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"I think this is going to take some time," our president warned last Saturday as he took off for a vacation on Martha's Vineyard, maybe because he felt he had to offer some explanation as Iraq collapsed along with his foreign policy in general. What was once Iraq is now divided, like ancient Gaul, into three parts -- Shi'a, Sunni and Kurdish -- all of which are themselves crumbling. So now Barack Obama tells us that it may take some time to put Iraq together again after it fell apart in record time once he withdrew American forces there in...

In 627, Mohammad’s earliest biographer, Ibn Ishaq, records that his army held off a twenty-five day siege by Mecca’s ruling tribe, the Quraysh, at his redoubt near Medina. When the prophet learned that the Meccan army included some of the city’s Jews, he ordered the attack of a nearby largely defenseless Jewish settlement and tribe, the Banu Qurayza. While the prophet was overseeing the decapitations, “He caught a glimpse of Rihanna, a beautiful Jewish woman, whose husband and father were beheaded before her eyes just hours earlier. Muhammad asked her to become his wife. She refused. So he took her...

The United Nations plays a supporting role in every war between Hamas and Israel. U.N. spokesmen routinely issue statements, accusations and denials about everyone's conduct, including their own (most recently they had to account for why they returned rockets, discovered in a U.N. school, to Hamas). Israel was denounced worldwide for an "attack" on a U.N. school said to be housing 3,000 civilians, but it was actually an attack on particular terrorists on the adjoining street. It's time to reconsider the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. First, what UNRWA isn't. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees provides humanitarian...

The past few weeks, from France to Gaza, have seen many Islamic attacks. A record for the deadliest attack in Tunisia was also set last week. Tunisia, an overwhelmingly Islamic country, is in the middle of a crackdown on Islamic terrorists who feel the current, democratic, regime is too moderate. The Tunisian Army is leading the crackdown and 14 Tunisian soldiers were killed last in that country while 20 more soldiers were wounded; the worst terrorist attack ever seen on Tunisia’s army. The attack which took place at two checkpoints near the Algerian border, was not atypical of Islamic attacks...

Our president and his crew of Great Minds have managed to "reset" relations with Russia, all right -- all the way back to Cold War times. With an America sick of all those entangling alliances once known as the Free World, and turning its back on old friends and the world in general, the stage was set for Moscow to start grabbing pieces of other countries again. First came a nibble of Georgia, then the whole Crimean peninsula, and now the swath of eastern Ukraine just across what used to be an international border. Emerging from hibernation, the Russian bear's...

Russian president Vladimir “Teflon” Putin is on a roll—or so we’re led to believe by the media. The Russian president combines the slick machismo of James Bond, the cojones of George Patton and the craftiness of Cardinal Richelieu. Actually, in his dealings with Cuba, Putin looks more like Barney Fife. We’re not accustomed to seeing Mr Macho-Cool Vladimir Putin made an international jackass. But many Cuba-watchers snickered as the hapless Russian President met with the Castro brothers on July 11th and “wrote off” their $32 billion debt to the Soviet Union. “That old thing? I never liked it anyway,” Cuba-watchers...

In 1933, the Holodomor was playing out in Ukraine. After the "kulaks," the independent farmers, had been liquidated in the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, a genocidal famine was imposed on Ukraine through seizure of her food production. Estimates of the dead range from two to nine million souls. Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who called reports of the famine "malignant propaganda," won a Pulitzer for his mendacity. In November 1933, during the Holodomor, the greatest liberal of them all, FDR, invited Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to receive official U.S. recognition of his master Stalin's murderous regime....

The bodies of 298 passengers and crew of Malaysia Air Flight 17, 80 of them children, lie unburied in a Ukrainian field while Vladimir Putin's men fire their weapons into the air to keep international investigators from approaching the site. Yes, "Putin's men." Calling them "Russian separatists" unnecessarily dignifies them. They are supplied, armed and trained by the despot in the Kremlin. At the very least, Putin is responsible for arming these dangerous actors. At most, it's possible the missile wasn't fired by Ukrainians at all, but by Russians, which would answer President Barack Obama's question: "What do they...

When it comes to an agreement with Iran about its nuclear program, no deal is better than a bad deal. Secretary of State John Kerry delivered the news to President Obama this week that a deal was unlikely by the July 20th deadline agreed to at the beginning of talks last September -- which no doubt disappointed his boss, who is desperate for some foreign policy success to point to. But unless Iran is willing to give up its program -- and dismantle the uranium-enriching centrifuges it currently operates and destroy its existing stockpile of heavily enriched uranium --...

George W. Bush never claimed to be prescient, but here he is in 2007, warning us what would happen if the United States prematurely pulled its troops out of Iraq before Iraqi forces were sufficiently trained, equipped and motivated to defend the country we gave back to them after the ouster of Saddam Hussein: "To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we're ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaida. It'd mean that we'd be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It'd...

