America

Submitted by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

The vicious attack on the Brussels airport and metro underscores the futility of focusing on the Syrian “Caliphate” as the epicenter of terrorism: as I’ve been saying in this space since 2001, the snake has no head. Both al-Qaeda and now ISIS are protean entities with a vast geographical spread, and what the Brussels attack – and, before it, the Paris attack – show is that they have successfully colonized Europe.

It would be difficult to find a program that better exemplifies the word “failure” than the Pentagon’s “train and equip” effort in Syria.

Last May, US Central Command issued a hilariously absurd press release outlining what was quite obviously going to be a disastrous effort to arm rebel fighters. “The US military and partner forces have begun training the initial class of appropriately vetted Syrian opposition recruits this week to support the effort to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL in Syria,” the PR read.

Dear Tim Cook, the DoJ and FBI will no longer require your assistance in unlocking the iPhone of Syed Farook who, along with his wife Tashfeen Malik, murdered more than a dozen people at an employee holiday party in San Bernardino last December. 

Fantastic, long interview by Tyler Cowen with Jon Haidt, one of my intellectual heroes. Here’s an excerpt I really like. Let’s say you had an army in which everybody was told to do their own thing. How well would they achieve their purpose, which is to win wars? They would be terrible at it! Well, consider the contemporary university. Excerpt:

Belgium. Iraq. Pakistan.

Each of those countries was rocked by at least one horrific suicide blast last week. In Belgium, it was a crowded airport and metro. In Iraq, a soccer field. In Pakistan, a park popular with women and children.

The combined death toll from those attacks alone: more than 130.