Obama Is Making Two Huge Mistakes in the War on ISIS in Mosul
The long-anticipated battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, is the biggest test to date for President Obama’s strategy against ISIS and other terrorist groups active in the Middle East. The chances of success are decidedly mixed. Paradoxically, the forces…
Can Obama’s Successor Sort Out His Middle East Mess?
Whoever goes to the White House in November will have one foreign policy challenge above all others: How to navigate transitions between two of America’s Middle East alliances that daily events are rendering inevitable. On one side of this question…
While Europe Girds for the Next Attack, Is the US in ISIS’s Crosshairs?
The terror attacks in Brussels last week fairly zapped the American political conversation. Among our presidential aspirants, it’s suddenly all about foreign policy and national security—a long overdue focus. We have two new truths confronting us now. One, the Islamic…
As Syria Talks Flop, Obama Is Painted Into a Corner
So much for the Syrian peace process. With the opening of talks in Geneva last Monday, their collapse two days later, and little hope their resumption February 25thwill bear much more fruit, the four-year war in Syria takes a new…
He’s made the Middle East worse: Let’s be honest, Obama bears as much responsibility for this mess as predecessors who shaped them
Decades of poorly concocted policies with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and others haunt us — and worsen every day It is all there now for us to see. Decades of cynical, poorly devised policy in the Middle East, vacant of…
How Foreign Policy Became a Top Issue in the Presidential Campaign
Our 2016 presidential campaigns have acquired a truly novel feature: Suddenly, foreign policy is a front-burner issue among American voters. This hasn’t been so for at least a couple of generations. Is this a passing phenomenon? Or are we watching…
Putin’s Military Strikes in Syria Are a ‘Mine Is Bigger Than Yours’ Show
MOSCOW—You’d think that things are shaping up well for those trying to find an enduring settlement of the gruesome Syria crisis and get down to the business of destroying the Islamic State. That’s not how it looks from here. What…
Obama’s Job Now: Fight ISIS All-In as Turkey Plays Both Sides
Turkey’s stunningly rash decision last week to down a Russian Su-24 fighter jet flying an anti-terrorist mission near the Turkish-Syrian border alters the calculus in the Syria crisis at least as much as the ISIS ’s November 13 attacks in…
SYRIA.
Salon did not publish the following column. It was filed November 27th, the day after Thanksgiving and three days after Turkish pilots shot a Russian jet out of the sky near the border between Syria and Turkey—by what evidence has…
Why Allies and Adversaries Should Unite to Defeat ISIS
Suddenly, the civilized world has one thing on its mind — an alliance among key nations to fight ISIS. No one is talking about containment anymore. The topic is decisive defeat on Syrian and Iraqi battlefields and anywhere else terrorists…
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