The end of the year brings reflection on what happened in the past 12 months and what lies ahead. But these retrospectives usually offer no more context and often less than the thin gruel of news as the events played out,…
Tag: Syria
Iraq War’s Fallout in Syria
Repercussions from the disastrous Iraq War continue to reverberate through the Middle East, now with battle-hardened jihadists crossing into Syria and taking a key role in that civil war. A U.S. attempt to isolate them with a terrorist designation is…
France Plunges into Syrian Quagmire
France, which governed what is now Syria after World War I, has stepped forward as the first Western power to recognize the opposition as the legitimate government. But the future course of the Syrian civil war remains dangerous and complicated,…
‘Moderate Mitt’: Neocon Trojan Horse
Exclusive: Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney did all he could in Monday’s debate to calm voters’ fears that he would revert to George W. Bush’s neocon foreign policy. But there was one telling slip-up when Romney signaled that his heart remains…
Romney’s Shape-Shifting Foreign Policy
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has charted a novel course through Campaign 2012, shape-shifting his positions endlessly on domestic and now foreign policies. In Monday night’s global affairs debate, Romney exchanged his neocon garb for a new cloak of moderation,…
Shipping Arms to Potential Terrorists
The idea of arming a favored side in a civil war has become popular among U.S. policymakers chastened by the disastrous Iraq War, but there are grave dangers in that approach, too, especially the uncertainty of who might get the…
The Arms Dilemma in Syria
Much of Official Washington is clamoring for President Obama to arm the Syrian rebels, but the civil war in Syria is reminiscent of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in which the Reagan administration ended up helping hard-line Islamists who then…
The Price of US Interventionism
Mitt Romney and his neocon advisers want to confront the Muslim world with a “credible military threat” as if more American “tough-guy-ism” will quell the region’s anti-Americanism. But the reality is that the long history of U.S. intervention has engendered the…
Egypt Seeks Regional Approach to Syria
Led by Egypt, key Muslim nations also including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran are exploring ways to reduce the political violence in Syria, an initiative that upsets some in Washington because it represents an independent regional approach, observes ex-CIA analyst…
Selling War as ‘Smart Power’
The latest selling point for American warfare is “smart power” humanitarianism, dispatching the U.S. military to eliminate foreign leaders designated by pundits as evildoers taking lives and resisting freedom. Ex-FBI agent Coleen Rowley warns against this latest con.