Global Guerillas

Want to better understand what’s going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the “war on terror”? Forget about the conventional press: John Robb’s Global Guerillas blog is in a league of its own. John, a former tech CEO, tech analyst, and oh yeah, special ops pilot for the Air Force, is working on a book about the “intersection of terrorism, infrastructure, and markets.”

When you put political partisanship off to one side, you need to better understand the root causes of what’s going on and why. To simply write off Bin Laden as “evil” ignores the more unsettling reality that there may be a method to his madness. To avoid asking the difficult questions about why insurgents in Iraq were able to build a patchwork of resistance to coalition forces is to invite the possibility that it’ll happen again.

I have John to thank for getting me into blogging in the first place: nearly three years ago, he patiently explained to me what a blog was and helped me get started on this blog journey. (More about that here in an article I wrote for the ABA about blogs; interesting sidenote: whereas then I got 5-10 visitors from Google per day. Today I get 150-200 per day from Google.) It’s been cool to see him transition from his perch as a tech CEO and apply his various skills to an area that could really use some intelligence and analysis instead of simple fear-mongering.