Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 22

Christopher Hitchens on Today’s Paris Massacre

Gunmen shouting “Allahu Akbar” attacked the offices of French satirical newspaper named Charlie Hedbo and killed twelve people, including journalists and two policemen.

Radical Islamists apparently don’t share the paper’s sense of humor.

What good is legal freedom of speech if violent enforcers of a different, older, and foreign set of laws take it upon themselves to punish you extrajudicially?

This is not a new problem, not in the Middle East and not in the West. A few years ago I spoke with Ch...

Erasing Israel From the Map

The Iranian clerical regime has repeatedly vowed to erase Israel from the map, but American publisher HarperCollins actually did it.

The company released an atlas of the Middle East for English-speaking students in the Persian Gulf region, and Israel isn’t on it. The West Bank and Gaza are on it, which is entirely appropriate since they exist and are not part of Israel, but Israel itself is just…absent.

The Tablet newspaper in Britain originally reported the story, and HarperCollins has since r...

Cuba: To Embargo or Not

It was bound to happen eventually: The United States and Cuba have decided to restore diplomatic relations after treating each other as enemy states since the 1960s.

Some are elated and some are despondent. Both sides can make a strong case.

I visited Cuba near the end of last year and returned home with mixed feelings about the US embargo. Cuba is in no way a strategic or military threat to the United States. If diplomatic relations hadn’t already been severed a long time ago, Washington wou...

The Sydney Gunman’s Failed Message

A radical Islamist seized hostages in a café yesterday in Sydney, Australia. Sixteen hours later police shot him dead. At least two of his captives died and several others are seriously injured.

Shortly after he took over the café, he forced some of the hostages to hold a black flag up to the glass for news cameras to photograph. It is known variously as the black standard, the jihad flag, and the Salafist flag. It’s similar in some ways to the Saudi flag. It’s also similar to the black flag o...

Al Jazeera’s Scurrilous Attack on Morocco

Some people and organizations who claim to champion human rights don’t give a flying fork about the genuine article and would rather slam Western democracies and their allies than take an unflinching look at those who binge on anti-Westernism who, not coincidentally, include most of the worst human rights abusers on earth. The U.S. and Israel are the most abused targets, but Arab countries can get hit with it too.

The latest example came over the Thanksgiving weekend when Morocco hosted the se...

Israel Bombs Syria – Again

The Israelis bombed Syria again. That’s what the Syrian and Iranian regimes are claiming anyway, though the Israelis won’t confirm or deny it.

Generally we should take Israel’s word over Syria’s and Iran’s, but not this time. Israel’s refusal to deny it is a tacit admission that it did indeed launch air strikes against Syria, this time on the outskirts of Damascus.

Israel is not bombing Syria randomly. It’s targeting weapons shipments bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The rest of us are focused on...

Dispatch from Vietnam: Will the US Foster a Natural Ally?

My latest essay in the print edition of World Affairs is now available online. Here's the first part:

Nearly forty years after the Vietnam War, Hanoi holds no grudges against the United States, in part because nearly all the country’s negative energy today is focused on China. And for good reason: China is big; it’s powerful; it’s right next door; and it has been hostile for two thousand years. Vietnam’s war with the US will never be repeated, but its long history of conflict with China, which...

The Last Days of the Communist Party?

Vietnam is an authoritarian one-party state that looks and feels like a free country.

Local people scoff at the government publicly without fear of reprisal. I saw plenty of men in uniforms from both the police and the army, but they did not look intimidating, nor did they look like they were trying to be. They carried themselves the way uniformed security people carry themselves in countries like the US and Canada.

I didn’t worry for even a second that my hotel room might be bugged. It wasn’t,...

Book Release Day

My new book, Tower of the Sun, is now officially released.

Those of you who pre-ordered a copy should have it on your Kinde. The rest of you can get your electronic copy delivered right away from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iTunes, Scribd, or Inktera.

If you prefer the trade paperback edition—real books look much better on shelves, don’t they?—you can get a copy right now from Amazon.

OG Image: Middle East

The Kurds Rise From the Ashes of Syria

Syria no longer exists.

The tyrannical regime of Bashar al-Assad governs parts of what’s left of it. The psychopathic Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) controls another large swath. Small scraps of territory are ruled by sundry other militias which, more likely than not, will eventually be absorbed by Assad or ISIS.

Up north the Kurds have carved out a proto state of their own which they call Rojava. It is being violently squeezed by ISIS from the south, and it’s jammed up against the wall...