Remember that George W. Bush got excoriated for this kind of thing: On Wednesday, the president met with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen and Central Command commander four-star Gen. David Petraeus. Gates, supported by Mullen and Petraeus, ...

There's actually a lot Obama can learn from the troubled presidency of George W. Bush....

Right now I’m going to say I’d rather get up late, walk to my TV or go to a watch party, and enjoy the ceremony. To me it looks like a hassle to even try and get into town. Those were the words I wrote in my last post, as I decided at the time I wouldn’t try to go on the mall. However some...

Anthony Shadid has a great story in The Washington Post that offers a microcosm look at the kind of compromises by which we’ve brought down the level of violence in Iraq. Specifically, he takes at Nadhim Khalil, the bossman of a Sunni Arab town called Thuluyah. I would say that these compromis...

Andrew Exum (aka “abu muqawama”) offers a rather blistering review of Linda Robinson’s Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq . This, too, is hagiography. (”It reads as if ghost-written by Petraeus,” one friend complained.) Th...

Bob Woodward’s new book The War Within is different than his last three books on the Bush administration. This book was touted as the smoking gun. It was going to explain how we went so wrong in Iraq. At least this was the scuttlebutt. This book does not even attempt to tell us why we got in I...

Blunt and pugnacious will soon give way to supple and below-the-radar. Say goodbye to the Bush era in foreign policy and hello to the Obama moment....

Blunt and pugnacious will soon give way to supple and below-the-radar. Say goodbye to the Bush era in foreign policy and hello to the Obama moment....

In July 2007, when the possibility that Barack Obama might win the presidency was still just a gleam in the candidate's eye, he met with former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to ask for some advice. But he wasn't after the usual campaign position papers or sound bites. Obama was alrea...

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain shifted their foreign policy focus yesterday from the future of U.S. military involvement in Iraq to the deteriorating war in Afghanistan, with both White House hopefuls pledging thousands of additional troops and a large-scale infusion of aid for the Afghan......