One face of the war in Syria that Americans don’t often see is the US Army trauma surgeon, standing in the midday sun on the outskirts of Raqqa, taking a brief break from her near-constant duty in the operating room treating Syrians whose limbs have been shattered by bombs and booby traps.The doctor is a lieutenant colonel serving with US special operations forces, and under the ground rules for my four-day trip to Syria in February, I’m not allowed to use her name. She’s a trim, clear-eyed woma

Viewpoints April 9, 2018

Donald Trump made the case in “The Art of the Deal” for “winging it” on big negotiations. “I never get too attached to one deal or one approach,” he wrote. “I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.”Trump is now about to wing it on an epic, global stage in his planned face-to-face meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Nobody in Washington or abroad seems to know just what Trump wants to accomplish in the meeting -- an ambig

Viewpoints April 1, 2018

In a wide-ranging late-night interview at his palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia‘s young crown prince Mohammed bin Salman described a new wave of reforms as part of the “shock” therapy needed to modernize the kingdom’s cultural and political life.“MBS,” as the headstrong 32-year-old crown prince is known, began the conversation just before midnight Monday, at the end of a day that had brought new royal decrees shaking up the Saudi military and government bureaucracy and appointing a woman to a cabin

Viewpoints March 1, 2018

Every good spy story needs a shadowy operative who does the dirty work for the boss, and thanks to the indictment issued Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller, we now have a nominee for that role in the Russia investigation. He’s a billionaire oligarch named Yevgeniy Prigozhin, and based on Russian and other accounts, he sounds like a real-life version of a James Bond villain. Prigozhin’s fingerprints appear to be on three of the most sensitive operations launched by Russian President Vladimi

Viewpoints Feb. 22, 2018

Richard Helms, the godfather of modern CIA directors, prided himself on keeping his mouth shut in public. He was delighted that his 1979 biography had the starchy title “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.”　But that was then. In today’s media-driven world, former intelligence chiefs appear so regularly on cable television they probably need agents (not the trench-coated variety) to negotiate their contracts. Five recent directors or acting directors -- John McLaughlin, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Mi

Viewpoints Jan. 29, 2018

Sometimes diplomacy is the art of going in two directions at once, and the Trump administration seems to have chosen that sweet spot of ambiguity, for now, in managing its continuing confrontation with North Korea. President Trump has paused his “Little Rocket Man” rhetoric and boasts about the size of his own nuclear button. He's insisting this week that talk of a US military strike (which he had encouraged) is “completely wrong,” and calling for discussions with North Korea “under the right ci

Viewpoints Jan. 12, 2018

After visiting Tehran in 2013, I wrote that the Iranian capital seemed suspended somewhere between Pyongyang and Los Angeles. We’ve seen this past week how passionately Iranians want the latter, not the former -- as they denounced their impoverished garrison state and demanded a prosperous, modern future.Asking whether Iran’s demonstrations create a “pre-revolutionary” situation may miss the larger point. The process of change has already begun. The regime will use its instruments of repression,

Viewpoints Jan. 7, 2018

When it comes to cyberweapons, America is an elephant and Iran is a flea. Still, a flea can be a persistent nuisance, especially for the unprotected.Iran‘s cyber capability is the focus of a detailed new study called “Iran’s Cyber Threat,” to be published soon by Collin Anderson and Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It describes a country that, although “third tier” on the cyberthreat matrix, can still do considerable damage.The disclosures about Iran‘s cyberatt

Viewpoints Dec. 28, 2017

The US-North Korea confrontation is nearing another tense inflection point, with North Korea signaling that it could be ready for negotiations with Washington soon, even as it moves toward becoming a full nuclear-weapons power.When such diplomatic standoffs get resolved, it‘s often by allowing each country to claim it’s entering negotiations on its own terms. In this case, North Korea would assert its status as a nuclear-weapons state, while the US would insist the dialogue is about eventual den

Viewpoints Dec. 7, 2017