Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 17

Iran is not Iowa

Leon Wieseltier, unhappy with the Iranian nuclear deal for most of the usual reasons, zeroes in on the Obama administration’s failure to appreciate the chasm that separates the regime from its people.

It is true that in the years prior to the Khomeini revolution the United States tolerated vicious abuses of human rights in Iran; but then our enmity toward the ayatollahs’ autocracy may be regarded as a moral correction. (A correction is an admirable kind of hypocrisy.) The adversarial relatio...

Ho Chi Minh's Nightmare

Six months ago I wrote a long essay about Hanoi for City Journal. The magazine is quarterly, and the story got bumped from the Spring issue since it's not time-sensitive, but it's in the Summer issue. Here's the first part:

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hanoi, capital of a now-unified, Communist Vietnam, was a bombed-out disasterscape. Residents lived under an egalitarian reign of terror. The grim ideologues who ran the country forbade citizens to socialize with or even speak to the f...

The War Arrives in Turkey

A suicide bomber killed 28 people in the Turkish city of Suruc, just across the Syrian border from the Kurdish city of Kobane that ISIS fought for and lost last year.

Kobane has been devastated, and the site where the blast occurred hosted a meeting of pro-Kurdish groups discussing how to rebuild the city.

No one has claimed responsibility yet, but the attack comes mere days after Turkey supposedly made its very first attempt to crack down on ISIS with a wave of mass arrests.

Maybe the Turkis...

An Uncertain Future

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, argues that the deal with Iran is better than no deal even though he doesn’t expect Iran to stick to its side of the bargain, even though he thinks “the arbitration mechanisms will be challenging,” and even though he expects no one to be as interested in reimposing sanctions in the future as the United States will be.

It’s a tough case to make, and he admits that it’s a close call, but his upbeat argument is more worth reading than most because he...

Most Americans Skeptical of Iran Nuclear Deal

Well, the United States and Iran struck a deal. I’ll be poring over the details in the next days and weeks, but in my latest essay for World Affairs I argue that there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that it will work regardless of the contents.

I’m sorry to be negative about this. Really, I am. Americans and Persians are not natural enemies. Some day, when Iran has a new government, our two nations will genuinely reconcile. But that day has not yet arrived. Iran’s current rulers are as...

The Iran Delusion

My latest essay for the print edition of World Affairs is now available online.

The chattering class has spent months bickering about whether or not the United States should sign on to a nuclear deal with Iran, and everyone from the French and the Israelis to the Saudis has weighed in with “no” votes. Hardly anyone aside from the Saudis, however, seems to recognize that the Iranian government’s ultimate goal is regional hegemony and that its nuclear weapons program is simply a means to that...

Iran is Not a Bulwark

An unnamed American diplomat told the Sunday Times in Britain that President Barack Obama “believes a peaceful Iran could be a bulwark against ISIS in the Middle East and the key to peace there.”

The Iranian people and government strongly oppose ISIS, no doubt about it. They are predominantly Shias while ISIS is the most deranged Sunni Islamist terrorist organization in the world. Its attitude toward the Shia is outright genocidal. It’s easy, then, to see why a powerful Shia bloc might act as...

The US Bombs Raqqa

Coalition forces (a euphemism for the American Air Force) bombed the ISIS “capital” of Raqqa from the skies on the 4th of July.

Brett McGurk, the US envoy for the coalition, says the latest attacks were “the most sustained air strikes to date” against ISIS in Syria.

That’s great and all, but the war against ISIS is still spectacularly unserious. A mere eighteen vehicles and bridges were destroyed.

ISIS has a lot more than eighteen vehicles, and there was a time not long ago when they didn’t h...

To Medina and Back

I reviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new book, Heretic, for this month's issue of Commentary magazine. Here's the first part.

In April of last year, Brandeis University offered Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree for her tireless campaigning for women’s rights in the Muslim world. But little more than a week after announcing that she would be honored at the university’s commencement ceremonies, Brandeis rescinded its offer owing to Hirsi Ali’s record of bluntly criticizing Islamic oppression. “We can...

Turkey Plans an Invasion of Syria

Turkey is planning an invasion of Syria—not to fight ISIS, but to fight the Kurds.

“We will never allow the establishment of a state on our southern border in the north of Syria,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday. “We will continue our fight in that respect whatever the cost may be.”

He wants a buffer zone along the Turkish border 30 kilometers deep into Syria in an area that the Kurds are poised to take back from ISIS.

As always, the Turkish government fears the Kurds more than...