Senior Fellow Seth Keshel on why Texas is no longer a 20-point romp, and the three forces — big tech expansion, a misread Latino electorate, and a transformed suburban vote — that put the state one cycle from upending the national map.

Senior Fellow Adelle Nazarian argues that Washington must look beyond national capitals to find strategic minerals partners before China and Russia claim them.

On 9/11 I was commanding a battalion heavy task force, and we were in the field finishing our second week of a brigade tactical exercise. At 0200 hrs, 11Sep2001 (West Coast time), we received ENDEX over the radio, so I headed back to my command post and threw my sleeping bag onto the hood of a HUMVEE, told the shift to set stand-to at 0700 and wake me shortly before that. Instead, at aprox 0550 hrs I’m shaken awake by my XO, Major Phil Koenig, who notified me of the first plane. He added, “Sir, reports are it’s a terror strike.” Our fire support element happened to have a small, portable 4″ TV with an antenna. We gathered around that for the live feed and watched the second plane slam into the second tower. Within minutes we knew three things….our children’s generation had just lost its innocence, our nation was going to war, and every soldier in that brigade wanted to deploy immediately to begin kicking someone’s ass.

And most of us did, and some of us did not come back, but we were victorious. We destroyed al Qaeda and killed its leader. There hasn’t been a successful al Qaeda strike on the USA since 9/11.

Yes, we won, but the sad reality is many Americans don’t know we won. There are various reasons for this, but the first occurred nine days after 9/11 when President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. He stated our objective…“Our war on al-Qaeda begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” It sounded right and just, and as a nation, we were passionately in favor. I certainly was.

But in war, as Clausewitz reminds us, Passion must be balanced against Reason and Genius. In our passion we ignored the fact that the President had just articulated a limitless objective, ie “It will not end until every terrorist group…has been found, stopped and defeated.” I’m not saying we should stop fighting these other terror groups, we MUST fight them, but our continuing ops obscure the fact that we absolutely, positively destroyed al Qaeda. We can be supremely proud of that.

My guest this week is an old comrade of mine and a battlefield commander who directly contributed to the destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq and, later, the destruction of ISIS in Iraq. General Shaykh Sheikh Jaafar Sheikh Mustafa led Kurdish peshmerga forces, along with a few US Army Green Berets, in Operation Viking Hammer, which completely destroyed al Qaeda ally, Ansar al Islam, in the first days of Operation of Iraqi Freedom. He later led key elements of Kurdish peshmerga in the initial main effort for the Battle of Mosul, the largest ground operation since WWII. It resulted in the destruction of the capitol of the ISIS caliphate, and it has become regarded as Iraq’s Verdun. I was honored that he joined me (along with my dear, old interpreter, Alani) to discuss all the above, as well as his days fighting the armies and agents of Saddam Hussein. Click on the link to listen to our discussion: https://frontlinesoffreedom.com/frontlines-09-12-2026…/