Or Five Lessons in the History of American Defeat. By Tom Engelhardt.

South of fallujah’s Route Fran were hundreds of insurgents who’d spent months digging trench lines, emplacing roadside bombs, barricading streets, training with their weapons, reading the Koran, and watching videos of suicide bombers to inspire them for the fight to come. North of Route Fran were the roughly 1,000 men of 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, preparing themselves for the assault. Route Fran itself was a wide, four-lane highway. On November 9, 2004, the highway was wet—it’d rained the previous day—and the sky was gray and foreboding.

The U.S. State Department said Friday that it has proof that Syria was behind the suspected gas attack that left more than 40 civilians dead in Douma last week. Heather Nauert, a department spokesperson, said officials are still trying to determine what kind of chemical was used in the attack.

Attempts to focus world attention on the calamity facing the Kurds of Afrin largely failed as the Turkish forces closed in on the city…By Patrick Cockburn. (Mar. 23, 2018)

How Unwanted Wars Begin. By Robert Jervis and Mira Rapp-Hooper. (Apr. 5, 2018)

At press time, MSNBC sources confirmed that Maddow’s ratings had reached an all-time high. [Satire]

The dominant propaganda meme of the day, as already noted by Colonel Lang, is that Bashar al Assad unleashed chemical weapons on “innocent women and children” in rebel held territory… By Publius Tacitus.

The group in control of the last rebel bastion near Damascus appeared on Sunday to have agreed a deal for its fighters to make peace with the government or quit the eastern Ghouta enclave, Syrian state media said on Sunday.

The 'Liberator of Libya' turned on the Colonel in 2011, but it seems the former French president's ascendancy owed much to the late dictator's beneficence. By Pepe Escobar.

Those crossed swords in Baghdad, the rockets swooping heavenwards in the giant wall painting in his palace conference room, the military parades – they would surely have tickled the interest of the present lunatic in the White House. Kim Jong-un is Trump’s Saddam. By Robert Fisk.

Brushing aside warnings that he was about to unleash Armageddon in the Middle East, George W. Bush launched an unprovoked attack on Iraq on March 19-20, 2003, the ramifications of which we are still grappling with today, Nat Parry writes.

The making of Threads, the nuclear war film that shocked a generation. By Jude Rogers.

A review of the Clinton and Bush years reminds us what really dooms a presidency. By T.A. Frank.

Prepare for dumb wars. By W. James Antle III.

Please, let's not forget what a dangerous nut John Bolton is. By Damon Linker.

War, or the danger of war, is always an opportunity to silence troublemakers. By Peter Hitchens.

Trump’s staff purge is the start of a dark and dangerous new phase in which no constraints on his whims will be tolerated. By Andrew Sullivan.

Everyone knows Bolton is a hawk. Less understood is how he labored in secret to drive Washington and Tehran apart. By Gareth Porter. (Mar. 22, 2018)

The invasion is no longer just one of the great crimes of this or any age – it's become a crossroads event in the history of America's decline. By Matt Taibbi.