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Flynt Leverett

Flynt Leverett is senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a visiting professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council and on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff during President Bush's first term. After leaving the Bush administration because of policy disagreements, he was a foreign-policy adviser to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Recent Articles

The Way Out

A roundtable discussion of our options for exiting Iraq.

Flynt LeverettJul 09, 2007
Art by John Ritter.

In our June issue, Flynt Leverett penned a memo to the incoming president laying out the options for an exit from Iraq. Below, several prominent progressives respond and offer their own suggestions.

Peter W. Galbraith
Lawrence J. Korb
Suzanne Nossel and Charles A. Kupchan

Plus, Flynt Leverett responds.

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Peter W. Galbraith: An Internal Solution for an Internal Problem

To the Incoming President: On Iraq

It's January, 2009. A Democrat has just become president and confronts one mean conundrum: What's the best way to leave Iraq?

Flynt LeverettMay 19, 2007

To: The New President
From: The National Security Adviser
Date: January 21, 2009

Illusion and Reality

Flynt LeverettAug 13, 2006

On the evening of September 11, 2001, I was one of a small group of State Department staffers called in to confer with Secretary of State Colin Powell and work through the night to produce a diplomatic strategy for assembling an international coalition to destroy Osama bin Laden's base in Afghanistan. Powell took this strategy to the White House on the morning of September 12, and it became the blueprint for marshaling international support for Operation Enduring Freedom, launched months later.

The Middle East: Thinking Big

Flynt LeverettFeb 21, 2005

One certainly cannot fault George W. Bush for lacking what his father famously called “the vision thing.” Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the president announced a war on all terrorists “with global reach,” and warned state sponsors of terrorism “to stand with us or with the terrorists.” Two months after the attacks, Bush endorsed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more explicitly than any of his predecessors. He developed a grand vision for political and economic liberalization in the Middle East, denouncing the 60-year-old policy “mistake” of cosseting authoritarian regimes in the Arab world for short-term strategic gains.