Michael Hirsh

Behind the scenes, the Clinton and Obama camps are competing fiercely for foreign policy aides to the 42nd president.

Much was changing in Vietnam when I visited in December 1991, in the waning hours of the Soviet Union. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades, had curdled into mutual contempt.

The truth behind Bush's mangling of cold war history.

Pervez Musharraf has always been a dubious ally in George W. Bush's War on Terror—the kind of guy you avert your eyes from while patting him on the back.

How the tainted-products scandal is exposing Beijing's true backwardness.

Pakistani Ambassador Mahmud Ali Durrani, a scholar and former general, says the government of President Pervez Musharraf is being unfairly blamed for the failure of U.S. intelligence to locate Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri.

Those who fall in with the Barack Obama campaign tend to fall hard for the man himself, and none more than Jonathan Scott Gration. A recently retired Air Force major general who voted for George W.

In the Mideast, the Bush Democracy Agenda is gone with the wind.

His campaign's sorry state isn't just a setback for the candidate. It's a sign that the country won't listen to a military man running for president—at a time when it matters most.

Mohammad Jafari isn't built like your typical diplomat. Stocky and square-jawed, with a thatch of close-cropped black hair, Jafari looks far more like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards general he once was, and he still carries the honorific title "commander." But that's precisely the issue: which role is Jafari playing now?

The new National Intelligence Estimate is an admission of America's strategic failure. Only by acknowledging that can we prevent a new 9/11.

Muslims must find a way to remove the cancer infecting their religion.

Given Bush's behavior on Iraq, his decision to keep Scooter out of the slammer isn't surprising. Nor is it likely to hurt the GOP at the polls either.

U.S. and European officials are still very angry at Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for appearing to concede that Iran's uranium-enrichment program is here to stay. "Every time he gets up there, he comes out with Iranian talking points," snipes one Western diplomat.

The Israelis didn't want Palestinian elections back in January 2006. Even Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, had been worried about them and kept asking for delays.

Iranians may have lost faith in the mullahs, but they're not about to overthrow them.

Why a dusty town 90 miles south of Tehran may hold the key to Iran's future.

The elites mock the president as a religious extremist with a lousy approval rating. Iran may be more like America than you think.

Washington's drive toward regime change in Iran is only rallying the country around its radical president.

Western knockoffs and Islamic bling: Debunking some popular stereotypes of life in Iran.

In his forthcoming biography of Condoleezza Rice, NEWSWEEK's Marcus Mabry explains the roots—and the consequences—of her loyalty to the president.

It wasn't like Harry and "Uncle Joe" at all. Or was it? Sixty-two years ago, here at Potsdam, Harry Truman and Joe Stalin seemed to get along famously, putting on a display of bonhomie that belied how fast their relationship was about to go into a deep freeze.

These are not happy times on the nuclear proliferation front. Iran this week defied yet another 60-day U.N. deadline ordering it to stop enriching uranium, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Wednesday.

He started out well. Conscious that he had image issues—he was the Ugly American architect of the unpopular Iraq War—Paul Wolfowitz, the now embattled World Bank president, ate lunch in the employees' mess hall rather than in the Bank president's palatial dining room.

It's one of those musty, neocolonial traditions dating back to the World War II victors' club. The two big institutions invented at Bretton Woods, N.H., to resurrect the global economy—the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—were supposed to be run by those winners, no questions asked.

Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute is by most accounts a formidable fellow: smart, efficient and expert in all aspects of nation-building—civilian and military. As the top operations officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he's also intimately familiar with all aspects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. "Lute is about as broad-gauged a senior military officer as they could find," says Philip Zelikow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's former senior counselor, who's known him since Lute was a captain....

Susan Eisenhower is an accomplished professional, the president of an international consulting firm. She also happens to be Ike's granddaughter—and in that role, she's the humble torchbearer for moderate "Eisenhower Republicans." Increasingly, however, she says that the partisanship and free spending of the Bush presidency—and the takeover of the party by single-issue voters, especially pro-lifers—is driving these pragmatic, fiscally conservative voters out of the GOP.

If there's one rule that's sacrosanct in American political culture, going all the way back to George Washington, it's that civilians have clear control of the military.

Only a few years ago, Shaha Riza was what is known in journalistic parlance as a flack. She was a media relations person, in other words—and a fairly junior one—whose job it was to reach out to reporters like me so that we would write about various World Bank activities.

The former CIA director's new book gets some facts wrong--or so says the former top staffer of the 9/11 commission. Browser: Deconstructing George Tenet