should the u.s. as john mccain has said, and martin indic, one of your former colleagues said, do a limited no fly zone and do stand off action. air strikes. that s something you ve been writing about. form follows function. and the reality is that the military power is an instrument. it s an instrument to achieve an end game. without a clear sense of what that end game is, we have to correlate quite precisely, or as price prooe sizely as we can, what are we trying tie cheev. if you want to overthrow the current government of syria, the president should declare that is a vital national interest and design a military strategy to do so. but what i don t want to see is america getting stuck with a check on this one. and the reality is, we are uniquely positioned to get stuck with that check. we re coming off the two longest wars in american history. where the standard for victory was never could we win, but when could we leave. and extrication not the metric you want to use to measure t
you wrote this article recently and say in part, there s a lot that s merurky for syria right now. a messy situation is about to get a whole lot messier. messier in what way? well, we have to set this in a broader context. we re coming off the two longest wars in american history. where the standard for victory iraq and afghanistan was never could we win but when could we leave? and extrication is not the kind of metric you want to judge the performance of the greatest power on earth. i think the president is really in a conundrum, really, because there s no single act that he can take right now that would significantly change the military or political arc of this crisis. we have to get away from the notion that there s an immediate solution or game-changers. we ve seen the introduction of
seen here that was not quite exactly the case. tamerlan tsarnaev was not even part of his local mosque or particularly connected with the local muslim community at all. the islamic society of boston took pains to report that neither brother was a member or even a regular attendee of the cambridge mosque. based on what we re learning about his life leading up to the bombing tamerlan tsarnaev does not seem to have been taken in by an extremist movement. these anecdotes we do have of his interactions with the muslim community in fact tell the opposite story and paint a portrait of profound alienation from the muslim community. of an extrication from anything larger. we have a mental category for people who commit violence inspired by an extremist version of islam and that is the category of terrorist. we also have another mental category for a pair of disturbed, self-radicalizing young men who create a private world that justifies the most horrific of acts, disturbed sociopaths. as the pi
about his life leading up to the bombing tamerlan tsarnaev does not seem to have been taken in by an extremist movement. these anecdotes we do have of his interactions with the muslim community in fact tell the opposite story and paint a portrait of profound alienation from the muslim community. of an extrication from anything larger. we have a mental category for people who commit violence inspired by an extremist version of islam and that is the category of terrorist. we also have another mental category for a pair of disturbed, self-radicalizing young men who create a private world that justifies the most horrific of acts, disturbed sociopaths. as the picture of the brothers motivation slowly comes into focus it is hard not to wonder if we are seeing something more like columbine than jihad. the reason that matters a lot is because everything about the politics and legal ramifications of what is about to happen will depend on which category we assign this crime. joining me at the t
local muslim community at all. the islamic society of boston took pains to report that neither brother was a member or even a regular attendee of the cambridge mosque. based on what we re learning about his life leading up to the bombing tamerlan tsarnaev does not seem to have been taken in by an extremist movement. these anecdotes we do have of his interactions with the muslim community in fact tell the opposite story and paint a portrait of profound alienation from the muslim community. of an extrication from anything larger. we have a mental category for people who commit violence inspired by an extremist version of islam and that is the category of terrorist. we also have another mental category for a pair of disturbed, self-radicalizing young men who create a private world that justifies the most horrific of acts, disturbed sociopaths. as the picture of the brothers motivation slowly comes into focus it is hard not to wonder if we are seeing something more like columbine than jih