The senior director at the NSC for the Middle East is retired Col. Derek Harvey, an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer with a Ph.D. who served as the head of the U.S. military cell examining the insurgency in Iraq in 2003.

An intelligence officer and historian, Rayburn published a 2014 book, 'Iraq After America,' which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq descended into chaos in the years after the American troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.

The hard reality is that attacks by vehicles in public places are very hard to defend against in a free and open society. The best defense against such attacks is good intelligence, and that often comes from inside the Muslim community.

The dirty little secret of the intelligence world is that much of what you really need to know isn't exactly a secret anyway.

So what really gets me is these chickenhawks, who sent our kids to die, without ever serving in a war themselves. They don't know what it's all about.

No matter what you think about the Iraq war, there is one thing we can all agree on for the next days - we have to salute the courage and bravery of those who are risking their lives to vote and those brave Iraqi and American soldiers fighting to protect their right to vote.

The scientific and technological discoveries that have made war so infinitely more terrible for us are part of the same process that has knit us all so much more closely together.

I don't know about politics so much. I'm a professional athlete.