It’s a fickle and false religion, used to replace the ideologies we (a country of immigrants) escaped. Random high priests lurk all over the Internet, ready to pounce. Below are the Ten Commandments of the American Religion, as I see them.

The image of Samar, then 5 years old, screaming and splattered in blood after American soldiers opened fire on her family’s car in the northern town of Tal Afar in January 2005, illuminated the horror of civilian casualties and has been one of the few images from this conflict to rise to the pantheon of classic war photography.

The ball-busting defense of the tiny-yet-critical British fortress at Saragarhi is one of the most storied and famous tales of skull-crushing bravery in the already-badass military history of the Sikh people. The middle-finger-u-death response of the ferocious 21 men who bravely held their ground against impossible odds is often held up as the ultimate example of Sikh badassitude, which is really saying something considering that these balls-out Indian hardasses have stories about shit like the dude who ran around pureeing enemy soldiers apart even after being mostly decapitated by a broadsword to the throat. Yet despite this epic showdown being the basis for a national holiday among Sikhs and a valiant, head-cleaving last stand worthy of the Spartans at Thermopylae, this insane tale of 21 warriors going Horde Mode against roughly the entire male population of Central Asia in a single battle remains largely undocumented in Western military histories. This is their tale.

Three years into World War II, people thought they’d seen it all, including neighbors with concentration camp tattoos. RICHARD JACKSON remembers the day when a Nazi flag flew in the Bronx.

How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war.

The issue reminds me of the taxation and spending debates; many Americans want low taxes and high government spending, forever.  For airline security, at times we want to treat it as a matter of mere law enforcement, to be handled by others, and one which should not inconvenience our daily lives or infringe on our rights.  At the same time, so many Americans view airline security as a vital matter of foreign policy and indeed as part of a war.  We own and promote this view and yet we are outraged when asked to behave as one might be expected to in a theater of war.  

The main danger to liberty here is not the TSA but rather a set of American attitudes which, at the same time, take our current "war" both far too seriously and also not nearly seriously enough.

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.