Nearly eight in ten people said that President Obama should seek congressional approval before intervening
Middle East
How Innocence of Muslims Emerged from the Seamy Side of Hollywood
A veteran of the low-budget end of the entertainment industry talks about how the director of the incendiary film got involved in the project
The Making of Innocence of Muslims: One Actor’s Story
How a sometime adult-film actor found himself cast in the most controversial film of the year
The Empire Strikes Back
The latest chilling dispatch from a reporter known only as “A Time Reporter in Syria”:
“Is it real? Is it really almost over?” asked a young FSA fighter who took up arms a year ago. “I’m so sick of guns, bullets,
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Washington: Time To Dump Bashar, Moscow
The U.S. and Russia have been sparring all week over competing United Nations Security Council resolutions on Syria. The U.S. would like a mandate under Chapter 7 of UN law to intervene more robustly in what the Red Cross and …
The Rebels: We Need Intel More Than Arms
It took Twitter five years to hire a Washington lobbyist. That was quick compared to Apple, which took 25 years to begin paying someone to represent its interests in the capital.
Violence had been raging in Syria for 14 months …
Would Assad’s Fall Limit the Nuclear Menace in the Middle East?
As Bashar Assad looks more internationally isolated by the day — and far more vulnerable to Western economic sanctions than uber-bad boy Iran — it behooves us to think through what general advantages accrue with his eventual …
The Shah’s Ghost…
Those of you paying attention to international affairs a generation ago recall that Jimmy Carter’s decision to let the shah of Iran come to the U.S. for medical care created an anti-American firestorm back home in Iran. Has …
Winding Down the War: A Cynical Look Ahead
It appears that we are finally withdrawing from Iraq after eight years there. It is about time. We went in with the stated objective of finding and destroying nuclear weapons and Iraq’s other weapons of mass destruction. We also decided to topple the Saddam Hussein regime with the stated objective of bringing democracy (and …
Arab Spring With Same Impact as “Big-Bang Strategy”: Islam at War with Self — Not West
Nice piece in the NYT at the end of September pointing out that the primary impact of the Arab Spring is that, in giving people chances to rule themselves and not be subject to dictators, Islamic activists find themselves splintering from within:
The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe that the most important
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Defining the Floor and Ceiling of U.S. Interventions Post-Bush
Nice NYT analytic piece (already cited by Mark Thompson) by Helene Cooper and Steven Lee Myers regarding the downstream legacy of the US involvement in Libya to date. Starts off by saying the Obama White House seeks no doctrine definition because it fears being pulled into inappropriate situations, but, of course, that’s what a …
An Explosive Glimpse of the Future of the Long War in Africa
The militant Islamic group of north Nigeria, known as Boko Harum, takes credit for the deadly car-bomb attack on a police station in the capital city of Abuja yesterday.
You might not think of West Africa as a likely site for radical Muslim violence, but the map on the left, which I use in my current “global futures” brief, may …
Votes Show that for Hawkish GOP, the Times they are A-Changin’
It used to be easy to cover the Republican party when it came to national security issues. For the most part, members of the GOP could usually be counted on to come down on the hawkish side of a debate or vote.
Toss in tens of thousands of casualties, ten years of war, billions of dollars spent, a new front opening in Libya, and a …