Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking […]

Political upheavals are reckoned by the currency of accelerated experience. Human beings perceive time in many ways (more on time in a future post), but three fill out the spectrum. There is geological time, measured in hundreds of thousands and millions of years. There is personal time, measured by the sentient moments afforded by our […]

From the very beginning of the so-called revolution in Egypt, I have taken some pains to throw a wet mop in the face of all those clueless Western commentators who believed that democracy, as we understand it, let alone liberal democracy, was at hand in Egypt—or anywhere else in the Arab world save maybe Tunisia. […]

So the Administration announced yesterday that it was going to arm the Syrian rebels, and it’s moving some military forces around, too. Commentators are nearly unanimous in concluding that we’re edging much closer now to involvement in this civil war, one with major and fairly large regional implications. Some folks are singing the talkin’ Syria […]

The “big news” in U.S. foreign policy today, of course, is what is being called the personnel shakeup: Tom Donilon out as NSC Advisor, Susan Rice in from her UN post, and Samantha Power from the NSC staff to Turtle Bay. This is the kind of story the mainstream press can’t get enough of, because […]

As I write a battle is raging in Qusayr, Syria. It has been going on now for several days at various levels of intensity, having started in earnest on May 19. As of yesterday midday one way to measure that intensity is by the number of rocket attacks on rebel areas: approximately 55 per minute, […]

When I read a certain front-page article in the New York Times on Friday, my mind immediately hurled itself, and much of the rest of me with it, back to Poland in 1772. I can’t help it; my mind does that sometimes, since, I guess, that’s where my forebears were living at the time. But […]

Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a very scary front-page article, and no, I am not referring to the coverage of the Oklahoma twister. I refer to the article above the fold, left, signed by Scott Wilson and Karen deYoung entitled “Petraeus at heart of Benghazi Dispute.” The article supplies much more detail about the origins of […]

Antipathy between Sunni and Shi’a radicals in and around the Syrian cauldron is growing rapidly, lately manifested in the battle of the shrines—wherein Sunnis destroy Shi’a holy sites (most recently one not too far from Damascus) and proudly disinter centuries-dead bodies (or the dust thought to have once been bodies), and the Iranian regime threatens […]

It’s no fun blogging at moving targets.Since I tried on May 8 to make the simple point that Gregory Hicks’s testimony was being used for partisan purposes, and hence deflected attention from the Obama Administration’s real, seminal errors on Libya—which date to March 2011, not September 2012—some interesting developments have taken place.It is now clear, for example, […]