Remember Baghdad Bob? You know, the Iraqi Information Minister who, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, told reporters to believe him, not their lying eyes. As American troops advanced on the capital, Baghdad Bob made one pronouncement after another about how they were being repelled, poisoned, American troops were committing suicide, and the glorious Iraqi …
Do you remember the last time we saw helicopters evacuating embassy personnel and civilians following a U.S. overseas collapse? If you said April 29-30, 1975, upon the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army, you’d show you have a sense of history. Something that seems to not be in the portfolio of this country’s …
That’s the long and the short of it: I’ve moved to Substack with my writing and have given up on Medium. I’ll tell you why. From the time I started my blogs more than four years ago, I co-published most of my posts on Medium. I was attracted by the possibility of a large, …
An old Foreign Service buddy of mine recently turned me on to the book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Co-authored by writer Elliott Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis, my friend tells me the novel is all the buzz inside the Beltway these days. In no small measure, this is because in …
If you live in America, as I do, and you feel like the bottom monkey in that photo, no one would blame you. That might be true in some other countries right now, too, but I’m relating it mostly to my own country. Watching the latest missteps, blunders, malfeasance, general incompetence, obvious dementia, and shameless …