The most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler once wrote that "War is a racket." That was in 1935. If only he could see it now. The cash flow enabling the global war on terror which was launched in 2001 is astonishing,...

Back a little over ten years ago I wrote an article for The American Conservative magazine called "The Jihadi War." I had only recently left the CIA and it was the first article I had ever written for any publication, so I was grateful for a little friendly...

A picture is indeed sometimes worth a thousand words. A photo of Secretary of State John Kerry disembarking from his plane in Tel Aviv showed chief US negotiator Martin Indyk walking along at his side with a grin on his face as if he had just heard a new Palestinian...

It is sometimes disorienting to note that a federal bureaucracy that we have grown to mistrust over the past decade occasionally can be a source of reliable information that actually discredits what the government itself is saying. On those all too rare occasions...

My Christmas holiday frequently includes a series of reunions with other former CIA people, often grouped by the overseas stations that we served in. This year the Istanbul gathering preceded Spain and the Rome Station ca. 1980 soon followed. Some of the retirees are...

There is a major flaw in the United States Constitution. The Founders understood that partisan politics would inevitably result in bickering along party lines that would lead to charges that political opponents were betraying the country so they deliberately made it...

Terrorism has become as all-American as apple pie. It is ingrained in our civic DNA, it fills our newspapers and is the backstory for every foreign policy discussion on talk radio and television. One might reasonably expect that American mothers might now cajole their...

Though the President of the United States is responsible for the management of the nation’s foreign policy he hardly has a free hand. Congress has increasingly been playing a role utilizing its power to legislate and also its control over the federal budget while...

Since I have been featured on antiwar on Thursdays going back a number of years, I sometimes try to write something that includes a sense of the holiday. The Pilgrims initiated Thanksgiving to celebrate the end of harvest and to acknowledge that they had managed to...

It is hard to believe that even though 64% of the American public favors a negotiated settlement with Iran over its nuclear program fully 37% of those polled also believe that the United States actually needs Israel’s permission before coming to any kind of agreement....