Michael Vlahos

Official Disclaimer: This take is mine and mine alone.

Today is a national commemoration once called Armistice Day: The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. In its terrible last nine months, 10,000 Americans were dying every month so that this would be the War to End...

Official Disclaimer: This is my take, and mine alone.

I thought at least someone would ask the question. This is after all a solemn commemorative occasion. It is perhaps our only real moment for constructive reflection, because this anniversary also effectively marks the end of the war itself.

It...

The United States has pursued a self-defeating client king strategy in the greater Middle East. It failed in Iran in 1979 and it has failed now in Egypt. It has failed because the global spirit of the age has changed, and America has not yet changed with it. This is...

As Hu descends from the Heavens, the Right has found a new adversary to make American hearts race strong and true. China for its part is acting like a great power teen, testing limits and ready, at least rhetorically, to act out.

The big question raised by the Right, daggers...

Miners. Trapped. No way out. Miraculously rescued. Happy end. End of story.

Not so fast.

The resurrection of Chile's lost miners is a testament to the power of belonging and meaning in human life.

We humans live singularly evanescent lives. Our consciousness is like to the Moth: Done in the...

The Mother Goddess has come into American politics. Her appearance through Sarah Palin is divine sign of an American identity crisis as deep as any in our history, and her intercession promises to alter national identity forever as well....

The American religion puts its faith in Divine Progress. But we now begin to look like ancient Greeks and Romans who looked backward to a lost Golden Age. Consider Jack Kennedy and James Bond: 1962, Dr. No.

Granite-gray three-button suits, Bronzoni silk ties (very thin), unfiltered cigarettes, and...

Bigeard is dead.

Who is General Marcel Bigeard, and why should we care?

First in on the Plaines Des Jarres at Dien Bien Phu: The enterprise that doomed the French Empire. Then, marching in Lizard-cap into the Battle of Algiers with Massu:

"At Dien Bien Phu as...

The last of the Roman blockbusters of the 1960s was also the most interesting politically. The Fall of the Roman Empire was designed as an allegory of us, and released in the year Lyndon Johnson so passionately ramped up our stake in Vietnam.

This gorgeous (if tendentious) production was not...

"This is language that we have not heard since the time of Gamal Abdul Nasser." Thus wrote the influential chief editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, referring to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's fiery response to the Israeli assault on the Gaza flotilla -- adding that such "manly" positions and...

Grazing airy electron opinion, the firing of Denny Blair -- especially him of most High Court title -- is surely a blog-seduction most likely to touch-off tremulous surface fanning and gasps, whetting unfettered gossip: All fluttering to those inmost whisperings and intimate doings in the sacred precincts of our Imperial...

The world is changing, but not the way we think. Once the bringer of change, America has now become the enemy of change. After nine Iliad-years fighting change, we find change remaking us. Not only have we lost control -- we shockingly find ourselves the midwife of the very future...

Steely Dan would say: "And they wrote it on the wall," inscribed like the stone stele of Daniel 5:1-31. The words tell us when we will leave.

But how to decode these obscure, fateful words?

Americans like to compare themselves to old Romans, especially those martial...

The place: the River Frigidus, in a country we now call Bosnia. The time: autumn, 394. Two Roman emperors are at war, with the world in the balance. A deciding factor: Alaric's Gothic tribal militia. His shock troops storm the Laager, helping defeat the Western armies and reuniting the empire....

It is our resolute preference to see Zarqawi's death on our terms: what it means to us, how it affects our war. But what does his death mean to the movement of revolutionary Muslim revivalism that we call "Islamic radicalism?"

Two years ago I wrote a paper, Two Enemies: Non-State...

Will we fight Iran?

Another way to ask the question is: Will it be a war of choice?

In other words, will war happen because we want it, and freely decide that this is the best outcome of policies we have approved?

Or instead, will relentless stories -- iron...

The President's State of the Union message reminds us that war is more than violent activity -- it is also symbolic activity.

But what kind of symbolic activity? War is about meaning: war's symbols celebrate who we are, and wars do this by telling us a sacred story. The best...

There are two famous clichés about foreign wars and domestic politics.

The first of course is emblazoned by Vietnam, where the war that goes wrong over there comes back home to task our very souls. Perhaps it leads to a constitutional crisis narrowly averted, like Watergate. Perhaps, like the Mexican...

The Global War on Terrorism has produced its share of domestic political battles. But these little battles never get to the heart of the GWOT. Its existential "big ideas" are still unquestioned after four years.

I have been exchanging emails with a friend high up in the administration. He defends...

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier's novel of the American Civil War's final months, has much to tell us about Iraq.

First, almost nothing can be achieved in a place with multiple competing armed authorities, each saying that they are the real law, and each all too ready to take human life...