This Jon Stewart episode is everything wrong with how we talk about Syria
Daily Show host Jon Stewart made an impassioned case, on his Tuesday night return to broadcasting after taking the summer off, against the Obama administration's plan to launch limited strikes against...
View ArticleThe real case for Syria strikes makes sense, so why isn’t anyone making it?
Early last week, when Secretary of State John Kerry made the Obama administration’s first public case for limited U.S. strikes against Syria, he was actually quite clear about why: because strikes to...
View ArticleThe four reasons Russia won’t give up Syria, no matter what Obama does
President Obama arrived in Russia today for the Group of 20 economic summit, where everyone is hoping he might be able to make some progress with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Syria. But Obama...
View ArticleA terrorism expert’s Twitter rant about how we get Syrian rebels all wrong
How many of Syria’s rebels are moderates and how many are al-Qaeda-aligned extremists? Is any one group more powerful than another? If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fell from power, what would the...
View ArticleActual good news: U.S. and Iran still looking for peace, despite tension over...
The United States faces a long list of problems and complications in Syria, none of which appears to be getting much easier. But there’s one that, by the normally low standards of the Middle East,...
View ArticleSamantha Power’s case for striking Syria
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power delivered the following speech at the Center for American Progress on Friday advocating for the Obama administration’s plan to launch limited...
View ArticleBashar al-Assad’s interview with Charlie Rose shows he knows Obama’s weak spots
Charlie Rose interviewed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus over the weekend, Assad’s first interview with an American news outlet since 2011. The full interview is to be aired Monday...
View ArticleRussia urges Syria to give up chemical weapons. Game changer or a shrewd bluff?
Syria isn’t a Russian client state, exactly, but President Bashar al-Assad is existentially reliant on Russian support. In many ways, Russia’s willingness to negotiate matters even more than Syria’s –...
View ArticleJohn Kerry is dangerously bad at selling Syria strikes
Secretary of State John Kerry has been doing his darnedest to sell Congress on President Obama’s plan to launch limited strikes against Syria. But, while Obama and the rest of the administration have...
View ArticleSyria’s plan to give up its chemical weapons could make things worse, not better
Few people depress me these days like Michael Doran. A Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, Doran has been a leading advocate among thoughtful foreign policy analysts for a more aggressive...
View ArticleYes, Russia might oppose its own Syria plan. Here’s why.
It seemed like the mother of all Russian diplomatic pranks: just one day after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov proposed that Syria give up its chemical weapons to international control in...
View ArticleDon’t get your hopes up. Syria might be adopting the North Korea playbook.
Syria has signaled that it may be willing to accept a Russian proposal for President Bashar al-Assad to give up all of Syria’s chemical weapons in exchange for the United States agreeing not to launch...
View ArticleThis is the hard part: Getting that Syria plan through the United Nations
All the major players have agreed in principle for Syria to give up its chemical weapons, but now comes the hard and important part: making it official and binding with a United Nations Security...
View ArticleTo sell Syria, Obama chose political science over scare tactics. That’s a big...
International norms are not sexy. Limited, off-shore strikes are not satisfying. And the idea of modestly punishing a murderous dictator, but leaving him in office because toppling him outright could...
View ArticleThis is the speech Obama would give on Syria if he were brutally honest
President Obama addressed the nation Tuesday night to explain his case for launching limited strikes on Syria to punish its alleged use of chemical weapons. He was unusually direct but still danced, as...
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