What Abu Muqawama's Readers Are Reading ... besides, uh, you know, this blog

About once a month, Abu Muqawama will sift through all the mail his readers send to the abumuqawama[at]hotmail.com email address. A few things of note, worth passing along:

Hannah sent the html address to the Visitor's Guide to Baghdad's Green Zone. Abu Muqawama had read this before after someone sent the word document his way over email, and funnily enough, one of the authors is a guy Abu Muqawama met many years ago at Fort Lewis.

Michael, meanwhile, has been reading Kaboom, a blog written by a young lieutenant in Iraq. Abu Muqawama is, generally, in favor of letting smart young soldiers tell the world their stories. Nine times out of ten, they show the U.S. military and its soldiers in a much more favorable and human light than the world is used to.

Elsewhere, "The Bateman" has finally had enough and unloads both barrels in the direction of the New York Times regarding their "crazy veterans" series of articles.

And finally, a big thanks goes out to Péter Marton for getting in touch with the blogging crew here at Abu Muqawama. Péter runs the excellent [My] State Failure Blog and passed along his most recent paper, written with Péter Wagner, on Dutch and Hungarian counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. (Abu Muqawama blogged on this paper earlier this week.) Abu Muqawama had actually already seen the paper via afghanistanica before he noticed Péter sent a copy to the email account. Péter has now taken it upon himself to educate Abu Muqawama on European counterinsurgency training, most recently passing along an article that can be found here on Dutch pre-deployment training. Fascinating. Thanks, Péter!