In Syria, the United States has adopted a none-of-the-above strategy. President Barack Obama has launched airstrikes against ISIS targets in the Euphrates Valley and against an unrelated radical group near Aleppo. But the administration does not want airstrikes to benefit Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. So it proposes to spend $500 million to create a […]

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  Exit Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Not a day too soon and five years too late. The enormity of the tragedy he helped create is almost too great to grasp. Civilians murdered with weapons the U.S. had provided an Iraqi army that proved incapable of confronting a small but disciplined band of terrorists. Rape […]

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  Iassume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side,” the late columnist Molly Ivins wrote in 2003. “The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’” Ivins never considered herself an authority on […]

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  Southwest Asia has been with me for a long time. For over a decade, I was a small part of a fairly well-orchestrated U.S. strategy to maintain the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. When the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, we knew that the papier-mache kingdom of Saudi Arabia could not […]

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  By next year, a residual force of 9,800 u.s. troops will remain in Afghanistan, down from 33,000 this year and 100,000 in 2011, according to drawdown plans announced by President Barack Obama. At the time the president announced that policy in late May, the cost of the two big foreign policy initiatives of the […]

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