WHO WE FIGHT – AT 9:58 A.M. ET:  It's easy to forget, at holiday time, that we're still involved in struggles in the Mideast, and that the enemy is getting more ferocious, not less.  ISIS has been somewhat slowed in Iraq, but not in Syria.  And there are regular reports on its attempts to infiltrate into Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestinian areas.  From TIME:   

ISIS executed 1,878 people in Syria over the past six months, including 120 of its own members, a U.K.-based Syrian human-rights group said on Sunday.

Most of the people killed by the Islamist terrorist group were civilians, including 930 members of a Sunni Muslim tribe from eastern Syria, Reuters reports, citing the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

All but four of those executed within ISIS’s own ranks were fighters trying to leave and go back home.

ISIS, which has declared a caliphate across a broad swath of Syria and Iraq, and regards breaches of strict Islamic law as punishable by death, frequently releases videos of its executions, including the killings of two U.S. journalists and three aid workers from the U.S. and Britain.

COMMENT:  Despite all the announcements from the White House that the U.S. is "winding down" its military action overseas, the reality is that the enemy hasn't gotten the e-mail.  As we pull out of Afghanistan, we can expect increased Taliban activity.  Iraq is fragile, threatened not only by ISIS, but by a large number of Iranian "advisers," with whom the United States is actually working.

The war on terror isn't over, or nearly over.  In some respects it's just begun.

December 29, 2014