Has anyone noticed how our numerous post-Iraq military interventions – actual and proposed – have nearly always been the result of a sudden "humanitarian crisis"? The War Party – facing popular skepticism, indeed, outright opposition from the American...

American soldiers are not permitted to make moral assessments about the wars in which they are tasked to fight. This is not meant to be an inflammatory statement. The simple fact of the matter is that if a soldier believes a war to be unjust, and decides to act on his...

In some respects, the recent admission by CIA Director John Brennan that his agents and his lawyers have been spying on the senators whose job it is to monitor the agency should come as no surprise. The agency's job is to steal and keep secrets, and implicit in those...

One hundred years ago, along came the long-predicted slide into the First World War. Though it is perhaps second to Vietnam in terms of wars now considered to be a mistake, and in spite of the idea of the horrors of trench warfare, there is still this notion of WWI...

The full extent of the troubles that have befallen the Yazidi people of northern Iraq has not yet come to light, but the fighting for their land continues. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to consider stepping aside for Iraq’s sake. At least 938 people were killed and 107 more were wounded.

Remember the Kosovo war? If you’re under 30, it’s just a blip on the historical screen, one that has far less impact on your consciousness than the subsequent wars of the post-9/11 era – and yet it was an important milestone on the road to where we are today. It was...

Think of it as the true end of the beginning. Last week, Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, the final member of the 12-man crew of the Enola Gay, the plane (named after its pilot’s supportive mother) that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died at age 93. When that...

The American foreign policy elite should learn something from the recent humiliating evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, Libya – amid the chaos of tribal civil war in that country – but probably won’t. Since World War II, this bipartisan elite has thumbed its...

For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam on August 4, 1964 in retaliation for an alleged naval attack that never happened –...

Battles and airstrikes killed most of the 415 dead today. Few civilians were killed in fighting; however, at least 40 people from Sinjar have died from thirst or starvation while awaiting help. At least 178 were wounded.