<![CDATA[ - Articles - RealClearPolitics]]> http://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/rss/archive/15992.xml Author <![CDATA[ISIS and the Destruction of History]]> Fri, 20 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500 It does something to our sense of ourselves, and of humanity, when we see pictures of men, willfully and with impunity, destroying some of the world’s oldest and rarest archeological treasures. A couple of weeks ago, it was video clips of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham’s extremists wielding sledgehammers and drills, methodically destroying an exquisitely carved stone lamassu, or winged man-bull, at the Assyrian complex of Nimrud, which was created by artists nearly three thousand years ago. A few days later, it was the ancient temple complex of Hatra, in northern Iraq, which was built by the Seleucid Empire around two or three centuries before Christ. Hatra had been...]]> <![CDATA[Egypt, Libya and ISIS]]> Tue, 17 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0600 The release, on Sunday, of a video showing the beheading of twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christian workers is but the latest of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)’s documented horrors. In the video, the executioners make clear that the workers, who were kidnapped from Sirte, Libya, last year, were killed for purely sectarian reasons. Aping medieval jihadists, they vow to “conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission.”

]]> <![CDATA[Libya on Edge]]> Sat, 31 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0600 Amid reports that the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) was finally beaten back from the Syrian-Turkish-border town of Kobani, and of threats and negotiation offers from ISIS hostage takers, came the news, on Tuesday morning, of an attack on the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli. As many as five gunmen blasted their way into the hotel, shooting at whomever they saw. Ten people, five of them foreigners, were murdered. 

]]> <![CDATA[The Barbarians Who Killed James Foley]]> Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0500 A video showing the beheading, by a black-garbed executioner, of the American journalist James Foley is the latest in a series of sickening acts that the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, has visited on the world in recent months. Foley’s execution was presented as a choreographed “message to America” by this band of performance-minded terrorists, who seek to be seen, heard, and feared by as many people as possible. Jim Foley, who was forty, was a handsome and quietly intrepid man who reported for GlobalPost, a Boston-based news site. He was in the field in northern Syria when he was abducted, two years ago.

]]> <![CDATA[The Last Days of Moammar Gaddafi]]> Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500 How does it end? The dictator dies, shrivelled and demented, in his bed; he flees the rebels in a private plane; he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. He is tried. He is not tried. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed. The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures.

Instinctively, when dictators are toppled, we invade their castles and expose their vanities and...]]> <![CDATA[Iran: After the Crackdown]]> Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500 Early this summer, while walking in the Alborz Mountains outside Tehran, I came across three members of Iran’s reformist Green Movement. It was a parching-hot afternoon, and they had taken shelter from the heat in a cherry orchard next to a stream, where fruit hung glistening from the branches. The Alborz Mountains have long provided refuge, clean air, and exercise for the residents of north Tehran. The northern districts are more prosperous than the rest of the city, and their residents are generally more educated and aware of foreign ideas and trends. North Tehran was not the only locus of the Green Movement, but support there was particularly intense last...]]> <![CDATA[Ahmadinejad, Nukes & Greens]]> Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500 <![CDATA[Obama's Savvy Cuba Move]]> Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 <![CDATA[Ahmadinejad’s Reelection: Can Iran Change?]]> Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 <![CDATA[The Rising Influence of Hugo Chávez]]> Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500