If you're looking for a handy guide to the blame game over the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Vox has a helpful primer to "how the US, its allies, and its enemies all made ISIS possible." Zach Beauchamp's list of the guilty--the United States, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and his sectarian […]

The gruesome murder of American reporter James Foley was horrific enough, but now right-wing bloggers and conservative commentators seem determined to make it more grotesque still. With word from ABC News that the Obama White House was aware that ISIS was threatening to kill Foley and fellow journalist Steven Sotloff in retaliation for American air […]

With tensions still running very high in Ferguson, Missouri, Governor Jay Nixon ordered National Guard units to the area in an effort to restore calm--and confidence--in the community. It would be hard for the Guardsmen to do worse than the local police, whose heavy-handed, confrontational tactics and shocking insensitivity only served to incite conflict. And […]

When the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) overran Mosul and Tikrit two months ago, I laid out 10 Lessons from Bush's Fiasco in Iraq. But like Spinal Tap, I should have gone to 11. I forgot to include one additional moral from Mesopotamia: John McCain got it all horribly wrong. […]

Politico practices journalism in much the same way that bricks float.* For years, its mission to "win the morning" has often come at the expense of the truth. But with Katie Glueck's piece on Iraq titled "Neocons to Obama: No Half-Measures," the publication Charles Pierce rightly mocks as "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" has reached […]

Back in 2010, Arizona Senator John McCain told surprised Americans that "I never considered myself a maverick." Now, the failed 2000 and 2008 GOP White House hopeful is telling an even bigger tall tale about the Iraq war he so vociferously supported. "You'll find this surprising," he told CNN's Jake Tapper about a would-have-been McCain […]

House Republicans have announced that constitutional expert and George Washington University Professor Jonathan Turley will be their star witness in upcoming hearings regarding Speaker John Boehner's proposed lawsuit against President Obama. Turley's starring role may be an uncomfortable one. For starters, just two weeks ago he co-authored an op-ed with Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson […]

This weekend, the architects of President Bush's disastrous Iraq war fanned out in what might deemed Operation Blame Shift. But of all the Republican efforts to make Barack Obama's the face of Bush's failure, perhaps none is more pathetic than that of L. Paul Bremer. On television and in the op-ed pages of the Wall […]

"Obama lost Iraq." With the fall of Mosul and Tikrit to the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), that will be the rallying cry for Republicans for the foreseeable future. Already, there is a chorus of voices from John McCain and the Wall Street Journal to right-wing radio and the […]

In December 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lectured American troops worried about vital equipment shortages plaguing U.S. combat forces in Iraq. "You go to war with the army you have," Rumsfeld pontificated, "not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Now, Republicans are learning, Rumsfeld's condescending maxim applies to […]