Steve Coll's Blog, page 7

How Can the Qatar Crisis Be Resolved?

Steve Coll writes about the current crisis in Qatar, where leadership is likely to refuse to accommodate the demands of the U.S. blockading coalition.

An Unquiet Week in Washington

A shooting and investigations at a political moment that appears to be as volatile as the Watergate era.��

An Unquiet Week in Washington

In June of 1968, following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson set up the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. A task force made up of academics studied killings, attempted killings, and assaults on eighty-one state legislators, congressmen, senators, governors, and Presidents, dating back to 1835. Their findings presented a discordant medley: cases involving mentally disturbed people, extremists, and terrorists; political grievances that escalated; and one incident, in 1890, in which a journalist shot and killed a congressman who had been harassing him. Over all, attacks on politicians seemed to spike in times of social instability, such as during Reconstruction.

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While Trump Tweets, Assad and Putin Advance in Syria

In normal political times, when a President attacks another country and makes bold claims about what his warfare will achieve, the press will stay on the case in the following weeks, reporting on how things have turned out. In Donald Trump times, this is only one of many rules of accountability to have vanished behind his Presidency’s fog machine of manufactured distraction, legal crises, and eroding governance.

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Facebook and the Murderer

In mid-September, 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman and chief executive officer of Facebook, broadcast, from his company’s headquarters in San Francisco, the first live video shown on his social-media platform. He wore a gray T-shirt. He spoke cheerfully about “our community.” He showed off “all kinds of cool stuff” on his desk. “At Facebook, no one has offices,” he said. He then walked into a conference room, where he took some meetings behind closed doors. He pointed to the walls. “It’s all glass,” he said. “We want to create this very open and transparent culture in our company.”

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Trump���s Intervention

In ���Trump's Intervention,��� Steve Coll considers the consequences of President Trump's strike in Syria.

Trump���s Confusing Strike on Syria

If President Trump broadens his aims against Assad, he will enter the very��morass that Candidate Trump warned against.

Trump’s Confusing Strike on Syria

On August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda suicide bombers struck two U.S. embassies in East Africa, killing two hundred and twenty-four people, most of them Africans. Two weeks later, President Bill Clinton launched Operation Infinite Reach, a fusillade of cruise missiles aimed at a reported Al Qaeda meeting in Afghanistan, and at a factory in Sudan, which was suspected of involvement with chemical weapons. “There will be no sanctuary for terrorists,” Clinton declared. The retaliation produced few tangible benefits. And yet, since then, from Kosovo to Waziristan to Libya, the United States has repeatedly threatened or carried out missile and drone attacks and air strikes for limited and sometimes imprecise purposes. In the modern Presidency, firing off missiles has become a rite of passage.

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Rex Tillerson Is Still Acting Like a C.E.O.

ExxonMobil’s global headquarters are situated on a campus in Irving, Texas, beside a man-made lake. Employees sometimes refer to the glass-and-granite building as the “Death Star,” because of the power that its executives project. During the eleven years that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson served as ExxonMobil’s chairman and chief executive, he had an office on the top floor, in a suite that employees called the “God Pod.” When I visited a few years ago, the building’s interior design eschewed the striving gaudiness of Trump properties; it was more like a Four Seasons untroubled by guests.

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Donald Trump Meets the Surveillance State

On November 26, 2010, in Portland, Oregon, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a nineteen-year-old Somali-born American citizen, stood near the city’s Pioneer Courthouse and punched numbers into a cell phone. He thought the phone would set off a bomb planted nearby, at a crowded Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. In fact, Mohamud had been duped by a months-long F.B.I. counterterrorism sting operation. Agents arrested him.

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