Moscow, no doubt, delights in the U.S. military’s reenactment of the Soviet’s Afghan boondoggle. But do America’s failures in the Middle East spell a conflict between the U.S. and Russia in the near future?    When I was a boy my Dad often would say: “Don’t ever be too confident that things cannot get worse.”  Well, my Dad is gone, but … [Read More]

In his new and intensely interesting and provocative book, Churchill Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Patrick J. Buchanan quotes British statesman Lord Salisbury thusly: “[T]he commonest error in politics … [is] sticking to the carcass of dead policies.” We in America are now living the piping days of a presidential campaign in which all candidates pledge to deliver “policy change” in … [Read More]

For nearly thirteen years between 1979 and 1992, the Central Intelligence Agency managed the U.S. government’s largest-ever covert action program in support of the Afghan mujahedin’s war to rid their country of Soviet occupiers and Afghan communists. The CIA learned many lessons from this experience, the most important also being one of the simplist:  Money is much appreciated by the Afghans … [Read More]