Outside the Beltway

We’re almost certainly going to launch punitive strikes against Syria. They’ll almost certainly be ineffective.

In both Egypt and Syria, it’s damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

Walter Russell Mead explains why a well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued grand strategy failed.

A headline I never thought I’d see: “Yemen Asks U.S. For Drones To Fight Al Qaeda”

Al Qaeda may be up to something, so take no chances.

Bradley Manning was acquitted of the most serious charge against him, but is still likely to spend most of his life in prison.

Anti-Assad forces are committing atrocities in Aleppo.

Think of it as the spy version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

As many as 500 convicted al Qaeda terrorists were released Sunday night as part of a surge of violence that has killed thousands since April.

A Federal Judge wasn’t very pleased when Administration lawyers told her that she doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear a lawsuit over the President’s drone policy.

Abu Sufyan al-Azdi, al Qaeda’s number two man in Yemen, is still dead. Or dead again. Or finally dead.

Ostensible allies in the fight against the Assad regime, al Qaeda and the Free Syrian Army are killing each other.

Frustrations with the mercurial leader of Afghanistan may increase the pace of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The events of the last week in Egypt raise a whole host of questions.

Edward Snowden has likely violated many laws, but, absent additional facts, treason is not one of them.

Radical Islamists now dominate the Syrian opposition. And you’re arming them.

Two polls indicate that most Americans oppose the President’s latest moves on Syria. This makes sense considering actual policy there seems to be entirely incoherent.

The U.S. is now confirming that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons. What’s next?

Even if you trust the current occupant of the White House to exercise the powers granted to the agencies operating in secret under him, do you trust all future Presidents?

Has the West inadvertently handed Iran a victory in Syria?

How would the addition of Susan Rice and Samantha Power to the President’s foreign policy team affect policy toward Syria’s civil war?

The same story yet again.

Starting today, the fate of Pfc. Bradley Manning is on trial in a courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Senior DOJ officials from the previous three administrations back the Obama DOJ’s controversial subpoenaing of AP conversations.

Just how serious was the leak that the Associated Press reported on last May?

Would more information about the Benghazi attacks have changed the outcome of the Presidential election?

The talking points prepared in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attack were heavily edited at the request of the State Department.

Republicans looking to Benghazi for political ammunition are likely going to be disappointed.

The United States is currently negotiating for a U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014, but they’re not sharing their plans with the American people.

Yesterday’s hearings shed more light while also raising yet more questions to which we’ll likely never get a satisfactory answer.

Arming the Syrian rebels may do nothing more than prolong a seemingly endless war, and pull the United States into a conflict it shouldn’t be involved in.

Are civil liberties once again at risk in the wake of the bombing attack in Boston?

My latest for The National Interest, “Why Terrorists Are Worse Than Guns,” has posted.