Elvis is back in the building

++President Obama returned from Martha's Vineyard last night. Today. he was briefed on the events in Ferguson, Missouri as well as the situation in Iraq. Apparently,the White House was not informed by Governor Nixon that Missouri called out the National Guard after more outrage last night during the curfew.

++The family's autopsy revealed that Michael Brown was hit by six bullets, two in the head. The head shoots meant that there was no chance to revive him. The bullet wounds suggested that he had his hands and arms in a position of surrender.

++On another subject,Eric Reeves,professor at Smith College and a former classmate of mine at William, has a superb op-ed on the problems with Darfur and the UN-AU peace keeping force that seems unable to protect the people there. Eric has been a one man campaigner on Darfur from the beginning and deserves a great deal of praise for his meticulous work.

++Meanwhile as the Kurds took back the dam near Mosul, Eli Lake is thrilled that President Obama is moving to a big war against terrorism. Lake complained that President Obama only considered Al Qaeda a threat to the West and not every jihadist group. To bolster his argument,the Vatican let it leak that even though Pope Francis has denounced the war in the Middle East and the Ukraine,he really wants the populations protected by force. The Archbishop of Canterbury attacked the Cameron government for failing to have a strategy to fight Islamist threats and urged it to protect the Anglican community in Iraq.

++Over the weekend I watched Noam Chomsky's talk to the Palestinian students at UCLA. Chomsky said many things of interest, particularly his historical rendition of how we got to where we are in Gaza. But the striking thing to me was his analysis--which I believe is true--that the United States basically destroyed secular Arab political forces in favor of Islamists. In short, we created an ideological vacuum that is being filled with jihadists from Al Qaeda to ISIS, from the Hezbollah to Hamas. Chomsky was no apologist for regimes like Saddam Hussein but pointed out that the nationalist, secular strain of Arab politics we saw during Nasser and others has vanished. And we are now confronting the outcome.

++Neocons who are urging President Obama to get more aggressive in the Middle East fail to appreciate the $4-6 trillion mistake of Iraq. You are not starting a square on in dealing with this issue but behind the eight ball with the long term damage of the Iraq War affecting our economy and the escalating costs of dealing with veterans suffering from a host of illnesses.

++Consider this sad irony. President Obama did orchestrate regime change in Iraq with the removal of al-Maliki. We have to be very reflective on whether we want more of that in the future. 

++Over the weekend, I received strange e-mails from the Heritage Foundations and Guns and Patriots. They read "The American Empire is threatened". Only in the last administration did conservatives refer to the American empire. Usually, that has been the language of the Left in a negative sense. Here it was a positive idea that President Obama is jeopardizing. A Worrisome trend.