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Obama Should Have Never Intervened in Libya in the First Place
Tweet Share on Facebook October 18, 2012 CommentMalou Innocent is a foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. Follow her on Twitter @malouinnocent.
"I take responsibility," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CNN this week, taking the blame for security failures at the American consulate in Benghazi that some lawmakers believe contributed to the killing of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
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Weighing Foreign Intervention in Mali
Tweet Share on Facebook October 18, 2012 CommentRobert Nolan is an editor at the Foreign Policy Association and producer of the Great Decisions in Foreign Policy series on PBS. You can follow him on Twitter @robert_nolan.
Unabashed destruction of historic UNESCO sites. The banning of all music aside from the singing of verses from the Koran. The imposition of strict Sharia law. The rise of Islamic terrorism. No, this is not Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban, though it sounds a lot like it. The above is actually taking place in what has been one of Africa's most stable countries for much of past 50 years.
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How To Fix the U.S. Policy Toward Syria
Tweet Share on Facebook October 18, 2012 CommentRobert Zarate is policy director and Evan Moore is policy analyst for the Foreign Policy Initiative.
Over 30,000 Syrians have been killed in the course of the 18-month uprising against the Bashar al-Assad regime. As the situation continues to deteriorate, neighboring countries are being destabilized with spillover violence and a tidal wave of over 340,000 refugees. With no end to the conflict in sight, it is clear that Washington's current strategy of economic pressure, international diplomacy, and non-military assistance has failed. It is clear a new policy is needed. As the Foreign Policy Initiative (where we're employed) and the London-based Henry Jackson Society argued yesterday, the United States and like-minded nations should work together to create a safe zone in northern Syria to protect civilians and allow armed opposition forces a chance to truly organize.
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What the Soviets Can Teach Us About Leaving Afghanistan
Tweet Share on Facebook October 18, 2012 CommentOlga Oliker is a senior international policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
The recent spate of attacks by Afghan police and military forces on their coalition partners and advisers has drawn renewed attention to the future of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—something CBS News's Bob Schieffer has promised to ask President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney about at Monday's final presidential debate.
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Defense Cuts Hurt Military's Ability to Plan
Tweet Share on Facebook October 18, 2012 CommentMichael P. Noonan is the director of the program on national security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Over at foreignpolicy.com Micah Zenko, the Douglas Dillon fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written a provocative piece about the U.S. military's inability to predict future wars correctly and their penchant for using force sizing models to make up for their lack of predictive certainty. His big takeaway seems to be that
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Keep Turkey’s Military Out of Syria
Tweet Share on Facebook October 16, 2012 CommentDr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou is affiliate scholar and co-chair of the Southeastern Europe Study Group at Harvard University and served (2004-2012) as vice chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The Turkish Parliament's green light last week for cross-border operations and the Turkish General Staff's deployment of armored units for possible engagement with Syria are ominous signs of the escalation of the Syrian civil war into a regional war that will have catastrophic consequences for those immediately at risk—namely, unarmed civilians in Syria. The United States has welcomed Turkey's leading role in trying to find a solution to the Syrian quagmire. But the moment has come for Washington to be clear that Ankara's assistance can be optimized through diplomacy and humanitarian relief and should absolutely exclude unilateral military action.
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Defense Budget Cuts Will Hurt American Strategic Planning
Tweet Share on Facebook October 16, 2012 CommentIlan Berman is vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
It's a refrain familiar to every Washington policy wonk and political science graduate student: Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu's famous admonition about the need to "know your enemy." Less remembered is the second half of Sun Tzu's prescription for success on the battlefield—to "know yourself." Today, as a result of looming defense cuts and potentially catastrophic drawdowns in the federal budget, the United States is drifting in the direction of not being able to do either.
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Dealing With Mali's Plunge Into Failed State Status
Tweet Share on Facebook October 16, 2012 CommentJ. Peter Pham is director of the Atlantic Council's Michael S. Ansari Africa Center.
Last Friday the United Nations Security Council bought itself a little more time to figure out what to do about the deteriorating political, security, and humanitarian situation in Mali by unanimously voting to give regional leaders 45 days to come up with a detailed plan that the council can review. If Resolution 2071 is not destined to be recorded as much of a milestone, it is understandable insofar as there are no easy solutions to the crisis affecting the West African nation and threatening to engulf the entire Sahel.
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Obama, Romney Must Stop Politicizing Terrorist Attack in Libya
Tweet Share on Facebook October 16, 2012 CommentHeather Hurlburt is the executive director of the National Security Network in Washington, D.C. Heather previously served in the Clinton administration as speechwriter to the president, and as speechwriter and policy planning staff for Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher. Follow her on Twitter at @NatSecHeather.
In case you weren't keeping track, the families of three of the four men killed in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi have now asked politicians to stop talking about them. First, the family of Glen Doherty asked the Romney campaign to stop bringing up a chance meeting between the two a few years back. Then, the mother of Sean Smith accused the White House of "telling lies." Most recently, the father of Ambassador Chris Stevens said it would be "abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue."
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Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures
Tweet Share on Facebook October 15, 2012 CommentDaniel Gallington is the senior policy and program adviser at the George C. Marshall Institute in Arlington, Va. He served in senior national security policy positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Justice, and as general counsel for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The media assumes that national security and foreign policy issues won't have much to do with this year's presidential election. The media is wrong: In fact, national security and foreign policy could easily be the determining factor when we decide who we want to lead us for the next four years—and the key word here is "lead".
