In the  Odessa Steps scene  of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film  “Battleship Potemkin,”  a boy no more than 3 or 4 years old is shot by czarist troops. Bleeding, he falls to the ground, where he is trampled by a frantic crowd fleeing the massacre. His anguished mother...

The fierce competition between the proxies of the two mainstream Kurdish factions in Syria’s Kurdish areas, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) may sabotage Kurds’ best opportunity to achieve self-rule within Syria in a century. The Democratic Union...

The attack the U.S. is threatening Bashar Assad with for alleged chemical weapons use will now be an "unbelievably small, limited kind of effort." Is America becoming a paper tiger? When the White House's foreign policy team aren't dissembling or dithering, they can be found fudging,...

Much of the  debate over U.S. intervention in Syria  boils down the conflict there to a clash between the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and an armed rebellion in which al-Qaeda affiliates play a significant role. Typically ignored in that conversation are the voices of the...