Darren Goode has a story about the difficulty that environmentalists opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline have had with getting Senate Democrats to help them expose conflicts of interest. Environmental groups opposing the $7 billion, 1,700-mile pipeline sending crude from Alberta oil sands to Texas have uncovered evidence they say shows the State Department has [...]

On a conference call with progressive media, White House deputy national security adviser for strategic communication Ben Rhodes stressed that the United States would now commence a “normal” relationship with the Iraqi government, an equal partnership between two sovereign nations. But it’s hard to square that with the reality that the United States will have [...]

Republicans, who never met a war they didn’t like, are responding to the announcement that the President would bring all military troops home from Iraq with a mixture of petulance and rage. Here’s a representative sample from the sine qua non of petulance, Lindsey Graham: “I respectfully disagree with President Obama. I feel all we [...]

The Associated Press reports that the Obama Administration has abandoned plans to keep military troops in Iraq beyond the December 2011 deadline. The Administration could not secure immunity from prosecution for its troops operating in the country, so they’ve decided to bug out instead. A substantial amount of personnel will remain at the US Embassy [...]

The Keystone XL pipeline protests almost prefigured the protests on Wall Street and across the country, or at least offered a glimpse into the new aggressiveness on the part of activists to stop damaging government actions. Whatever the outcome, the weeks-long highlight on the controversial pipeline has caused PR problems for the White House heading [...]

A few things have become clear about the post-2011 Iraq operation for US military forces. First, the Iraqi leadership wants a training force to stay in the country to help Iraqi security forces, particularly the air force and border patrol. Second, they want that training mission to be totally confined to Iraqi bases, and they [...]

As expected, the State Department essentially gave its environmental blessing to the Keystone XL pipeline today, which would stretch nearly 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada to Texas, and which would deliver as much as 700,000 barrels of noxious tar sands oil every day.  This is not a final approval on the project, but getting a [...]

I assumed the hundreds of protesters who’ve come to D.C. to protest against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline weren’t out there because they thought the Administration was on their side.  They meant to pressure the Administration over the environmental and political consequences of their imminent actions. Indeed, we now learn that at least one [...]

I actually agree with much of Hillary Clinton’s assessment of the Administration’s Syria policy. “It’s not just brute force, it’s not just unilateralism, it’s being smart enough to say: ‘You know what? We want a bunch of people singing out of the same hymn book,’ ” said Clinton, who appeared with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta [...]

For the next several months, every public appearance by a member of the Obama national security team will be accompanies by a warning about how allowing triggered cuts to the Defense Department would threaten the United States. The amount of cuts, combined with the up-front cuts in the debt limit deal, aren’t even as much [...]

US officials met face-to-face over the weekend with representatives of the Libyan government in Tunisia. Accounts vary about the meeting. The US claims they delivered a message to Moammar Gahdafi, that he must leave power. The Libyans claim that the US was trying to mend relations, which actually doesn’t make a lot of sense, coming [...]