ArcaMax

If Colin Powell's life has meaning, it is as a cautionary tale about the perils of going along to get along.

Rarely has history offered such a stark example of a human being offered a clear existential choice between right and wrong. Hardly ever has so much hung in the balance for humanity and for an individual's soul as when then-Secretary of ...Read more

Activists harass White House officials and senators as they eat dinner at restaurants. Another senator was recently stalked into the ladies' room, where her pursuers shouted derision at her stall. Many other politicians have suffered protest demonstrations at their homes.

Now that they're beleaguered, this may be the perfect time to convince ...Read more

The British tabloid The Daily Mail is taking small-arms fire for publishing an article bearing the headline: "It's the trendy Taliban! Young fighters accessorize their traditional clothes with sunglasses, stylish trainers and own-branded baseball caps -- while cracking down on Western dressing." Though the piece took note of the brutal ...Read more

Journalism needs a new rule. Are you reporting about a human rights violation in another country? If the United States commits the same offense, you should be required to refer to that fact in your article or broadcast.

Criticizing how a nation treats its prisoners or responds to internal dissent implies that the behavior being discussed falls ...Read more

President Joe Biden is taking heat from Democrats, not for his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan -- that's popular -- but for his haphazard pullout that, self-serving Rumsfeldian "stuff happens," "wars end messily" platitudes aside, could have been executed more efficiently. They blame George W. Bush for starting America's longest war, ...Read more

If crisis creates opportunity, we couldn't possibly have squandered the possibilities presented by 9/11 more spectacularly. We certainly couldn't have failed its tests more completely. Twenty years after 9/11, it is clear that the United States is ruled by idiots and that we, the people are complicit with their moronic behavior.

"We had to do...Read more

Taxes are the price we pay for government. But a government that doesn't provide basic bureaucratic services is no government at all, and it doesn't deserve our tax dollars.

Afghan translators and others who worked for the U.S. military, American journalists and nongovernmental organizations aren't Americans and don't pay taxes, but the U.S. ...Read more

How will the Taliban govern Afghanistan? It may be up to us.

The U.S. is out, but what the Biden administration and its Western allies do in the weeks and months ahead will have a big influence on whether the Central Asian country reverts to the insular, medieval barbarism of the 1990s or modernizes in order to conform to major international ...Read more

Thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands of dead Afghans, $2 trillion down the toilet, a Taliban victory that leaves America's international reputation in shambles. This disaster didn't happen by itself. Political and military leaders, aided and abetted by the news media, are responsible and should be held accountable. Voters let ...Read more

You're going to read a lot of Afghan War postmortems in the coming days. Some have already been published.

Don't listen to anyone who was ever in favor of occupying Afghanistan. They were wrong for thinking that the United States could have won. They were stupid to think that invading Afghanistan would prevent another 9/11, a horror for which ...Read more

Better late than never: Most Americans now believe that invading Afghanistan was a mistake. But what good does it do to recognize a screw-up unless you learn from it?

Failure to understand what went wrong and why sets you up for doing the same thing later. That's what happened after Vietnam; rather than face the truth that we went there to prop...Read more

Americans are politically fractured, but they agree that our longest war was a mistake. Seventy-seven percent of Americans, including many Republicans, told a recent CBS News poll that they agree with President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. That's a reversal from the conflict's early days, when between 85% and 90% of ...Read more