I apologize for the absence of a new column, but my health has not been all that great lately. It's nothing serious, so don't worry – I'll be back on Monday! NOTES IN THE MARGIN You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are...

Veteran foreign correspondent Reese Erlich was in northern Iraq at the start of the U.S. bombing campaign against Islamic State. He interviewed Kurdish leaders, peshmerga fighters and U.S. officials. He says the reality on the ground is far different from the...

At a recent talk at the National Press Club in Washington DC, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, says he believes there’s not one person in the Pentagon who would agree that President Obama can achieve his aim of destroying ISIS in Iraq and...

At least 291 people were killed today and 49 more were wounded. Heavy fighting took place during a failed attempt by ISIS/DAASH to take over Hit, in Anbar province. Meanwhile, the United Nations released a gruesome report on the violence and abuses occurring across Iraq.

When President Obama attributed the rise in Iraq of the Islamic State, or ISIS, to the failures of the U.S. intelligence community earlier this week, naming and blaming directly National Intelligence Director Gen. James Clapper, he was attempting to deflect criticism...

What if the so-called Islamic State (IS) didn’t exist? In order to answer this question, one has to liberate the argument from its geopolitical and ideological confines. Flexible Language Many in the media (Western, Arab, etc.) use the reference "Islamist"...

American officials underestimated ISIL’s threat, according to their Commander-in-Chief. Only last winter, Obama himself described ISIL as a "JV Team." Yet a year ago, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin warned Americans of exactly that ISIL threat in an...

At least 175 people were killed in Iraq today, mostly militants. Another 75 were wounded, mostly civilians in a bombing in southern Baghdad.

Originally posted at TomDispatch. What are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather...

The rise of China as America’s chief rival on the international stage has long been a staple of our foreign policy pundits’ alleged wisdom. The Chinese, simply by virtue of their enormous population, have been deemed the inheritors of the earth. China, we are told,...