The official Obama Administration policy is to work with China and Russia to diplomatically isolate Iran. According to this Reuters report from Tehran, it seems to be working, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashing out at Russian President Dmitry Medvedev with what sounds like a not-so-veiled threat:
“If I were the Russian
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One of the most remarkable qualities about General Stanley McChrystal is his remarkable candor…and now he has called the benighted campaign to secure Marjah what it is: “a bleeding ulcer.” The question is, why on earth did McChrystal decide to go in there in the first place? When he first arrived, the general questioned the enhanced US …
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
–Rand Paul was on ABC’s “Good Morning America” this morning to run a bit of damage control. It was kind of brutal. He standoffishly dodged the civil rights questions before shifting to a defense of BP and a critique of the minimum wage. Again, the merits of his small government philosophy …
Jonathan Cohn may be the smartest, most well-sourced health care writer in the country. When I was first assigned to the health care beat in early 2009, his book Sick was among my required reading.
Today, he unveils the first in a series of five pieces that explain how the White House and congressional Democrats passed health care …
Just one day after Iran announced a deal with Turkey and Brazil to export some of its nuclear fuel for enrichment, Secretary of State Clinton said Tuesday the P5+1 had reached a tentative deal for multilateral U.N. sanctions. Our colleague Massimo Calabresi parses:
Unmoved by the latest Iranian offer, the Administration is pressing
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Britain has a new Prime Minister, Conservative David Cameron, and it may be years until the Labour Party gains back power, but that doesn’t make the struggle to replace Gordon Brown at its helm any less interesting, especially when that struggle is between two brothers: David and Ed Miliband. TIME’s London Bureau Chief Catherine Mayer …
It will be days before we can unpack what actually happened in this week’s meetings between U.S. and Afghan officials. The big question concerns reconciliation: Will the U.S. back Hamid Karzai’s efforts to lure the Taliban into a coalition government? In the meantime, the estimable Spencer Ackerman has a report from a source in Kandahar, …
In a joint press conference with Hamid Karzai at the White House Wednesday, President Obama spoke rather directly about an issue that is central to his Afghan strategy.
When there is a civilian casualty, that is not just a political problem for me. I am ultimately accountable, just as General McChrystal is accountable, for somebody
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Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson
–Afghan President Hamid Karzai is in Washington today for meetings with President Obama. Our colleague Tony Karon writes it will be a tense debate over when and how to strike a deal with the Taliban. Marc Ambinder describes the optics: “two parents who tolerate each other and cannot …
It seems increasingly likely that the Pakistani Taliban were behind Faisal Shahzad’s attempted bombing of Time Square for all that they disavowed him. Which is why Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and New Jersey’s Frank Lautenberg and Bob Menendez sent a letter to the State Department on Tuesday …
Marc Thiessen, the Washington Post’s new pro-torture columnist, has a typically brutish piece today in which he argues that if we only treated our latest Taliban trophy-capture, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the same way we treated Khalid Sheik Mohammed–i.e. waterboarded him in a CIA black site–we might find out who was running the Time …
David Ignatius has a good account of the issues at stake as Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai arrives in Washington this week. I’d probably put a bit more emphasis on the reconciliation issue–to my mind, the big question this week is whether the President will give Karzai approval to begin formal talks with the Taliban. The U.S. military is …
I’m just catching up with some important news out of Iraq: the two exclusively Shi’ite political parties seem destined to form a government, joined by the Kurds, leaving Ayad Allawi’s secular-Sunni coalition–which received the most votes–out in the cold.
This is potentially dangerous in several different ways:
