Who’s to blame for ISIS’s rise to power in Syria and Iraq? How do we stop it? What’s the end goal really look like? If you read Gawker’s April interview with badass intel officer Malcolm Nance, you know a bit about these questions. He offers more (depressing) background today in the Intercept.

There was Dick Cheney, as always, arguing that the only way to deal with Iran was to bomb it back to 1953. But President George W. Bush, on the unanimous advice of his generals, decided such a campaign would be a disaster—and Cheney began an end run that’s working wonders with today’s top Republicans.

Last week, we posed a question. This week, we have an answer: "Senator Tom Cotton," Republican of Arkansas, is in fact not a natural human organism, but a hybrid experiment in which the brain of German general Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff has been grafted onto the frame of a pugnacious giraffe.

Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.

As nuclear negotiations between Iran and U.S. allies go down to the wire, the Islamic Republic has accused America of killing two of its advisers in the ground war in Iraq with an unmanned aerial vehicle—though U.S. officials say the allegation has no merit.

Is the world flat enough for you yet? Do you require more flattening? 'Cause it can be arranged. Nay, it should be, according to Tom Friedman, who—and he's just spitballing here—wonders, in the New York Times, where he is paid to spitball for Pulitzers: "Should we be arming ISIS?"

Kurdish forces besieging an ISIS-held position Tuesday have confirmed that Ashley Johnston, 28, an Australian pictured above at right, was killed fighting with the Kurds, making him apparently the first English-speaking Westerner to die in combat against the Islamic State.

It takes a special kind of person to leave home and join a foreign militia to fight the theocratic brutes of the Islamic State's army. It takes an even more special person to realize, a little too late, that his chosen anti-ISIS militia holds a political and religious ideology that's as antithetical to his own as ISIS's.

Since visiting Iraq in 2003, NBC and its star news anchor, Brian Williams, have maintained that Williams was aboard a Chinook helicopter when it was hit and grounded by enemy fire over Baghdad. But after repeating the claim last week, Williams was forced by contrary reports from the helo's crew to completely recant his story today.

The Taliban, bane of America's post-9/11 Afghanistan operations, said Wednesday that they captured Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, a renegade insurgent and ex-Guantanamo detainee who was in Afghanistan recruiting for the Islamic State, the latest parry in a messy internecine conflict between violent Islamist regimes.

Glistening war dome Eli Lake, late of Bloomberg Politics, just can't stand that hand-wringing Senate report about torture being bad and ineffective. So he turned it upside down and tried to read it all backwards-like, and it turns out torture is super good at helping Americans, maybe, possibly. That'll be $275,000, please!

In one of its last acts before Republicans take leadership, the Senate intelligence committee today released another report again acknowledging that yes, the United States tortured people in the war on terror—and no, it didn't really help much. Here's what we know today.

One of the original tires on the axis of evil is apparently being swapped out for a more aggressive tread: Iran, that longtime Islamic bogeyman used in bedtime stories to scare Republican children straight, is now bombing the far-more-terrifying Islamic State in an apparent convergence of interests with the U.S.

A U.S. airstrike over the weekend may have targeted and hit Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the fancy watch-wearing head of ISIS's wannabe worldwide caliphate. He may be dead, according to some people. Top people.

The Free Syrian Army, a moderate militia being trained and equipped by the Obama administration in hopes that it could defeat both ISIS and Syria's secular dictator, was routed by Al Qaeda allies over the weekend, with many of its men and weapons being taken over for the jihadi cause.

Erik Prince, the diminutive Blackwater founder, knows why four of his ex-employees were just convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians with machine guns: the goddamn anti-war hippies.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows more Americans than ever want a ground war to fight ISIS. More Caucasian, Republican, male, senior Americans than ever!

It's been more than two months since America started dropping laser-guided freedom all over the Islamic State. But for some reason, the flowers of liberty aren't blooming in all those new holes we've dug in Iraq and Syria. Perhaps it's because we should bomb more shit, say two experts in talking about bombing shit.

In bunkers now held by ISIS militants, and sometimes in streets emptied by bomb threats, scores of American service members secretly helped find and dispose of Saddam Hussein's aging chemical weapons. Now stateside, many troops are sick with mystery ailments the military has at times tried to conceal.

To defeat the Islamists of ISIS, everyone says, you need boots on the ground. How about motorcycle boots? Kurt Sutter from Sons of Anarchy has to be pissed he didn't think up this story line first.