Part I noted that two key requirements of our counterinsurgency doctrine – a legitimate host-nation government and a competent, trustworthy host-nation security force – will never be accomplished in Iraq or Afghanistan. Part II will illustrate the lack of reliable...
As the world marked the beginning of the ninth year of detention at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Monday, a leading legal advocacy group filed suit against the Library of Congress for firing Guantanamo's former chief prosecutor for writing articles...
We're at war – old news, you say? Well you don't know how old – because I'm not talking about our eternal "war on terrorism," but the Korean war. Yes, in case you didn't know, it's still on, at least in the formal sense: a truce was signed, on July 27, 1953,...
The Obama administration's Iran policy is a riddle wrapped inside a conundrum folded into a pickle. So many signals are being sent in so many directions that it's a wonder the Iranians (or other involved parties) have any idea what's going on. Barack Obama came into...
President Barack Obama recently expressed a reluctance to send U.S. forces to Yemen and Somalia, two "failed states" where al-Qaeda is active. Obama seemed to realize that such a U.S. military presence might make the terrorism problem worse. If he...
Updated at 7:39 p.m. EST, Jan. 12, 2010 A massive security sweep in Baghdad has suppressed other news reporting in Iraq. The operation, which government officials say was against a bomb plot, even drowned out the stunning assessment that Dutch involvement in the Iraq...
JERUSALEM - In the past, whenever there was even a semblance of pressure from Washington on Israel, nerves in Jerusalem went all a-jangle. Nine months ago, true to form, tensions rose appreciably when then-new U.S. President Barack Obama and then-new Israeli leader...
As intelligence agencies rush to connect more dots on a page so crowded with dots that they already almost touch, Americans need to focus on the real problem, our foreign policies. We have made ourselves the enemy of over a billion people, nearly a quarter of the...
The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counterinsurgency war that, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing, apparently planned in Yemen, of a Northwest Airlines flight by a...
