There once was a country created by artificially drawn borders. It was dominated by an authoritarian regime that ruled with great brutality, using all of the tools of totalitarian governance — incarceration, impunity, and oppressive internal espionage. Eventually, the state blew apart in a frenzy of religious and ethnic hatred. At one point, 8,000 men and boys were executed over a few days despite the (weak) efforts of the international community. Hundreds of thousands were eventually killed and millions displaced. Yes, it sounds like Syria. But it was the Balkans in the 1990s. When Yugoslavia came apart initially, the country’s…

“Do you realize now what you have done?” So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us. Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power. A dozen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ISIS occupies its second city, Mosul, controls its largest province, Anbar,…

The video of 13 year old Palestinian Ahmed Manasrah bleeding to death on the pavement of an East Jerusalem neighborhood has been described as “shocking,” “disturbing,” and “painful to watch.” The callous verbal abuse and insults from Israelis watching the child writhe in agony are variously characterized as “heartless” and “cruel”; and indeed they are. “Die you son of a whore. Die! Die!” the Israeli onlookers can be heard shouting in the video which has since gone viral on social media. While there has been much discussion of this video, and other similar incidents involving the extrajudicial executions of Palestinian…

Containing and ultimately defeating ISIS will require both short and long-term response. ISIS expansion has been made possible by political conditions in Syria and Iraq, ethnic-religious/sectarian divisions and violence and terror in the region, and the failures of the US and international community. Bashar al-Assad's unprincipled and disproportionate military response to the "threat" of the democratization wave, the Arab Spring, with the slaughter of Syrian opposition groups both radicalized the situation and heightened sectarian (Sunni-Shia or Alawi) divisions. The inability or reluctance of the US and EU to respond early on with significant assistance to the moderate Syrian opposition's and…

Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples. When two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, came to the U.S. in January 2000, they immediately met with Omar Al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy and an employee of a Saudi aviation company. Al-Bayoumi,…