that you were a secular or unfanatical person caught in the net by mistake; you would still find yourself being compelled to pray five times a day (the guards are not permitted to interrupt), to have a Quran in your cell, and to eat food prepared to halal (or Sharia) standards. I suppose you could ask to abstain, but, in such a case, I wouldn't much fancy your chances. The officers in charge were so pleased by this ability to show off their extreme broad-mindedness in respect of Islam that they looked almost hurt when I asked how they justified the use of taxpayers' money to create an institution dedicated to the fervent practice of the most extreme version of just one religion. To the huge list of reasons to close down Guantanamo, add this: It's a state-sponsored madrasah."

How to fight North Korea

Nicholas Guariglia writes:

"...start a serious reverse-propaganda program of beaming real information into North Korea, similar to Radio Free Europe at the end of the Cold War. We should weaken the tyrant’s rule from within; when done properly, it works almost every time. To paraphrase my friend Michael Ledeen: there are many ways to destroy a dictator when you have his oppressed people on your side."