These not-so-united states
The People’s Democratic Republic of Oregon. That has a kind of ring to it, don’t you think? The reason this phrase has crystalized in my mind: Just after it was confirmed that Donald...
The New Yorker
Taking Dictation From a Dictator
Last week, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, through his father-in-law’s organization in Britain, ...
Op-eds
How the Syria Echo Chamber Works
Over the past five-and-a-half years, the Obama White House has used the Syria echo chamber it created in the American press and on social media to defend and advance the...
Op-eds
Assad Regime’s Grotesque PR Conference in Damascus Uses Reporters to Whitewash War Crimes
Bashar al-Assad’s regime has pulled off a grotesque PR coup by corralling a number of prominent American journalists from outlets like The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Washing...
Op-eds
The Long War Continues
In many ways, the reaction to the horrific attacks in Paris has been familiar. There were the expressions of solidarity: flowers at French embassies; social media avatars changed from silly selfi...
Op-eds
Argentine Murder Mystery
When heads of state gather, as they did for the United Nations General Assembly last week, you have a choice: Tune out or prepare to be bathed in blather, boilerplate and blatant lies. That said,...
Op-eds
The Unraveling of Sanctions on the Quds Force’s Qassem Soleimani
Sanctions against Qassem Soleimani “will stay forever,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday. Soleimani i...
Policy Briefs
The Rhyme and Reason of Jihad
You probably didn’t know it but Osama bin Laden was a poet. In fact, according to Yale’s Robyn Creswell and Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, “of all jihadi poets, bin Laden was...
Op-eds
Dr. Zarif or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb
Tehran’s largest cemetery,...
Op-eds
Reaction to the Charlie Hebdo Massacre Shows How We’ve Lost Our Free-Speech Spine
A backward slide since the clarity that followed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie
Op-eds
Sandstorm
The great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun centered his understanding of history on asabiyya, which is perhaps best translated as esprit de corps mixed with the will to power. In his maste...
Op-eds
They Have a Strategy
During a press conference on August 28, Barack Obama had a rare moment of candor. “We don’t have a strategy yet,” the president said in response to a question about the prospect...
Op-eds
Obama’s Kobe Bryant-Al Qaeda Flap
A long New Yorker profile of President Obama provides a g...
Op-eds
Iran Through Saudi Eyes
The Saudis have a point. Those words do not flow easily from my pen. For more than three decades, the Arabian royals have spent billions of petro-dollars promoting Wahhabism, a poisonously anti-W...
Op-eds
The ‘Targeted-Killing’ Memos
Why shouldn’t the public get to read them?
Op-eds
Israel’s January Surprise
The pundits were wrong: Israeli voters aren't lurching to the right.
Op-eds
Who’s Threatening World Peace?
How did it come to pass that Israel is now widely perceived as equally culpable, if not more so, for the potential eruption of another Middle Eastern war? To hear some of America's most infl...
Op-eds
Assad’s Ally Arrested
In Beirut last week, former Lebanese MP and cabinet member Michel Sa...
Op-eds
Seymour Hersh’s ‘Justice’
Writing at BuzzFeed, my colleague James Kirchick informs readers...
Op-eds
Seymour Hersh: Assassination Of JFK Was Form Of “Justice”
"There might have been some justice" in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said in a letter to a reader. Hersh made the shocki...