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Lionel Beehner
Lionel Beehner is a term member and former senior writer at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors and frequent contributor to the New York Times Sunday Travel section. His writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Guardian Online, International Herald Tribune, Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, Newsday, New Republic, New York Magazine, Slate, Seed, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs Magazine. He teaches op-ed writing at Mediabistro, and is writing a book about U.S. foreign policy and non-state actors.
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I have little hope in the United Nations when it comes to issues of accountability abroad. That goes in spades when it comes to places like Afghanistan. Case in point: […]
So the European Union is finally set to release its long-awaited report on who was responsible for the Georgia-Russia war of August 2008. The findings are expected to announce that […]
First we had to witness the egotistical tug-of-war over who took credit for coining the phrase “axis of evil” (David Frum’s wife leaked her husband as the author, which I’m […]
Moammar Gadhafi droned on for 90 minutes yesterday in rambling prose barely befitting of a head of state. Later up to the lectern was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who also gave longwinded […]
Rarely do I ever find myself agreeing with a Russian foreign policy official. But a Russian ambassador slammed his American counterpart, Susan Rice, for preaching the need to investigate war […]
Long gone are the days when PLO leader Yasser Arafat showed up wielding a pistol, or Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk. Nowadays the annual United […]
We may never find out what was onboard the Arctic Sea, the Russian-crewed vessel hijacked by Estonian pirates last month, but my guess is it wasn’t Algeria-bound timber. I’m not […]
One of the biggest fairy tales in foreign policy told to Americans over the past several years has been the Bush administration’s proposed missile shield in Eastern Europe. None of […]
I am standing atop a gorgeous valley of olive groves and goat herds. Black-veiled women lug baskets of fruit around town, whose buildings are still pockmarked with mortar fire. This […]
Attention is finally being paid to Lebanon’s latent political crisis. The prime minister-designate, Saad Hariri, has sacked himself, according to the constitution, for failing to cobble together a power-sharing agreement […]
I am no apologist for the New York City subway. One of the reasons I bought a bike is to avoid its cramped cars, its smelly stations, and its under-repair […]
Syria is in the hot seat. You know you’re in trouble when the only person willing to visit is Hugo Chavez. Iraq accuses Syria of not doing enough to prevent […]
I am sitting in Abu George, a hideout in the old souk of Damascus. It is perhaps the world’s smallest bar. The joint’s avuncular namesake stands behind the small bar, […]
How will we know when we have achieved success in Afghanistan? According to Richard Holbrooke, our special envoy to the region, “We’ll know it when we see it.” That’s a […]
We hear a lot about “compassion” these days in international news. Scotland just released the sole person convicted for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that left 270 people dead. Its rationale? […]
If a bear does his business in the woods and nobody is there to see it, did it in fact happen? I am reminded of this parable amid calls from […]
On its homepage, the State Department lists a number of countries that are unsafe for American tourists. But inevitably, tourists like the three hikers in northern Iraq find themselves on […]
I am based in Beirut this summer, and you can’t pick up a newspaper without reading about a Middle East country wracked by war, a Shiite-led insurgency, and Islamist extremism. […]
As U.S. forces begin their pullout from Iraq, tensions between the Kurdish region and Baghdad are rising. A nationwide census, as mandated by the constitution, has been held up again. […]
Certain terms should not be tossed around lightly, and genocide is one of them—which is why President Obama’s special envoy’s comments on Darfur have created such a stir in the […]