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Syria’s civil war has been going on for more than two years. Seventy thousand people have been killed, most of them civilians. More than 3 million Syrians have been driven from their homes, nearly a million taking refuge in Turkey, Jordan, and...
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The violence that has engulfed Syria since March 2011 provides the latest and arguably most brutal evidence of the extremes to which a totalitarian regime will go to maintain its grip on power. The depravity of the Assad government, on display for...
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The disclosure that current U.S. drone warfare operations are directed from the presidential office in the White House, with the president himself selecting persons to be assassinated by unmanned aircraft in Muslim countries where the United States...
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It is no secret that President Barack Obama has conducted a very aggressive—and by many measures effective—campaign of targeted killings against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, both in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. It is less well known that the...
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"What if the government starts enforcing the espionage statute whenever there's a leak?" Steve Roberts, a former New York Times journalist who teaches at George Washington University, observed to the Baltimore Sun.
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Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate for the American presidency confirms that this campaign is going to be mainly about domestic issues -- barring a not-impossible Israeli attack on Iran between here and there. It is likely to...
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PARIS -- I watched some of the Washington Sunday political talk shows this week on international television. The participants' main foreign preoccupation seemed to be the potential threat to America of al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb and the other...
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Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, oversees counterterrorism and intelligence gathering in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
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Politics tends to wring all seriousness out of speech. Sometimes this is a demonstration of unforgivable ignorance. Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan thinks that "now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach" in...
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Ask most people in the West what images they associate with the words “Middle East” and you’ll likely get descriptions of oil wells, desert dunes, and men in flowing robes and Bedouin headgear. More recently, you might hear of crowds filling public...
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The October online posting by WikiLeaks of nearly a thousand classified Pentagon documents (the “Iraq War Logs”) shed new light on the vexed issue of Iraqi deaths during and after the 2003 invasion.
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From my student days, almost forty years ago, when I hitchhiked with a backpack on my shoulders and a guitar at my side, I’ve been an eager traveler in the Middle East, fascinated by the rich historical resonance and complex politics of this region.
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The principal problem with Mitt Romney's foreign policy statements is not that his position swings widely, or that he often reverses himself, according to the audience and the daily news. This is no surprise in American presidential campaigning. But...
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It is a profound but nearly universal mistake among Americans (and others) to think that the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan in 2013 or 2014 will end the American war with the Muslim world that began on September 11 in 2001.
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During his first term, President Barack Obama steered a middle course that displeased people on both extremes of the political spectrum. His health-care law eschewed the public option in favor of a private mandate. His stimulus package proved his...
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A Gallup poll issued this month says that 99 percent of the American public now has become convinced that Iran's civilian nuclear program will threaten "the vital interests of the United States in the next ten years." Eighty-three percent say this...
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On the evening of April 15—the day two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than two hundred eighty—President Barack Obama vowed that those responsible “will feel the full weight of justi
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The political response to the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that we live in an age of shrink-wrapped, prepackaged opinions.
When something new comes along, we hasten to squeeze it into whatever frameworks we were carrying around with us a day, a...
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently took to the Sunday morning political talk shows to dodge accusations that he
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The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable Western policymakers are to slogans and magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in which the credulity and carelessness of experts...
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In the riots that swept Islamic society last winter, reaction to the publication of cartoons insulting the Prophet Mohammed, the world glimpsed evidence of a clash between cultures—but not in the sense of the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel...
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I am deeply suspicious of economically determinist or conspiratorial explanations for political and historical events. The world is just too complicated, and chance and history play too large a role in the choices we face and the decisions we make....
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The democratic uprising that brought down the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt stands as one of the most dramatic expressions of “people power” in history. The people’s victory in Egypt was preceded by the downfall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and...
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With chilling matter-of-factness, Joshua Tuohy describes the explosion that took his right leg and killed three of his buddies.
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The interview given the New York Times by the new president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, on the eve of his trip to New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting, was notable for its moderation, but more than th
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The third American presidential debate was of negligible interest as a test of the qualities of the candidates, whatever it did or did not do to the presidential horserace odds -- probably not much.
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The right wing has lost the election of 2012.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year's best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to...
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Lebanon is one of the few Middle Eastern countries where large Christian and Muslim populations coexist in a secular state. How long can this remain so? With the Muslim Brotherhood assuming power in Egypt, and Syria dissolving into a civil war with...
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With Israel again bombarding Gaza and gathering troops for another potentially devastating incursion into the Hamas-controlled Palestinian enclave, it is tempting to think that nothing really changes in the Middle East, and especially in the Israeli...
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What exactly is it that Israel intends to do with the Palestinians now in the territories that it has just opened for home construction for Jewish settlers, thereby extending its policy of occupying and annexing what are legally Palestinian lands?
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Since the beginning of December, military gas (sarin, a nerve agent) has claimed a major place in discussion of the civil war in Syria. The Syrian government has admitted to holding major stocks of (unidentified military) gas in or near the areas of...
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We are about to have a major foreign policy debate in the guise of a confirmation battle over Chuck Hagel's nomination as secretary of defe
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To understand how Barack Obama sees himself and his presidency, don't look to Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Obama's role model is Ronald Reagan -- and that is just what Obama told us before he was first elected.
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The administration has set expectations for President Obama's trip to Israel so low you'd think he was making another visit to Ohio.
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War is war and murder is murder. The law draws the distinction. The American armed drone is a weapons system of war, not of policemen.
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Polls show that the vast majority of Americans do not want armed drones circling their own neighborhoods. Who could blame us for not wanting to be taken out by a killing machine operated by someone hunkered down thousands of miles away? Then again,...
