I’m C. Mark Brinkley, and I’ve been researching, writing, commenting, and consulting on issues related to war, crisis, disaster, military health and readiness, national defense, and global health for more than two decades. I take the job seriously, because these are serious topics, but I try to strike a tone that is somewhere south of deathly serious and north of indifferent.

 

Crisis issues, I’ve come to learn over time, are almost always a matter of perspective. Understanding these varying perspectives and deciding where you stand on the matter is the heart of intellectual freedom, as far as I’m concerned. “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,” Bob Marley famously sang. “None but ourselves can free our minds.”

 

You might be wrong, but at least you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.