Full Program

Part 1

Today we look into the rise of Daesh, the self-declared Islamic State that has emerged as the biggest foreign policy issue in 2015, as a few thousand of these Mad Max marauders in the deserts of Syria and Iraq captured the headlines. We begin with a program broadcast on June 14, 2015 discussing the addition of 450 more “trainers” and “advisers” to be deployed in Iraq to augment the 3550, mostly contractors, already there that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said would be establishing small bases or “lily” pads to fight the self-declared Islamic State which so far the Iraqi government, Iran and U.S. airpower has not been able to degrade and destroy. Veteran CIA officer Robert Baer, who ran operations in northern Iraq between the first and second Iraq wars, joined us to discuss why the U.S. sticks to the fiction that Iraq is still a country.  And, as Saudi Arabia and Turkey pour sophisticated weapons into the hands of jihadis in Syria, while Iran takes over the Assad regime’s losing war with Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah now holding the front line against al Nusra and the Islamic State, we examine a region in flames as the Iran/Saudi Arabia proxy war in Iraq, Syria and now Yemen, escalates.

Part 2

We now go to a program broadcast on September 27, 2015 in which we examine the continuing growth of ISIS with 30,000 foreign recruits pouring into Syria at the same time that divisions have erupted among U.S. Military Intelligence analysts who feel that their assessments are being sanitized by the top brass to make it appear that U.S. efforts to degrade and destroy ISIS are more successful than the reality on the ground indicates. Richard Barrett, who was the Coordinator of the al Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Team at the United Nations in New York joins us to discuss what might be achieved in the next day’s meeting about Syria between President Obama and Vladimir Putin, given that Obama thinks Putin is a thug and Putin thinks Obama is a weakling.

Part 3

We continue now with a program broadcast on November the first of this year covering the reversal of President Obama’s pledge not to put boots on the ground in Syria and assessing the resilience of the Islamic State who, despite Russian and American bombing, have captured a strategic town in Homs province and are poised to capture the main road that links Damascus with the northern cities. Hassan Hassan, the co-author of The New York Times bestseller “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror” who is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House in London and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington D.C., joined us to discuss the deepening proxy war that will extend the agony in Syria.

Full Program

Part 1

Today on Christmas Eve we look into the religious significance of the Christian holiday Christmas as well as assess how “Christian” is this most Christian of nations, the United States in terms of the current political discourse that desecrates Christ’s invocation to “love thy neighbor”.  A best-selling author who previously worked with such figures as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, Frank Schaeffer, whose parents Francis and Edith Schaeffer were world-famous evangelical speakers and authors, joins us to discuss his departure from the evangelical movement and explain why evangelicals support figures like Donald Trump whose religious credentials are dubious and whose rhetoric is decidedly un-Christian. We examine the historical role of religion in social movements that ended slavery and brought about civil rights that contrast with the current evangelical movement allied with the Republican Party that promote reactionary politics and racist, exclusionary policies that punish the “least among us”; the poor, people of color, refugees and women.

Part 2

Then we examine further the influence of the evangelical movement in this upcoming political year as Republican presidential candidates campaigning for the first primary in Iowa pander to the Religious Right. Matthew Sutton, the Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University and author of “American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism” joins us to discuss how much the nation is falling from grace with the current ugly campaign rhetoric that is odds with the preaching and teachings of the prophet Jesus whose birthday Christian around the world are celebrating. We also discuss the paradox of the world’s most powerful nation, which outspends the world’s top 20 other nations combined in terms of investments in defense, yet lives in terror of a few thousand terrorists in the Middle East, with many fundamentalist Christians, just like their Muslim counterparts, invested in the “end of times” as they await the apocalypse.