by Wayne White Once again American observers are outbidding each other over how serious a threat the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) poses. Recent IS gains in Iraq heightened Washington’s concern, causing President Obama to huddle with coalition defense ministers. In this air of heightened crisis, the option of deploying US combat troops has been
via LobeLog
by Wayne White
The outcome of the struggle now playing out over whether to smite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime militarily for its purported use of chemical weapons could define the future of the conflict within Syria more broadly. Much of the hesitation toward — even outright opposition to — military action [...]
by Emile Nakhleh
Watching the Syrian debate in Washington, one is dismayed by the focus on whether Sarin gas has been used or not. As if 80,000 dead and over two million refugees are not a sufficient reason for the administration to act.
Some foreign policy experts have publicly counseled President Obama to remain [...]
via Lobe Log
By Robin Yassin-Kassab
In August 2012 Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi attended a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran. His presence at the conference was something of a diplomatic victory for the Iranian leadership, whose relations with Egypt, the pivotal Arab state, had been at the lowest of ebbs since [...]
via Lobe Log
Amidst UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi’s attempts to achieve a temporary Syrian ceasefire, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week announced a boost in American non-lethal assistance to the Syrian rebels. Meanwhile, Russian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Nikolai Makarov declared that Moscow has “reliable information that Syrian militants have foreign…anti-aircraft [...]
via Lobe Log
The National Review Online has run an advance copy of the foreign policy speech GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will give today in Virginia. In it, the former governor is expected to lay out his “red lines” for Iran that will be closer to Congress and the Israeli government’s position [...]
via Lobe Log
Michele Flournoy, who served from 2009 to 2012 as the first female Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, was described as one of “the new realists” by the New York Observer, distinguishing her from Clinton Administration “liberal interventionists”, though like them she argued for “forward engagement” by the US abroad, especially in [...]
via Lobe Log
Emile Nakhleh is a retired Senior Intelligence Service Officer, a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico and a National Intelligence Council associate. Since retiring from the United States Government in 2006, he has been consulting with different US government entities and departments on national security issues, particularly Islamic radicalization, [...]
Last week, Professor Daniel Serwer criticized me in the Atlantic for not including nonviolence in my brief survey of the Syrian intervention debate. I am not sure that much had been written about nonviolence in that context at the time of my post’s publication. Even if it had, my non-exhaustive commentary compilation [...]
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