Do the Geneva conventions apply in Middle-Earth?

The Economist looks at the numbers. Number of Israelis killed by fire from Gaza between January 1st 2012 and November 11th 2012: 1 Number of Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israeli fire during the same period: 78

More expensive - less economically viable?

"I'm here to help you make peace." "...Great..." by my old friend Roger.

Dan has difficulty doing so.

Not good news.

"My husband has been deployed to Afghanistan for six months."

The ever shrewd Wayne Merry warns of the increasing certainty of war.

Horoscopes as black propaganda in the Second World War.

My ex-intern's NGO.

Why Badme matters (though nobody knows where it is).

"Today, Aghdam is an extraordinary place. Once a bustling Azeri town, it is now nothing but ruins for as far as the eye can see. But what the eye can't see is that this long-frozen front-line is also now part of the global struggle waged between Israel and its enemies."

Stunning!

Fascinating and brutally honest analysis of Norway's role in the Sri Lanka conflict.

Three books reviewed, very interesting.

Re the proposed 1945 US land invasion of Japan: "The Military was so certain things were about to go very badly for U.S. soldiers that 500,000 Purple Hearts were made in preparation, a number so large that the medals have been used to supply every single war since, including Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I and Iraq II, with about 100,000 still left ov…

Hugh Pope reviews "We Meant Well: how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people".

Heather on the craziness of not talking to the other side.

1)  Military peacekeeping has grown in scale … yet lost operational impact. 2)  Peacekeeping is cheap …  but it is also still too expensive. 3) All peace operations are political … but not all are guided by credible political strategies and few peacekeepers are good at politics. 4)  Peacekeepers promote democracy and justice … but democracy and ju…

A modern constitution needs to be legitimate in the eyes of the people, but achieving this is a challenge. Often national and international constitution-makers feel out in the cold as there has been no comprehensive resource on the options for constitution-making and reform. The design, implementation and management of these processes, in an inclu…

Brilliant on-line atlas of the history of war.

Gender in the new Libya

Ten years on, Osama bin Laden’s caliphatist dream is not one step closer to being realised, and his nihilist vision of Islam never gained support from anything more than a miniscule fringe of his intended audience. Muslims were simply not interested, and by the time he was killed in his hideout in Pakistan, the Arab world was too busy pursuing pos…

"So, not without a few tears, I threw away some twenty thousand words of perfectly good copy about the Sri Lankan civil war..."

More on the colossal expense of a technology that doesn't work defending against a threat that doesn't exist.

Money quote: "Without a vigorous restatement of the principles of humanitarianism, humanitarian action will remain in a state of crisis and continue to be a selective tool for the powerful and hence fail in its global mission of protecting and restoring the dignity of human life."

Tour of a nuclear missile base.

'There are plenty of good, valid arguments against the current western military action in Libya... But I do wish opponents of the action would stop resorting to the bone-headed type of argumentation that runs "Why aren't they bombing the crap out of Bahrain/Saudi Arabia/Syria/Yemen/Côte d'Ivoire?"'

"I think the arguments above are mostly pretty solid and convincing, that a no-fly zone would have all sorts of negative consequences and would be in many ways a Bad Thing. What I do not find convincing is that these consequences would be a worse thing than for Ghaddafi to succeed in crushing the rebellion..." "So, much as I am extr…