The Iraq War raises many questions still, 10 years after those first bombs sought out Saddam Hussein. Most of the coverage of this tenth anniversary will focus on the decisions leading to the war, the blend of lies and arrogance in the Bush administration, which never really learned a lesson...

One of Britain's leading newspapers, the Guardian, has just published an exposé of interrogation teams run by two U.S. operatives acting under the authority of General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2003-05. While no smoking gun -- or blood-stained billy club -- has Petraeus' fingerprints, it's clear from...

Rescuing Syrian civilians is again a hot topic of discussion among foreign policy elites. In fact, for the nearly two years of the Syrian uprising, the West's concern over Syria has been largely driven by the human toll, specifically the death toll of non-combatants. And well it should: The numbers...

Susan Rice, America's ambassador to the United Nations, is apparently trying to build support in the Security Council for a UN peacekeeping force for Mali. That would come after the French have set back the Islamist militants that have threatened to seize control of the entire West African country. Rice's...

When I first met Howard Zinn 40 years ago, I had known him as a leading antiwar critic, civil rights activist and radical historian. I expected a brooding and perhaps angry intellectual deeply at odds with a nation that shortly afterward reelected Richard Nixon by a landslide. But my first...

How many children have died -- are dying every day -- because the United States bombs several Middle East countries with drones? How many children died at the hands of U.S. military firepower in Iraq?

I raise these disturbing questions to provoke some reflection on the horrible massacre in Newtown,...

Along with the security snafu in Benghazi, Topic A on foreign policy in the White House race has been Iran. The Islamic Republic is an easy whipping boy in U.S. politics, and so it has been again for many months. Mitt Romney has blustered relentlessly that Iran is four years...

The next Obama-Romney debate on October 16 will include foreign policy, and while the president's partisans will expect to see a newly assertive candidate, the foreign focus then and in the October 22 debate does not lend itself to such posturing. In fact, chances are strong that the debate will...

One week following the saddening murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Bengazi, Libya, the mystery of precisely what happened has not lifted. The claim of UN envoy Susan Rice that the violence was spontaneous in reaction to the American right-wing film about the...

Consider this Part Deux of my July 27 essay, "You Didn't Build That: Obama's Public Sector Gap," not least because the "you didn't build that" meme played out so prominently in the political conventions. Republicans ridiculed the notion, and Democrats reworked their framing of the communitarian sentiment by...

In the last several days, three events dramatically underscore a hard truth about domestic terrorism: nearly all of it originates with the extremist right wing.

This provocative idea is borne out by stubborn facts, but the question is why this so, and why the national discourse about terrorism remains...

The contrived controversy over President Obama's "you didn't build that" line raises a more profound question about his leadership that has been overlooked. That is the case for the public sector -- and if you're wondering, what case for the public sector? -- that is precisely what I'm addressing.

The...

Among the responses to my last column on climate change was a comment from Bookzilla saying, "Suppose we limit carbon emissions and convert our society to renewable energy. If it turns out that climate change was only a fantasy, we end up with... clean air and no dependence...

Among the unnoticed ironies of the controversy over Obamacare is the effect it had on climate change. No, not the trees felled to produce the paper for the Supreme Court's decision, but the tendentious politics besetting the health care debate in 2010 that convinced several lawmakers and the Obama White...

In March 2012, Iran and the representatives of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (Russia, China, France, United Kingdom, and United States) plus Germany -- the so-called P5+1 -- agreed to resume negotiations on the nuclear issue without preconditions. The prospects for a successful outcome are doubtful given...

The news from Baghdad is good. The nuclear talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 countries paused somewhat amicably, with signs of progress and a schedule to meet in a month in Moscow. The question is, as always, how many ways can this progress be derailed?

Details of what transpired...

I have been puzzling over Year Two of the Arab Spring. The signals remain mixed. The apparent power of the Muslim Brotherhood and others of similar fervency is frankly worrisome. The economies of these countries -- Egypt particularly -- are in the doldrums and don't look like they will escape...

I recall a vivid passage in Kai Bird's fine book about the Bundy brothers, McGeorge and William, when Mac Bundy was John F. Kennedy's national security adviser. It was early in JFK's presidency, and Bundy was being briefed by Daniel Ellsberg, then a wunderkind of the nuclear priesthood, on U.S....

The nearly complete mastery of U.S. politics that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again displayed in Washington last week belies a dark reality for the Jewish State. That is the startling prospect that it has sown the seeds of its own destruction, one which will come to its ghastly fruition...

Afghanistan is slipping away. Not slipping away like a thief in the night, but slipping out of our conscious grasp. Like Iraq, it's a venue of escape for Americans, a place from which to flee.

We see little spurts of stories that punctuate the foreign news beat -- the Koran...