Photo Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; Harris and Ewing Collection Forty-seven Democrats turning their backs on principle—and on their president—in Thursday’s House vote on an “Arab Exclusion Act” reminded me of a conversation I had with the late Maury Maverick Jr. Maverick was a San Antonio civil rights lawyer, son of New […]

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  Some cover-ups are scandalous. Others, like those surrounding the First Gulf War, suggest an official callousness that shocks and awes. During and immediately after the war, 200,000 of 700,000 U.S. troops were exposed to nerve gas and other chemical agents. The Department of Defense (DOD), fully aware of the chemical hazards and the troop […]

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  In Syria, the United States has adopted a none-of-the-above strategy. President Barack Obama has launched airstrikes against ISIS targets in the Euphrates Valley and against an unrelated radical group near Aleppo. But the administration does not want airstrikes to benefit Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. So it proposes to spend $500 million to create a […]

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  Exit Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Not a day too soon and five years too late. The enormity of the tragedy he helped create is almost too great to grasp. Civilians murdered with weapons the U.S. had provided an Iraqi army that proved incapable of confronting a small but disciplined band of terrorists. Rape […]

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  Iassume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side,” the late columnist Molly Ivins wrote in 2003. “The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’” Ivins never considered herself an authority on […]

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