The San Bernardino massacre has brought the United States face -to- face with the Islamic State; the quest of Islamic militants for a new Caliphate is now at its very door step. Yet Washington refuses to borrow a thinking cap in the Af-Pak region. Instead, for short term stakes, it is pushing Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to hold peace dialogue with the Taliban under the aegis of Pakistan.
U.S. Air Force officials has begun to hire private companies to fly drone aircraft operating over Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The unprecedented move is in response to demands from the Obama administration to dramatically expand the drone war just as the Pentagon faces a critical shortage of military pilots.
Canada decided to limit Syrians to families, single women and children. This sounds like a human rights violation: discrimination against single men, on the pretext that they could be terrorists. Not fair, but understandable, given the Paris bombings and the need to be seen to act carefully. There are lots of women and children and married men still alive there to fill the quota.
The Middle East is fertile ground for conspiracy theories, and one growing to towering heights these days says the US created the Islamic State. But while the US may well have aided ISIS in its formative days with covert supplies of weapons and CIA funding (directly or indirectly, via Turkey leading political families) the one nation most responsible for iteration after iteration of "terrorist organizations" is Saudi Arabia which "created" not only the Islamic State, but al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and many other Sunni Jihadist groups in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan.
A mistrial was declared yesterday in Baltimore for one of the police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. Protests occurred immediately after the verdict was announced. One protester put it, "We want justice & we're just not going to get it". One thing seems clear w/this mistrial verdict of a black man dying while in police custody; the perception racial injustice is alive & well in America.