Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 32

The First Post of 2014

I took a break over the holidays to recharge my batteries and keep myself sane, but the entire human race didn’t stop or slow down, so there’s news.

Guess what the news looks like from the Middle East? That’s right. It’s bad.

Hezbollah may have moved long-range Scud missiles from Syria into Lebanon, and Al Qaeda reconquered Fallujah.

The way things are going in Syria, Al Qaeda might even take over Damascus. We are long past the date when a non-horrible outcome from that war was possible. And it...

Holiday Book Sale

The electronic versions of three of my four books, Where the West Ends, Taken, and In the Wake of the Surge, are on sale right now for just 5.99. If you want any of these, buy them now because the price is going back up soon.

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Egypt's Bleak New Draft Constitution

Eric Trager knows Egypt better than just about anyone, and his analysis of the new draft constitution is as bleak as expected.

Cairo’s more or less secular rulers are doing the same thing the previous theocratic Muslim Brotherhood rulers did—imposing their collective political vision on the broader society.

A nation’s constitution should be a consensus document if it’s to have any kind of lasting legitimacy, but that’s not what Egypt is going to get. Instead Egypt is going to get the legal codi...

Paul Berman on Nicaragua

Paul Berman wrote an open letter in The New Republic to New York City's mayor-elect Bill De Blasio who apparently is a long-time sympathizer with the Sandinistas, the Nicaraguan communists who briefly ruled the country after the overthrow of the previous tyrant Anastasio Somoza.

Berman has been to Nicaragua a number of times and knows the place well enough to write a book about it. I hope he does. All his books are outstanding and should be considered required reading for everyone interested i...

Sign Up to be Notified of New Book Releases

I have two new books coming out in 2014.

One is a collection of dispatches from the Middle East called The Tower of the Sun. The other is a post-apocalyptic novel, specifically a zombie novel in the style of The Walking Dead.

I said before that I was going to write a zombie novel, and I finally did. And I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

You will be the first to know when each of these books are available if you add your email address to my mailing list. Trust me: I will never spam you....

The Once Great City of Havana

“Havana is like Pompeii and Castro is its Vesuvius.” – Anthony Daniels

Almost every picture I’ve ever seen of Cuba’s capital shows the city in ruins. Una Noche, the 2012 gut punch of a film directed by Lucy Mulloy, captures in nearly every shot the savage decay of what was once the Western Hemisphere’s most beautiful city.

So I was stunned when I saw the restored portion of Old Havana for the first time.

It is magnificent. And it covers a rather large area. A person could wander around there all...

A Dispatch from South Sudan

My sometimes traveling companion Armin Rosen (he went with me on reporting trips to Egypt and Tunisia during the Arab Spring) visited the world’s newest country—the Republic of South Sudan—when it declared independence after its long bloody struggle with the regime in Khartoum that costs the lives of more than two million people.

Armin has written for us an astonishingly literary and detailed portrait of a place most people still don’t realize even exists.

In [the capital] Juba itself, you expe...

Welcome to Cuba

Fidel Castro made a liar out of me.

Okay, I didn’t have to lie to immigration, customs, and security officials at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport. I could have just applied for a journalist visa and hoped they’d approve me. But colleagues warned I’d have to wait months for an affirmative, and the authorities wouldn’t tell me if the answer was no. They’d simply toss my application into the trash if they thought I’d write anything “negative.” Six months, nine months, a year would final...

The US-Iran Deal

I’m wrapping up a long piece about Cuba which I’ll publish later tonight, so I’m going to outsource my reaction to the US-Iran “deal” first to Mike Doran at the Brookings Institution and second to the Canadian government.

You should definitely read Doran’s entire analysis, but here’s the bottom line:

The nuclear deal will further subject the Arab world to the tender mercies of the Revolutionary Guards. Iran will now have more money — our money — to channel to proxies such as Hezbollah. Washingt...

Blowback is a Bitch

Hezbollah fears more suicide attacks. That’s the headline in NOW Lebanon after a suicide bomber blew himself and others to pieces outside the Iranian embassy in the Hezbollah-controlled suburbs south of Beirut.

And yet Hezbollah invented the Islamic suicide bomber. It seems like this scourge has always been part of the Middle East, but it wasn't used until the 1980s when Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who has been described as Hezbollah’s “spiritual leader,” declared that suicide is not a...