Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 45

The Superpower Takes a Breather

My latest piece in the Wall Street Journal is up and it's outside the paywall.

France just smashed al Qaeda in Mali with little more than moral support from the United States. Washington didn't even lead from behind. Americans did not lead at all. This time we sat on the sidelines while France—France!—led and did everything from the front.

Last winter the entire northern part of the northwest African country was seized by Ansar al-Dine and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, who together transform...

Now I REALLY Can't Go to Libya

Libya is so unstable now that international airlines are refusing to fly there.

The government should have just approved my visa when I first asked for it. The bureaucracy over there is in no better shape than the security services. Libya will just have to suffer alone for a while.

The Push for Anti-Blasphemy Laws

I have an essay in the current print edition of World Affairs which is now online outside the pay wall. Here's the first part:

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” —Thomas Jefferson

Free speech is under attack in the West, and it’s under attack from abroad. For years radical Islamists have targeted embassies abroad and individuals at home for “insulting” the Prophet Muhammad. And now diplomats and heads of state from Islamist...

Benghazi in Transition

Benghazi is in a state of transition, most likely from bad to horrendous.

Security in Benghazi, the eastern Libyan city where four Americans were killed Sept. 11 in a terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate, has decayed to the point where Westerners are fleeing, assassinations and kidnappings are rife and residents worry that U.S. drone strikes on jihadist targets are imminent.

“The situation has obviously deteriorated. It is a systematic deterioration,” said longtime Benghazi resident Jalal Elg...

Fighting Over Syria's Ruins

Jabhat al-Nusra, the Salafist faction of the Syrian insurgency that was recently labeled a terrorist organzation by the United States government, recently launched a failed attack against the town of Sere Kaniye in Syrian Kurdistan.

My pal Jonathan Spyer, who has been following the Syrian war as closely as anyone and is now writing a book about it, has this to say in the Jerusalem Post:

The Sere Kaniye fighting is an indication of the increasing transformation of Syria’s civil war from an insur...

Benghazi Circles the Drain

As Westerners evacuate Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi, Islamist militias—whose fighters apparently number in the thousands—are moving in.

An unnamed activist there says, “There isn't anyone fully in control of Benghazi…[Militias] control entrances into the city, streets, key infrastructure. The police don't want to challenge them because they just don't have the manpower.” A downtown police chief says, “We only have pistols and rifles. They have tanks and heavy weapons. We want to do our job...

Change of Plans - Libya Has Become Impossible

Just as I'm finally ready to depart for Libya, travel warnings go from bad to catastrophic.

The United States government is now saying “the potential for violence and kidnappings targeting Westerners in Benghazi is significant.” The British Foreign Office says, “We are aware of a specific, imminent threat to Westerners in Benghazi. We advise against all travel to Benghazi and urge any British nationals who are there against our advice to leave immediately.”

I cannot possibly defy these kinds o...

Love It, Hate It--But See It

Zero Dark Thirty, screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is weathering a storm of criticism. Critics overwhelmingly give the film positive reviews, but activists claim that it approves of and even glorifies the use of torture against suspected al-Qaida terrorists held in secret CIA prisons and “black” sites.

The accusation is ludicrous. Nothing in Zero Dark Thirty suggests that either Boal or Bigelow approves of torture. So many have...

What Just Happened?

Algeria is a black box for most Western foreign correspondents. Most of us, including me, have never been there. I sort of want to visit, but the place gives me the creeps in a really bad way. It is by far the most bloody-minded and ruthless place in the neighborhood.

The biggest reason this fact is not widely known is because during the unspeakable civil war there in the 1990s, every faction—including the government side—murdered reporters both domestic and foreign. Pretty much nobody went th...

Potemkin North Korea

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently returned from a trip to North Korea with former Ambassador to the UN and Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson. Schmidt brought his daughter Sophie along, and she published a long narrative dispatch about her experience there, including photographs.

Everything foreigners see in North Korea is staged. And it’s staged to an astonishing degree. The Soviet Union used to pull similar stunts for visiting foreigners, but North Korea has taken them to the nth degree....