The Russian Armed Forces are pushing west through the Donbas region of Ukraine. Their advance has consistently been called slow, but this is no longer true. In October and November, Russia captured over 1,500 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory. The pace has...
Can Trump Trump China (or Vice Versa)?
Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela: President-elect Donald Trump will face no shortage of foreign-policy challenges when he assumes office in January. None, however, comes close to China in scope, scale, or complexity. No other...
Washington’s Long Flirtation with Syria’s Extreme Islamists
The collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian government in late November and early December 2024 occurred with stunning speed. There was little question that Joe Biden’s administration and several U.S. allies, especially Turkey, were pleased with the outcome. Washington...
The Day the Media Decided Militant Jihadism Was Respectable
Here is a very strange thing. For years, western media outlets and politicians have been recklessly indifferent to the fact that Hamas is not a jihadist movement, like al-Qaeda or Islamic State, but a specifically *Palestinian* national resistance movement – if one...
What Are We Doing in Syria?
My first reaction to news earlier this month that the Syrian government had been overthrown was, how much did we have to do with it; how involved was the CIA; and how much is it going to cost. As with Saddam and Gaddafi before him, we know that Assad was no...
The Hypocrisy of Bombing Iran
President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly expressed concern that Iran could develop a nuclear bomb on his watch. In considering his options to prevent that, The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is considering the possibility of airstrikes on Iranian nuclear...
Iraq Weekly Roundup: 11 Killed
Deadly USS Liberty Attack Records Remain Secret – For Now
On November 21, 2024, Senior Judge Marsha J. Pechman of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington issued what seems likely to be her final order in Kinnucan v. National Security Agency et al. The order came more than four years after the federal...
Will Donald Trump Stop Domestic Spying?
During the course of an FBI written response to a Freedom of Information Act request asking about the trade names and suppliers of surveillance software the FBI had purchased, the government has yet again quietly acknowledged its antipathy to constitutional provisions...
The Syrian Fiasco
About 17 years ago the insufferable former general, Wesley Clark, reported on a talk he once had in the Pentagon: “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia,...


