No question about it: Afghans are way better off now than when the Taliban were running things.More >>

Lifting the ban on American women in combat roles is a stirring revolutionary idea, except that they were already there. 152 American female soldiers have already died in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is good that policy is now catching up with reality.More >>

Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, an Unexpected Journey is finally in theatres, capping off a 2012 whose offering of films offered disappointingly few highlights. (It’s tough to say if 2013 will be much better.) This also means that JRR Tolkien is with us once again, as Jackson presents the prequel that inspired all prequels, as The Hobbit must inevitably give way to The Lord of the Rings (the trilogy that inspired all trilogies).

Just as with The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit is about far more than merely the adventures of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorrin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage). As the Lord of the Rings is widely recognized as an allegory for the Second World War, The Hobbit is recognized as an allegory for the inter-war years; a time when the world mistook itself as being at peace, when in fact the grim machinations of Adolph Hitler were making another war inevitable.

Approximately midway through The Hobbit viewers encounter a scene that is a sombre reminder of this: an impromptu council called by Saruman the White in Rivendell. Present are Saruman himself, Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel. Elrond and Saruman both insist that Middle Earth is at peace. Gandalf boldly...More >>

War! Huh! What is it good for? Apart from ending slavery, stopping Nazism and Japanese militarism and defending civilized people from the ever-present onslaught of Islamofascism, right?

I can’t help but wonder if there is such a thing as a truly anti-war person, and if they exist, how lonely they must be. When the language of anti-war is invoked today, it is specifically meant as a protest, for the most part, against Israeli military operations in Gaza, the West Bank or Southern Lebanon, or US military operations in the War on Terror. We saw this with the thousands of demonstrations, both before and during the Iraqi War.

The problem with these antiwar movements is that they are, to be blunt, selective. You would hear nothing from them about the numerous conflicts in Africa. During the Cold War, they would not march outside the Soviet embassies against operations in Vietnam or Afghanistan. And now, they do not picket the Iranian embassy, which outsources terror to Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, just to start with.

It would be unfair to suggest...More >>