ONOZ. Foreign Affairs editor James Hoge on why [McChrystal] must be fired—and how Obama is in danger of becoming a wuss. Not a wuss! At first I thought this choice of words came from the Daily Beast editors, no strangers to crass and reductionist language. For most of the column, Hoge himself takes the long [...]

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I hate opinion pieces like these. Peter Beinart advances the useless notion that President Obama’s address to the West Point Academy wasn’t stirring enough: Obama is clearly trying to ensure that the Afghan war no longer be run on a blank check. That’s why he famously brought OMB Director Peter Orszag to be photographed at [...]

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Over at Salon, Alfred McCoy gets to the heart of Afghanistan’s success: To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: In poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to [...]

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The big news in bated breath anticipation of outcomes hopefully serving American geopolitical interests is the Iraqi election on May 7. The stakes are high, whoa-ho-ho!, so CNN sits down with its resident foreign expert guy, Fareed Zakaria. The main question on every Americans mind is, Will the trillions of dollars spent and thousands of [...]

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Frank Rich gets to the heart of magical thinking that guides American foreign policy: Americans want our country to be secure. Most want Obama to succeed. And so we hope that we won’t get bogged down in Afghanistan while our adversaries regroup elsewhere, that the casualties and costs can be contained, that the small, primitive [...]

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