At long last, the Iraq War appears to be over.

The US has been winding down its troop presence in Iraq for many months now, and will have reduced this to 50,000 by the end of August from a peak of 170,000 at the height of the ‘surge’ against the insurgency there in 2007. Under a [Read more...]

Early returns from Iraq’s national elections suggest that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Alliance is on track to secure the highest number of seats of any party in the next parliament, and that he himself is well placed to retain his post. If Maliki does stay on in his role, this should ensure [Read more...]

As US President Barack Obama ponders whether to send an additional 40,000+ American troops to Afghanistan, the bigger question is whether the US really has enough troops to neutralise its enemies.

The US has a demonstrable ability to defeat conventional military forces in places such as Iraq (1991, 2003), Serbia (1999) and Afghanistan (2001), [Read more...]

Eight years after the ‘9/11’ terror attacks, the outcome of the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ is still inconclusive.
Overall, I have not really changed my view from the blog post I wrote on the seventh anniversary.
Neither ‘the West’ and its allied governments nor al-Qaeda and its offshoots have scored a decisive blow. In any case, as [Read more...]

At the end of April, Risk Watchdog went to the ‘Invest Iraq’ conference in London. It was attended by several hundred representatives from a broad range of companies, and a large chunk of the Iraqi government, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (who gave the keynote speech), was there. The delegates were very ‘on message’ and [Read more...]

President-Elect Barack Obama certainly has a strong political hand going into his inauguration on January 20. Not only did he secure an emphatic electoral college vote, and a six point lead in the popular vote, but the Democrats have secure majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a majority [Read more...]

As we mark the seventh anniversary of the ‘9/11’ terror attacks, the only real conclusion I have is that the outcome of the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ is inconclusive. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that it is not clear what ‘victory’ is. For the West, is victory merely preventing further terror attacks, [Read more...]