It’s January, 2009. A Democrat has just become president and confronts one mean conundrum: What’s the best way to leave Iraq?
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 Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
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Illusion and Reality
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 […]
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The Middle East: Thinking Big
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 […]