committing ourselves to an endless presence surrounded by hostile forces. In any case, thanks to the Maliki government, ISIS seems to enjoy a solid base of support in those areas.

"West," I thought, when I saw the op-ed. Another proud member of the COINdinista brigade, as Porch calls it (using the acronymn COIN for counterinsurgency), was Bing West, a Marine from the Vietnam era, who wrote The Village, a fascinating account of his service in a Marine Combined Action Platoon in a South Vietnamese hamlet. He too suggested that he and his fellow Marines were pursuing the proper strategy and that it could have won the war. Sure enough, a quick search revealed that Owen West is Bing West's son, and that they have a joint web page dedicatedto the glories of counterinsurgency. Dynasties are in fashion in the United States today, and this is another one. Nearly every generation produces a new war in remote lands. Most of them fail, and all those, in turn, give rise to books by bitter military officers, who sadly cannot accept that all their dedication, skill and sacrifice could not overcome the lack of any political basis for what the United States wanted to achieve.

Friday, June 12, 2015

In a 6-3 decision last week, the Supreme Courtruled in favor of the Obama Administration in the case of Zivotofsky v. Kerry, which turned on the President's power to determine whether Jerusalem is, or is not, part of Israel. The case was brought by the parents of Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky, the child