I spent the evening at a screening of a soon-to-be-released HBO documentary about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the legendary international diplomat. It’s based on Samantha Power’s remarkable book exploring de Mello’s career as the apotheosis of a breed of diplomat emerging in the latter stages of the Cold War that husbands the United Nations in [...]

Dear Gen. Dempsey, This sounds like an excellent pilot program to encourage responsible command decentralization. However, through no fault of yours or your staff’s, you’ve picked a name for it that has unfortunate double-entrendres associated. Just saying. Sincerely, Spencer Ackerman

In an uncertain and confusing world, you can always trust Bill Kristol to be Bill Kristol. Here he fills his diaper over Adm. Mullen’s disinclination to attack Iran: Mullen’s formulation of geostrategic equivalance ignores a massive difference between the two outcomes: Even assuming the degree and kind of “destabilization” would be the same in both [...]

Warning! Everything that follows in this post is idle barstool-though-I’m-still-at-work speculation! So you may have heard that U.S. and Iraqi forces killed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al Masri, the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in a joint Sunday raid. If this was 2006, we’d all be freaking out. I might be making an [...]

Nouri al-Maliki has been prosecuting a miniature sectarian war while you haven’t been looking: Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country’s Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say. [...]

Books I need to read: Audrey Kurth Cronin’s How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. Nick Lehmann describes the policy implications of her research: Cronin offers a confident prescription, based on her small-bore approach to terrorism, for defeating the apparently intractable Al Qaeda. The idea is to take advantage of the [...]

Gen. Petraeus should print some NFTY-style t-shirts. Will Abe Foxman will make the arduous trip up to the 92nd Street Y to apologize to the man in person? (Thanks to reader EG.)

I’ve written a lot over the years about the mistake of authenticity and why the search for something authentic is a mirage that leads you into some dark and ugly corners of human existence. A consequence of that position is that I’m unable, on pains of inconsistency, to criticize a group calling itself Jews for [...]

Ellen Nakashima reports on a somewhat-vague dispute between the FISA Court and the NSA about what metadata the NSA can legally collect. Collection in this area —  the “origin, destination and path of an e-mail; the phone numbers called from a particular telephone; and the Internet address of someone making an Internet phone call” — [...]

Apparently Roxana Saberi — the American journalist recently detained by the Iranian regime — co-wrote a film about underground rock in Iran. Unfortunately, I’m learning about this movie late and I’ll be at something else when E Street closes out its run of No One Knows About Persian Cats tonight, but if you can make [...]