Jim Hoagland’s commentary on Kofi Annan and his Syria peace mission is worth a brief remark. Hoagland defends Annan’s tactics, which he associates with the “Yemeni variant” method of getting rid of Bashir al-Assad. The key, Hoagland contends, is not persuading Assad himself, because everyone knows, Annan included, that that isn’t going to work. The […]

In my last post, I mentioned finding relatively few nits to pick with the Times and Post coverage of Egypt last weekend. That wasn’t the case, however, with one of yesterday’s op-eds, the one by David Ignatius discussing the nature of national security leaks. Ignatius’s topic is the new book by David Sanger of the […]

I had planned to spend most of yesterday, Sunday, working in the garden, particularly harvesting and culling our plums. I have three trees: two standard purple, and one golden blush Japanese hybrid. But it got hot, I got most of the work done, and I couldn’t help but read the Sunday papers. And doing so, […]

In response to my most recent post, one of my loyal readers (my only loyal reader, for all I know) asked me to expound on the U.S. policy implications of what is going on in Egypt. I was going to do so in that earlier post, but I try to keep these things relatively short, […]

One of the commenters in my last post criticized me for misunderstanding the situation in Egypt. I stood accused of exaggerating the revolutionary reality of the post-Mubarak period. Apparently, this commentator is unaware of what I have written about Egypt since January of last year. So let me briefly repeat my original analysis from 18 […]

Yesterday’s events in Egypt are more of the same, but in this case really something new. The dissolution of the parliament confirms beyond all doubt the contention made here in February 2010 that the Egyptian military would not cede power to civilians if it could at all help it. The dissolution, combined with a court […]

The news from the region over the past few days constitutes, as always, more of the same and yet something new. Let me take you on a selective tour, ending with the most attention-arresting story of our time—Syria.Of all the developments in the Arab world, none come close to being as important as those in […]

By far the biggest political story of the weekend, and one likely to be with us in one form or another for a while, concerns Administration leaks of sensitive national security matters (mainly) to the New York Times.The basics of the story are already well known. On Friday Attorney General Eric Holder directed two U.S. […]

Most commentary on Tuesday’s recall vote in Wisconsin has focused on the raw politics of the episode. This is what our media thrives on: who’s up, who’s down, and what it all means looking toward November. Some commentary, thankfully, has delved deeper into the meaning of the entire skein of events over the past nine […]

Perhaps the most useful way to think of this brief comment is as a postscript to what I wrote yesterday. The media reports on Syria today are deeply disheartening—frustrating, really. The basic theme is the realization that the Annan plan has failed, no internal negotiations in Syria are likely to arise at this point, and […]