Anyone who doubts the dangerous consequences of White House waffling on Syria should note some startling statements by U.S. officials in recent days.Let’s start at the top. After two years of insistence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go, the White House started publicly hedging last week. No doubt that was a reaction to the fact that Assad, armed and aided by Russia, Iran, and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, has been scoring major victories against the Syrian rebels.The new W

Still-smoldering protests from Egypt to Brazil have set off a race among scholars and journalists to identify the roots of this summer of discontent in the emerging world. Each major theory starts at the bottom, with the protesters on the street, and notes a common thread: young, Twitter-savvy members of a rising middle class. In this telling, the protests represent the perils of success, as growing wealth creates a class of people who have the time and financial wherewithal to demand from their

WASHINGTON ― The National Security Agency survived a legislative challenge in the House of Representatives last week. But senior NSA officials still face an uphill fight to convince the American public that its operations can enhance security without jeopardizing privacy. The Obama administration had to lobby aggressively to defeat a bipartisan House proposal to defund the NSA’s collection of Americans’ telephone call records. The narrow 217-205 vote shows how fragile public support has become f

GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA ― Catholicism, among the most tradition-bound religions, contains at its core a paradox that has become increasingly sharp. As Pope Francis is on his first overseas trip ― to Brazil, the world’s most populous Catholic country ― it is difficult, despite the inertia of the past, to tell where the church is headed.The accession of Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy adds to the puzzle. The chief Jesuit confessor at the papal court used to be called “the black pope,” owing to hi

One way to view Detroit’s bankruptcy ― the largest bankruptcy of any American city in history ― is as a failure of political negotiations over how financial sacrifices should be divided among the city’s creditors, city workers and municipal retirees, requiring a court to decide instead. It could also be seen as the inevitable culmination of decades of union agreements offering unaffordable pension and health benefits to city workers.But there’s a more basic story here, and it’s being replicated

WASHINGTON ― Two qualities rarely associated with modern secretaries of state are patience and keeping your mouth shut in public. But in his first six months, John Kerry has demonstrated both ― and his stubborn silence appears to have brought him to the door of renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. “The best way to give these negotiations a chance is to keep them private,” Kerry insisted last Friday in Amman while announcing an agreement to resume direct final-status talks after a thre