Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 36

Let's Go to Cuba

I just launched a Kickstarter project to raise money for a trip to Cuba this fall. I’m not asking for donations. I’m asking for funding and will give something back in return. Check out the project page for all the details.

With Kickstarter, you can see how much money I need and how much I’ve raised. I won’t get any money at all unless the entire project is funded, so please make sure I don’t come up short. You and I both need me out of my office, but alas traveling costs money.

As I mentioned...

No Confidence

It’s not Barack Obama’s fault that Syria is an epic disaster, nor is it his fault that it’s a lose-lose situation for the United States no matter what he decides to do about it, including the do-nothing option. But the particular bind he’s in right now is the result of an unforced error of his own making.

Here’s Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest:

An effective leader would have consulted with key people in Congress and made sure of his backing before making explicit threats of force....

The Debate Over Syria

America’s foreign policy makers have my sympathies, especially this week. The Syrian conflict is the kind of problem that keeps actual decision-makers awake at night, staring at the ceiling, and sweating even with the air conditioning on.

Every option—including the option to do nothing at all—is ghastly. Syria is a big bloody mess and it will continue to be a big bloody mess no matter what America does. The United States will be partly blamed for what happens no matter what. Every option is do...

The Looming Strike Against Syria

I’ve wanted to watch Syria’s Bashar al-Assad get his clock cleaned for eight years, so it feels rather strange that I’m a bit ambivalent all of a sudden now that it looks like the United States might actually take action against him. Before we get into that, though, let’s look at how we got to this point and what we might expect in the near future.

The Syrian government allegedly used chemical weapons in a suburb of Damascus and killed at least hundreds of civilians and possibly more than a th...

US Gears Up to Bomb Syria

US Secretary of State John Kerry says it’s undeniable that Syria’s tyrant Bashar al-Assad, whom he used to hail as a reformer, murdered more than a thousand civilians with chemical weapons in a suburb of Damascus, a suburb that is currently under heavy artillery bombardment by the regime.

Military strikes appear set to commence within days.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this—some of it critical, some of it supportive, some of it just plain analytical—but I want to hold off for the moment un...

Syria's War Spreads to Lebanon

It finally happened. Syria’s civil war has officially spilled into Lebanon, and the two sides are using mass casualty terrorism against one another.

Earlier this month, a car bomb exploded in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the suburbs south of Beirut, killing dozens And this week, at least 47 people were killed and more than 500 wounded when two car bombs exploded next to mosques in the predominantly Sunni city of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest.

This wasn’t inevitable, exactly, but it wasn’t hard...

Reader Feedback Needed

The Middle East has never been the only part of the world I want to visit and write about, and I’d like to branch out again.

My first attempt to expand my beat, so to speak, was a smashing success. Of the four books I’ve written so far, Where the West Ends—which mostly takes place in the post-communist region of Eastern Europe and Western Asia—is my best-seller. Amazon.com still ranks it in the top 100 in the Eastern Europe category a year after it was first published, and it was in the top sl...

Egypt Spins its Wheels

Walter Russell Mead’s latest essay in The American Interest, Bambi Meets Godzilla in the Middle East, is a must-read. I wish he was wrong, but alas he is not.

Bambi, in his formulation, is President Barack Obama, of course. Godzilla describes both radical Islamists and the Egyptian military regime.

I believe that democratic capitalism works better than the alternatives (though it does not work perfectly) and that other things being equal over time the societies who embrace these ideas will outp...

Mubarak Will Go Free

Cairo’s new government has ordered the release of Hosni Mubarak from prison.

Egypt is going in circles.

OG Image: 

The Truth About Egypt

Egypt looks dodgier than ever right now.

Just six weeks after overthrowing the government in a military coup, the armed forces opened fire on civilians protesting the removal of President Mohammad Morsi and killed more than 500 people, prompting President Barack Obama to cancel joint American-Egyptian military drills.

Springtime never came to Cairo at all. In some ways, Egypt is right back where it was when Hosni Mubarak still ruled the country. The political scene is exactly the same. Two illi...