Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 3

Hollywood Botches Beirut

Beirut, the new Hollywood production by director Brad Anderson and Bourne trilogy screenwriter Tony Gilroy, is getting mostly good reviews, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 78 percent. It’s safe to say that the vast majority of the reviewers aren’t any more familiar with the actually existing city of Beirut, Lebanon, than the film’s director and screenwriter are.

It tells the story of Mason Francis Skiles, the deputy CIA chief in Beirut in the early 1970s shortly before the civil war broke out...

Castro Steps Down in Cuba. So What?

Cuban President Raul Castro, the younger brother of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, officially stepped down as the dictator of Cuba this week, passing the baton to Miguel Diaz-Canel. Nobody should get excited. Castro is still the most powerful man in the country, still the leader of Cuba’s Communist Party, still the head of its armed forces. Diaz-Canel is but a figurehead and a chair-warmer. The Berlin Wall fell more than a quarter-century ago, but Cubans who yearn to be free will still ha...

The Case for Bombing Assad

Bombing Syria over President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Douma last week—as President Donald Trump promises to do—is almost an absurdity. Nearly half a million people on all sides have been killed in Syria since the civil war erupted in 2011, barely 100 of them by the regime’s most recent sarin attack. Assad can mass murder civilians by the hundreds of thousands with exploding barrel bombs packed with shrapnel, but he can’t gas 0.01 percent as many with a nerve agent? It bare...

Vladimir Putin Isn’t Our Pal

Donald Trump still can’t tell the difference between an enemy and ally, and neither can his press secretary. “Getting along with Russia would be a good thing, not a bad thing,” the president said on Tuesday this week. “And just about everybody agrees to that, except very stupid people.” When NBC News reporter Peter Alexander asked White House Spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders if Russian President Vladimir Putin is a friend or foe, she said, “I think it’s something Russia will have to make t...

The Turkish-American Alliance Heads Toward a Cliff

The long alliance between Turkey and the United States has been heading toward a cliff for years now, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan using razor-thin electoral majorities to consolidate dictatorial powers for himself at home and using his muscle abroad to thwart Western interests. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have barely reacted or even seem to have noticed, but with uber-hawk John Bolton coming into the White House as President Donald Trump’s new national security ad...

Go Ahead. Talk to Kim.

Donald Trump is the first sitting American president who has ever agreed to negotiate with the North Korean dictatorship. His predecessors were right to refuse, but Trump should go ahead anyway. Sit down. Talk to Kim Jong Un. (Just please don’t do it in his capital, Pyongyang.) As Winston Churchill put it, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war,” and we’ve been lurching toward war now for a while.

There’s plenty of skepticism and even outright opposition, of course. “While Americans (and Sout...

Broken ISIS Recruits Return Home

Now that ISIS has been all but destroyed in Syria and Iraq, thousands of surviving foreign fighters are returning home. Their home countries are bracing themselves, but the United States, it turns out, might not have less to worry about than we feared.  

As many as 300 Americans traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight and possibly die for ISIS. None so far have returned as terrorists. Most never saw combat and wanted out more than anything once they go there. That’s according to a new book-length...

Turkey Takes its War Against the Kurds Into Europe

Czech police officers arrested a Syrian citizen named Salih Muslim last weekend at his hotel in Prague after the Turkish government issued an Interpol “red notice” describing him as a terrorist and asking for his extradition.

Muslim isn’t a terrorist. He’s a spokesperson for the Movement for a Democratic Society, a secular left-wing Kurdish organization aligned with the United States and Europe that stands foursquare against every terrorist army in Syria, especially ISIS.

He used to be one of...

The Russian Attack Against America You Didn’t Hear About

You probably didn’t hear this because few media organization have even mentioned it, but Russia committed an act of war against the United States a little more than a week ago. No, this is not about more social media and election shenanigans. Russia mounted an armed assault against American soldiers and our allies in Syria, including Kurdish security forces affiliated with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, at a military base in the city of Deir Ezzor, the largest in eastern Syria. Russia...

So Much for Egypt’s Secret Alliance with Israel

The New York Times reports that Israel and Egypt are secretly working together to fight ISIS on the Sinai Peninsula. For more than two years now, with official Egyptian approval, the state of Israel has conducted more than 100 air strikes inside Egypt using planes, helicopters and drones that fly in long winding arcs to appear as though they’re coming from the direction of Cairo. The Egyptian army  denies the report, but the Israelis do not. Jerusalem is simply declining to comment.  

Jihadis...