Then he offered his one caveat. “A red line for us,” he said, “is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”

 Over the past decade, on a far smaller scale, the country’s military and intelligence leadership have gone through a parallel debate about how to use the Predator drone. Because it is precisely targeted, often on an individual, it is used almost every week.

 

“We should not negotiate with the Taliban,” the former Massachusetts governor declared, just as diplomats dispatched by the president were in Qatar trying to get those negotiations going. “We should defeat the Taliban.” In case anyone missed his meaning, he drove home the point, saying the best strategy was, “We go anywhere they are and...]]> http://www.realclearworld.com/ Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600 Washington

ARM the Syrian rebels! And, while we’re at it, give the Israelis the tools they need — bunker-busters, refueling aircraft — so that if they decide to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, they’ll get it right the first time.

Both calls have resonated across Washington in recent days. The demand to level the playing field against the Syrian government — which is getting arms from Russia and Iran — came from Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Talk of increasing the credibility of Israel’s threat to flatten Iran’s far-flung nuclear facilities has arisen in many...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/sunday-review/confronting-iran-in-a-year-of-elections.html?_r=1 Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600 A DEMOCRATIC president running in a bitterly disputed presidential race faces a fateful national security decision: whether to approve an airstrike to thwart an adversary bent on becoming a nuclear-weapons state.

Conservative hawks deride the president as weak. In the West Wing, advisers debate the risks: a strike could lead to open conflict, but doing nothing would change the balance of power in a volatile, war-prone region.

President Obama offered up his administration’s favorite weapon: armed Predator drones.

The difference said much about the Obama way when it comes to intervening in armed insurgencies — and his comfort in letting someone else lead the intervention.

Now with the Qaddafi forces weathering episodic attacks, and sometimes even gaining, the question in Washington has boiled down to this: Can Mr. Obama live with a stalemate?

President Obama, appearing Monday morning with Australia’s prime minister, tried to raise the pressure on Colonel Qaddafi further by talking about “a range of potential options, including potential military options” against the embattled Libyan leader.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/health/policy/22assess.html?hp Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500 With his party rallying around him on health care, President Obama is now assured, whatever the ultimate cost, of going down in history as one of the handful of presidents who found a way to reshape the nation’s social welfare system.

A blog from The New York Times that tracks the health care debate as it unfolds.

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After the bitterest of debates, Mr. Obama proved that he is willing to fight for something that moved him to his core. Skeptics had begun to wonder. But he showed...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/weekinreview/14sanger.html?ref=weekinreview Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0600 For a few months in the mid-1960s President Johnson and his aides secretly weighed bombing China’s nuclear sites — perhaps seeking Soviet help — rather than let Mao get the bomb. Then the costs of starting another war in Asia sank in and they decided to try containment — living with a threatening regime while deterring its most dangerous moves.

It worked. Nearly five decades later, more Americans wake up worried about our trillion-dollar debt to China than about China’s arsenal. China has evolved into a comparatively manageable military competitor, at least for now.

Today a version of the same debate about whether containment is...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/world/middleeast/27iran.html?hp Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600 WASHINGTON — When Iran was caught last September building a secret, underground nuclear enrichment plant at a military base near the city of Qum, the country’s leaders insisted they had no other choice. With its nuclear facilities under constant threat of attack, they said, only a fool would leave them out in the open.

So imagine the surprise of international inspectors almost two weeks ago when they watched as Iran moved nearly its entire stockpile of low-enriched nuclear fuel to an above-ground plant. It was as if, one official noted, a bull’s-eye had been painted on it.

Why take such a huge risk?

That mystery is the subject of fervent...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/weekinreview/07sanger.html?ref=weekinreview Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0600 WASHINGTON — For decades — through political upheaval and wars and wild bouts of deficits or inflation — the debt of the United States has always been rated AAA, the gold standard of creditworthiness by which all nations are compared.

That was true before President Obama published his budget on Monday, with its projections of huge American deficits over the next decade and beyond. Astoundingly or not, it was as true after those estimates were published. Of course, had it been the United States Widget Company projecting red ink as far as the eye could see, no one would lend it a dime.

The closest thing Washington got to a brush-back pitch was a...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/us/politics/29sanger.html?hp Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0600 When President Bill Clinton faced a Republican uprising and a nation that turned deeply skeptical about his agenda, he used the 1996 State of the Union address to declare that “the era of big government is over.”

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That move to the middle — arguably more rhetoric than reality — stopped Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in its tracks. So why did President Barack Obama go a different route on Wednesday night, giving little ground and declaring that the problem was not his agenda but a deficit of trust in...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/world/asia/25rollout.html?hp Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 In declaring Tuesday that he would “finish the job” in Afghanistan, President Obama used a phrase clearly meant to imply that even as he deploys an additional 30,000 or so troops, he has finally figured out how to bring the eight-year-long conflict to an end.

But offering that reassuring if somewhat contradictory signal — that by adding troops he can speed the United States toward an exit — is just the first of a set of tricky messages Mr. Obama will have to deliver as he rolls out his strategy publicly.

Over the next week, he will deliver multiple messages to multiple audiences: voters at home, allies, the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/world/asia/11military.html?hp Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON — The leading Senate Democrat on military matters said Thursday that he was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.

The comments by the senator, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, illustrate the growing skepticism President Obama is facing in his own party as the White House decides whether to commit more deeply to a war that has begun losing public support, even as American commanders acknowledge that the situation on the ground has deteriorated.

Senator Levin’s comments, made in an...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/world/asia/07policy.html?hp Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 This article is by David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker.

An Afghan police officer stood guard Thursday in Kabul during a campaign stop by Ashraf Ghani, a presidential candidate.

New Afghan national police officers took part in a graduation ceremony last month in Wardak Province. United States Army instructors supervised the officers’ three-week training course.

WASHINGTON — As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.

Those “metrics” of success,...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/world/middleeast/06policy.html?ref=todayspaper Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in separate interviews this weekend, said that the accelerating crackdown on opposition leaders in Iran in recent days would not deter them from seeking to engage the country’s top leadership in direct negotiations.

In an interview with The New York Times, a day before his scheduled departure for Moscow on Sunday, Mr. Obama said he had “grave concern” about the arrests and intimidation of Iran’s opposition leaders, but insisted, as he has throughout the Iranian crisis, that the repression would not close the door on negotiations with the Iranian government.

“We’ve got some fixed national security interests...]]> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/weekinreview/28sanger.html?ref=weekinreview Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/world/europe/01global.html?hp Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 LONDON — For nearly 30 years, American presidents have arrived at economic summit meetings with nearly identical talking points: the solution to most ailments lies in more economic integration, unleashing free markets and using a light touch to tame capitalism.