News Sources for Conflicts in the West Asia/Eurasia Zone

Originally published 27 August 2014; last updated 10 November  2014.

(You can search just the web sites listed on this page via https using a Google Custom Search Engine at U.S. Foreign Wars. Note that this search omits the sources whose titles below are preceded by an asterisk (*).)

I have a perhaps morbid fascination with U.S. foreign wars because of my involuntary 27-month participation in one of them, in Viet Nam, which was the defining experience of my adult life. The kid who went over there never came back, and all that jazz.

So keeping up with America's many ongoing foreign wars of aggression (most being fought by proxy) and what leads to such wars is one of my abiding interests.

I'm Out of the Hospital ...

From an email in late August, 2005 to the youngest son, in which the author describes how he survived several days of brutal and abject captivity:

Hi, Bug,

Tammy said she let you know I was in the hospital. They think it was diverticulitis, but aren't sure. All I really know is that I couldn't poop and I couldn't stop trying to poop, then the waves of pain finally hit unbearable. So I roused Tammy from bed and had her haul both me and my painful ass to the emergency room.

More Comedy from the Obama White House

I've previously noted that Obama Administration foreign policy statements sometimes adopt a comedic and hypocritical double-standard. It sometimes seems like a contest among White House speech writers to see which can most often invoke the "do as I say, not as I do" metaphor that boosts American exceptionalism to new heights, an immunity of the U.S. and its allies from the same international law that governs all nations.

We got another such gem three days ago from White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden:

The Lesser of Two Evils Is Still Evil

It is an unwritten American law: in any close election, both the Democratic and Republican candidates will have as their major campaign slogan, "vote for the lesser of two evils." Here's a sterling example from Ronald Reagan:

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

The lesser of two evils argument is typically invoked immediately before listing a parade of horribles grossly mischaracterizing the effect of voting for the other candidate. (The argument is, of course, subject to the poetic license of apocalyptic hyperbole.)