Is there hope for Iraq? It depends on what you are hoping for. It is becoming clearer that there is little hope of destroying Islamic State in Iraq. Islamic State has no shortage of new recruits. Its fighters capture heavy weapons with such ease that the United States is forced to direct air strikes against equipment abandoned by the Iraqis — even as it ships in more. Islamic State holds territory that will allow it to trade land for time, morph into an insurgency and preserve its forces by...

This month Congress will consider whether to renew the charter of the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank). Ex-Im Bank is a New Deal-era federal program that uses taxpayer funds to subsidize the exports of American businesses. Foreign businesses, including state-owned corporations, also benefit from Ex-Im Bank. One country that has benefited from $1.5 billion of Ex-Im Bank loans is Russia. Venezuela, Pakistan, and China have also benefited from Ex-Im Bank loans. With Ex-Im Bank’s track record of...

“Hey, guys, we’ll be here long after you are gone,” gloated a high-ranking CIA official during a hearing of the US Senate’s “Church Committee” investigation of illegal domestic intelligence operations forty years ago. What this meant, according to Peter Fenn, Senator Church’s Chief of Staff, “was, `we’ll wait you out.'” Church, an Idaho Democrat who briefly ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 1976, had served in Army Intelligence during World War II and had supported the disastrous...

It’s been a bad time for foes of ISIS. Islamic State (IS) scored a neat hat-trick by invading strategic Ramadi in Iraq’s mainly Sunni Anbar province, occupying Syria’s historic gem Palmyra, and taking over Al-Tanf, the last remaining border crossing with Iraq. The multinational, American-led "Coalition" launched last August to thwart Islamic State’s (IS, formerly ISIS) march across Syria and Iraq…did nothing. And so Baghdad and Washington are pointing fingers, each accusing the other of being...

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”—William Binney, NSA whistleblower We now have a fourth branch of government. As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach...

During the Cold War Washington was concerned about communists fomenting street protests that they could turn into revolutions, with groomed politicians waiting in the wings to take over the new government, thus expanding the Soviet empire. Today this is precisely what Washington does. We recently witnessed this operation in Ukraine and now it seems to be underway in Macedonia. The National Endowment for Democracy was established in 1983. The official purpose is to promote democracy abroad. The...

Iraq? On another Memorial Day, we’re still talking about Iraq? Remembering I attended the 2015 commencement ceremonies at Fordham University in New York. The otherwise typical ritual (future, global, passion, do what you love, you’ll never forget this place) began oddly, with an admonition to pause for a moment in honor of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a special congratulations to veterans among the graduating class. No other group was so singled out. At William and Mary, a...

This week I found myself in rare agreement with Janet Yellen when she admitted that her economic predictions are likely to be wrong. Sadly, Yellen did not follow up her admission by handing in her resignation and joining efforts to end the Fed. An honest examination of the Federal Reserve’s record over the past seven years clearly shows that the American people would be better off without it. Following the bursting of the Federal Reserve-created housing bubble, the Fed embarked on an...

News media coverage of the Camp David summit between President Barack Obama and Gulf Cooperation Council members has focused largely on Obama’s success in getting the GCC States to go along with the negotiation of a nuclear agreement with Iran. But the much more consequential story of the summit is Obama’s decision not to confront Saudi Arabia and Qatar about their financing of an al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria that has made the most dramatic gains in the jihadist war against the Assad regime. For...

War, what's it good for? Aside from countless deaths of innocent civilians of course, it means a GDP boost for the biggest exporter of weapons on earth, the United States, and even more profits for the US military-industrial complex. Profits which mean the shareholders of America's arms manufacturers get even richer. Which is why following months of middle-eastern sabre ratling and numerous quasi-wars already raging in the region, moments ago the U.S. State Department approved the sale of 10...

I hear from competent reporters on the ground in Iraq that a great panic has set in within the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. Prime Minister Abadi, like his Shia co-religionist Maliki, has been engaged in a thorough effort to disadvantage all the Sunni populations of Iraq. This would include: the Kurds (90 percent Sunni), the Sunni Arabs, the Sunni Turkomans, etc. To accomplish this, Sunni majority areas have been systematically deprived of weaponry and funding for years. Alternatively, Shia...

“If we’re training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers? If you look at the police department, their creed is to protect and to serve. A soldier’s mission is to engage his enemy in close combat and kill him. Do we want police officers to have that mentality? Of course not.”— Arthur Rizer, former civilian police officer and member of the military Talk about poor timing. Then again, perhaps...

It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib. Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed. The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was...