If after the World Cup anyone is looking for a new underdog worthy of support, I submit the Kurds as the most up-and-coming players of the geopolitical world. The Kurds are the Middle East’s classic underdog story: a swashbuckling ethnic…
There is something going on that I may not have told you about. It is really a matter of semantics, but it has turned out to be rather significant. You may have noticed the multiplicity of English translations for ISIS,…
The American Spectator has already predicted a win for Tea Partier Chris McDaniel in today’s special Mississippi primary run-off. Senator Thad Cochran’s embarrassing loss to McDaniel in the earlier June election (he took 48.9 percent of the vote, McDaniels took…
It’s official. Iraq is having a party for all the sects in the Middle East, and we’re not invited. Our Gulf allies were surprised to hear that we ever thought we were coming. The Wall Street Journal reported on the awkward…
A Middle Eastern proverb tells of a Bedouin chief who believed that consumption of fowl would increase his masculine dignity and bought a turkey. One morning, he found his turkey was gone from its usual place outside his tent. The…
The “war on women” continues, but not in the way you might think; in fact, the HHS mandate of Obamacare might be more of a “war on nuns.” This mandate, which wasn’t passed by Congress, is the “Thou shalt provide…
“Small government” may be a catchphrase of conservatism, but it is only one side of the coin that buys a healthy society. Limited government is not an indisputable good, but rather a means to an important end. This end involves…
The deterioration of Iraq into sectarian violence demands the same strategy espoused by Treebeard the Ent in Tolkien’s The Two Towers: “Don’t be hasty.” The al-Qaeda offshoot ISIS added the strategic Iraqi city of Tal Afar to its prizes Monday,…
The demographics of the Middle East have long clashed with the region’s geography. Nowhere is this clearer than in Iraq, where the arbitrarily drawn borders enclose three distinct ethnic groups. Now, with violence from Syria spilling into Iraq, the region,…
“We are waiting to die,” Mahmoud al Taie, an Iraqi dentist, told the Wall Street Journal as he prepared to flee Mosul. If he does, a country that desperately needs every upright citizen it has will have lost yet another health…