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.

Rand Paul, the great white hope, presumed enemy of extrajudicial killings from the air, shocked and disappointed his libertarian disciples today by embracing drone warfare and defending President Obama’s use of flying death machines to immolate two hostages held by Al Qaeda.

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.

Future generations will read of a warmongering Southern senator named Cotton and think we made that shit up. Will they be right? Let's lay out what we know, and what we don't.

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.

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.

Bowe Bergdahl, the eccentric Army enlistee and final Afghanistan P.O.W. whose release from Taliban custody left detractors screaming for his corpse, may face desertion charges soon. Or maybe not. No one knows for certain just yet. But either way, these blogospheric anti-Bergdahl snuff-porn fantasies will be heard, dammit.

Investigators this week called the military to task for paying Afghan contractors half a million dollars to construct a training base "made mostly of sand" that melted in the rain four months later, calling the now-demolished project "not only an embarrassment, but, more significantly, a waste of U.S. taxpayers' money."

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.

"As a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, I lost 80 soldiers," retired three-star general Daniel Bolger writes in today's Times. "As veterans, we tell ourselves it was all worth it." But Bolger points out what we rarely acknowledge on days like today: The stories we tell ourselves, more often than not, are bullshit.

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.

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.

It's tempting to believe, isn't it? Our mortal enemies in the Islamic State are so primordial, so primitive, so twisted that they have sex with barnyard animals. As evidenced by this drone video! Except it's bogus. Here's why.

Perhaps in hopes of revising his image as an ineffectual peacenik, or to bolster his grandson's chances in a tight gubernatorial race, or simply because he's an opinionated 90-year-old South Georgia peckerwood, ex-president Jimmy Carter today criticized Barack Obama for dropping the ball on ISIS.

Eric Frein, the armed survivalist suspected of shooting two Pennsylvania state troopers who has evaded capture in the woods for nearly a month, participated in war reenactments as a variety of bad guys, but other members of the reenactor community want to make it clear that they're peaceable.