Ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. That was the whole idea, right? That‘s why we went. I am reluctant to let that fact disappear down the memory hole, because if— as the war ends, or at least starts to end— if, at this time, the histo...
By the time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventeenth century CE, what we now call the Middle East was divided between the Persian and Byzantine empires. But with the spread of this new religion from Arabia, a powerful empire emerged, and with...
The path to a sustained victory in Afghanistan lies in improving their economy, creating jobs for the Afghanis, strengthening their government and national services, getting the provinces to trust each other and work together, and eliminating the opi...
I am a Christian, but my time in Iraq has convinced me that God doesn't want to hear from me anymore. I've done things that He can never forgive. I've done them consciously. I've made decisions I must live with for years to come. I am not a victim. I...
A common strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism, which was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivat...
You don`t have to do anything. Why worry? It`s all god`s plan anyway. Just love everyone and believe. Be a limp-wristed wimp and recruit others to be the same. But, give unto Caesar that which is Caesar`s. When Caesar says drop bombs on christian bab...
One of the outstanding sources of resistance to imperial power in the Muslim world came from Sufi groups. While Sufi brotherhoods are generally known for a more quietist and mystic approach to Islam, they traditionally rank among the best organized a...
Sabrina Fairchild: Maybe you should go to Paris, Linus. Linus Larrabee: To Paris? Sabrina Fairchild: It helped me a lot. Have you ever been there? Linus Larrabee: [thinks] Oh, yes. Yes. Once. I was there for thirty-five minutes. Sabrina Fairchild: Th...
I guess I was always looking for something. What it was, I didn’t know. I wanted help from the VA, but didn’t want to go back, didn’t want to be subjected to that second-rate treatment any longer. I wanted to find peace within myself, but didn�...
..when a war ends, what does that look like exactly? do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves? does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother? when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glass and our reflection is not something ...
Ibn al-Khatib says: Ibn Battutah has a modest share of the sciences. He journeyed to the East in the month of Rajab 725 [1325], travelled through its lands, penetrated into Iraq al-Ajam, then entered India, Sind and China, and returned through Yemen....
The events of the day overcame me all at once, and I struggled to breathe without crying. As darkness fell over Qalat Sukkar, I sat alone in the dim green light of the radios. I felt sick for the shepherd boys, for the girl in the blue dress, and for...
Spc. Owen Eldridge: Aren't you glad the Army has all these tanks parked here? Just in case the Russians come and we have to have a big tank battle? Sergeant JT Sanborn: I'd rather be on the side with the tanks, just in case, than not have them. Spc. ...
The West has to take a critical look at itself and examine the apparent double standards at work that allow it to attack Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction but not North Korea, whose leader shared Saddam Hussein's megalomaniacal qualitie...
Unlike old-fashioned Britain, where Tony Blair recruited Lord Levy to encourage his 'Friends of Israel' to donate their money to a party that was just about to launch a criminal war, in America Alan Greenspan provided his president with an astonishin...
Voters have soaked up a noggin full of negativity over the last twenty years, with an economy we had to bring back from collapse, plus terrorist attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t want to belabor these points, but your listeners know...
You can walk around this culture now, as a proud supporter of the so called anti-war movement and it's made up of a lot of people I used to know … I'd like for them to be asked more often than they are, if your advice had been taken over the last 1...
National Security Adviser: If this was political, we'd be having this conversation in October when there's an election bump. This is pure risk, based on deductive reasoning, inference, supposition, and the only human reporting you have is six years o...
Sami and I had exactly one day together in the old world. On Tuesday the jihadists came to our front door and knocked down our buildings. Our new world was hijacked planes, anthrax, and Afghanistan. Then we had snipers inside the Beltway. Then came I...
In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance when, on the evening before ...
During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and 'experience' to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush admini...
