Tuesday’s newspapers made for some interesting reading on the subject of the Middle East. First, I take note of a New York Times op-ed called “Finish the Job” by James M. Dubik, who is described as a retired Army Lieut. Gen. who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops from the 2007 to 2008. General Dubik […]

Making connections between the current engagement in Libya and our ongoing project in Iraq is not usually well received. To be fair, there are perhaps more differences than similarities. The European Union’s plans to ask, at last, for UN permission to send ground troops into Libya is nothing if not agonizingly slow in coming to […]

Though the signs were clear from the start of the Libya operation that people hadn’t clearly thought through the consequences of intervention, it took a tweet from Anne-Marie Slaughter (the recently-departed Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and one-time author for our magazine) to crystallize just what a mess we’re really in. She […]

Andrew Sullivan is shocked and appalled that President Obama now seems committed to stretching coalition involvement in Libya beyond the narrow confines of the UN Security Council resolution:It’s so surreal, so discordant with what the president has told the American people, so fantastically contrary to everything he campaigned on, that I will simply wait for […]

A couple of days ago, I was asked a few questions about what chances liberal forces had in Egypt after the referendum. My response was in the negative. The young activists so often described in the Western media as liberal, democratic or secular stand no chance in the next parliamentary elections scheduled for next September. […]

The argument one’s been hearing most of all from critics of the intervention in Libya has been over consistency. If we’re so keen on invading Libya for ostensibly humanitarian reasons, why aren’t we fighting a war in Bahrain, Yemen or Côte d’Ivoire? The implication here is two-fold: that the Obama Administration has embarked on this […]

To all appearances, U.S. foreign policy in the Obama Administration has now definitively gone down the rabbit hole. It is intoxicated with an advanced form of Wilsonian madness, one shorn of all sensitivity to the consequences of the U.S. government’s behavior. Like Alice with her pills, some things are getting or will soon get bigger—risks, […]

The United Nations Security Council acted just in time to forestall a bloodbath in Libya, if it indeed enforces its own resolution. Troops loyal to Muammar Qaddafi have seized almost irreversible momentum in their battle against anti-government rebels, and absent Western action the fall of the rebel capital Benghazi is imminent. After a period of […]

The flight of the best and brightest from Russia is no accident.

The benefits of nationalism, as illustrated by its absence.