What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?

The United States is not overdeployed or overextended with deployments in 150 countries on any given year. On any given week we have about 65 deployments.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on.

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.