We are now on Part 4 and it might seem we are gilding the Lilly. But here’s the thing: What is going on in the Persian Gulf is rotten beyond words. The rogue madman in the Oval Office has detonated a conflagration there that could send the entire global economy…

Let me bury the lede just a bit: In December of 1862, Union troops under the command of Ambrose Burnside crossed the Rappahannock river by pontoon bridge and occupied the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in an attempt to come to grips with Confederate forces…

During the first Trump administration, the FBI quietly spent $5 million on Pegasus, an Israeli-developed software product known generically as zero click. Zero click permits the user to download the contents of another mobile or desktop device without tricking…

When Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched their military aggression against Iran on February 28, they appeared convinced that the war would be swift. Netanyahu reportedly assured Washington that the campaign would deliver a decisive strategic victory…

Reagan Carney, a really fine young man with whom we go to church, told me a few days ago that the University of Tennessee Young Republicans had a board on which members could express their opinions about the war in Iran. The board had only one question: “Is…

This week, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the cameras amid the smoke of his expanding wars and declared with the confidence of a man who believes history still belongs to the ruthless: “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan. Because if you are…

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants $200 billion for the Trump administration’s illegal, ill-advised, undeclared war on Iran. Well, maybe. “That number could move,” he says, to get “properly funded for what’s been done, for what we may have to do in…

It sure looks like the Donald is on the receiving end of a double-whammy. His victory declaration in Iran looks to rank right up there with George Dubya Bush’s “mission accomplished” pratfall on the deck of a US aircraft carrier in 2003; and that also means…

March 11, 2026: the day the UN died. Much devastation will be left in the wake of the war on Iran. One of the most serious losses will be the loss of credibility suffered by the United Nations. On March 1, a massive attack was launched on Iran in violation…

For more than a decade, naval and air forces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have exerted a strong presence in Taiwan’s immediate neighborhood.  One U.S. expert calculated that Taiwan recorded an average of about 10 Chinese military flights a day…

Last week, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission threatened to rescind the broadcast licenses of media entities that do not relate events in Iran or Ukraine as the Trump administration would like them to be related. He also attacked The Wall…

There is something revealing about the way Western governments talk about war when Iran is involved. The language changes almost instantly. Questions of legality fade into the background. Questions of power, stability, and markets move to the front. What…

After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began…

For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or “targeted killing” as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase. On March 17th and 18th, the United States…

Is Israel’s trajectory toward isolation and collapse self-inflicted, and has Zionism reached the point of no return? Every war led by Benjamin Netanyahu is framed not as policy, but as fate. “There are moments in which a nation faces two possibilities: to…

Let’s begin by recalling why the US Navy shot-down an Iranian airliner in July 1988 and brought 241 innocent men, women and children to their doom. The answer, of course, is that the Navy was conducting patrol operations in the Persian Gulf during the Tanker…

War is the most horrific series of events upon which any government can engage. It is systematic, industrialized, indiscriminate killing. It kills innocent adults and little girls. It often ruins the post-war lives of the killers. It is young men violently…

In the Western imagination, Taiwan is cast almost exclusively as a flourishing democracy under siege by a totalitarian neighbor, a moral clarity that fuels calls for military defense and ideological solidarity. Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s magisterial new history…

US President Ronald Reagan once declared that “Terrorism is the preferred weapon of weak and evil men.” While the ideological descendants of President Reagan love to incessantly describe Iran as the “#1 State Sponsor of Terrorism,” the US and its Western…

On the eve of the horrific World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001, the mullahs and their IRGC hooligans had been in power for nearly 22 years. Yet the record for that two decade interval subsequent to the founding of the Iranian Revolution does not…