The Arab Spring is over. Welcome to the Jihadi Spring. Across a huge swath of what, up until recently, had been known as Iraq and Syria, a transnational movement of Sunni Islamic extremists has taken control. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has conquered -- without much effort -- Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, along with most of the province of Nineveh. It's also taken Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown. Along the way it has ransacked banks (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars), pillaged weapon stockpiles (including the stuff we left behind for the Iraqi...

PARIS -- On June 6, the Central Intelligence Agency joined the social media platform Twitter with its first tweet: "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet." Presumably this is an attempt by the agency to develop its "brand." Here's why this is a really bad idea: -- The CIA doesn't need a brand. If anything, the agency is supposed to be all about discretion and secretiveness, meaning that it should be defined solely by its conspicuous absence. In fact, if the CIA ever wanted to run a TV ad, it should consist of 30 seconds...

Editor's Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison. First Lady Michelle Obama recently appeared on the Web holding a sign: #BringBackOurGirls. She was presumably acting with the full approval of her husband. President Barack Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of what was once repected as a Super Power. In London, Prime Minister David Cameron similarlyresorted to the Internet to express the concern of a nation once known as Great Britain. These fatuous responses to the kidnapping of nearly three hundred Christian girls by the Islamist Boko Haram in Nigeria have met with widespread derision, as they should. But these empty...

In President Barack Obama's egocentric world, everything -- civil war in Syria, Russian power grabs in Ukraine, Chinese claims to Vietnamese and Japanese territory in the South China Sea, and peace in the Middle East -- revolves around him. Has there ever been a more self-absorbed commander in chief in our nation's history? Not that one could imagine listening to the president talk this week about his role -- and, by extension, the role of the United States of America -- in the world. The president took the occasion of the commencement address to West Point on Wednesday to define...

Editor's Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison. When Sen. Barack Obama went to Berlin in 2008 and proclaimed himself a “citizen of the world,” he was acclaimed by hundreds of thousands of young Germans. They were as excited as many young Americans were by this avatar of Hope and Change. The candidate chose an odd backdrop for his address, however. Mr. Obama spoke in front of the Berlin Victory Column. It is an impressive monument to be sure, but it commemorates the lightning victory of Prussia in a lightning war against its unoffending little neighbor, Denmark. This...

CS Lewis warned us about men without chests. That is technocrats who use what Winston Churchill called “the lights of perverted science” to play God without ethics, without morality, without responsibility. And now they have a website. It's called globalchange.gov. And they have a legal mandate too, not just to investigate so-called climate change, but to investigate “global change” in general. “The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP,)” says the website, “was established by Presidential Initiative in 1989 and mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990 to ‘assist the Nation and the world to understand,...

The selection of Congressman Trey Gowdy as Chair of the Select Committee on Benghazi by House Speaker John Boehner was the best act of the Speaker in this Congress. Gowdy has impressed most fair observers with his preparation for prior Benghazi hearings, his careful questioning, his command of the facts and his approach to witnesses --allowing them to answer questions rather than eating up time with showboating. An experienced former state district attorney as well as a federal prosecutor for a half dozen years, Gowdy knows how to put together a case and how to assemble and mange a team....

Editor's note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison. The world has watched in dismay as Russia’s ruler, Vladimir Putin, has gobbled up Crimea. Now, he seems bent on dismembering Ukraine. Much of our attention has been focused on Putin and his next targets. Perhaps Taiwan is next. In the East, China’s Communist leaders are watching, too. They pay close attention to the actions of this former KGB agent. Putin is increasingly popular in Russia as he seeks to restore some of the power and prestige of the old USSR. For its part, China has been rattling a saber over...

As he seeks to rebuild the Russian empire, strongman Vladimir Putin has developed a terribly obnoxious habit. He keeps dragging the Obama White House back to a difficult place. It's called "reality." Putin's military capture of Crimea, a region of Ukraine, is just the latest example. His could be an act of willfulness, or a desperate attempt to stave off Russian decline. But in any case, no sane American would argue for a shooting war over Ukraine. The point is to avoid miscalculations that could lead to one. It's like that phone call at 3 a.m. to a White House...

NOTE The following text is a quote: Mullen: Military Has ‘Strategic Imperative’ to Save Resources By Lisa Daniel American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, Oct. 13, 2010 – The military has a “strategic imperative” to lead the nation in environmental conservation, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said here today. “We in the Defense Department have a role to play here -- not solely because we should be good stewards of the environment and our scarce resources, but also because there is a strategic imperative for us to reduce risk, improve efficiencies, and preserve our freedom of action whenever...