Every empire had security reasons, to go along with economic ones, to justify permanent military occupation. I say this: Kill the terrorists. Destroy their bases. When necessary, go back and do it again. Don’t occupy foreign nations. As the United States pulls its troops out of Afghanistan after a 20-year war, The Imaginative Conservative looks back at [...]
The Afghan War was, at its inception, a just war. If the Taliban would not turn over bin Laden and those who plotted the mass murder of 3,000 Americans, we had a right to go in after him. But we decided to stay on and convert the most tribalized and xenophobic land on earth into [...]
The strategy that President Obama laid out Wednesday night to “degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL,” is incoherent, inconsistent and, ultimately, non-credible. A year ago, Obama and John Kerry were straining at the leash to launch air strikes on Syrian President Bashar Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons in [...]
The latest upsurge in Islamic extremism, carried out by “ISIS” or “the Islamic State,” should be deeply troubling for all Americans. I must admit that at the sight of innocents, including innocent Americans and Christians attempting to mind their own business, being beheaded, my first reaction was anger and a desire for revenge, followed by [...]
Mark Twain said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Mark Steyn is fairly adept at spotting the rhymes, and today, as Iraq disintegrates, he eyed another one. After the U.S. government withdrew its support for Cambodia, it offered Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak an escape route from the communists. Prince Matak then penned an open letter to United States Ambassador John Gunther [...]
(An excerpt from American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, 2005) The roots of this ongoing conflict, a war which has raged at various levels of intensity from 1990 to the present, lie in the early twentieth century, when then colonial power Great Britain created from the ruins of the Ottoman empire the artificial nation of “Iraq.” At the [...]
Erik Prince Please forgive the brevity of this “With Both Barrels.” It’s the weekend. I wasn’t planning on posting, but Dedra is still drinking coffee, the kids are cleaning (whoo-hoo!), and it’s a grey, rainy day outside. Not good weather for the last Saturday of the summer. But, hey, enough about the Birzer [...]