Michael Hirsh

In his much-watched "60 Minutes" interview on Sunday, former CIA director George Tenet spoke passionately in defense of his former colleagues at the agency, saying they had been maligned and scapegoated by the Bush administration.

For a guy whose presidential campaign was declared dead almost the day it started, Joe Biden sounds a bit too confident these days. Especially when it comes to Iraq. "If it were up to us," says Larry Rasky, Biden's chief campaign flack, "all 90 minutes" of Thursday night's inaugural debate between the eight Democratic candidates would have been devoted to the subject of Iraq.

It's not exactly prime betting season in Washington. March Madness is long over, the baseball season is just getting started, and Barry Bonds's imminent career home-run record--asterisked or not--is such a sure thing that no bookie in his right mind would take odds against it.

Is Robert Gates becoming the Paul O'Neill of President Bush's second term? Someone, in other words, who not only can't stay on the same page as the White House, but who may have lost his songbook altogether -as often seemed the case with the former Treasury secretary?

Strobe Talbott, who served as deputy secretary of State during the Clinton administration, got to know Boris Yeltsin as well as any U.S. official. From Yeltsin's days as maverick Moscow party chief to his critical role in ending the Soviet Union to his chaotic years as president of the new Russian Federation, Talbott closely observed the rise and fall of a man he likens to a construction crane that demolished the old system but left a great deal of chaos in its wake.

The next U.S. president will have a tough job turning around the world's opinion of America, a new survey shows.

The early morning calm was shattered by the sound of gunfire. By the time it stopped, at least 33 were dead. Inside the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

A new hostage crisis ends well—but mysteriously.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad announced his country is now capable of producing 'industrial-scale' uranium enrichment. Assessing that boast—and what it means for nuclear negotiations.

As the British captives come home, Iran's negotiator signals that he may be willing to talk about his country's enrichment program.

Bush came out swinging against a Democratic Congress determined, he argues, to undo the benefits of the "surge." Time for a reality check. Finding the thorns in Bush's Rose Garden address.

America and Iran are barreling toward a collision. It doesn't have to be this way.

U.S. forces are massing on Iran, and soon it will be time to strike. No, not militarily—that would be the height of insanity—but diplomatically. The Americans and Europeans are close to achieving the leverage they have long sought against Tehran through a deftly managed policy of political encirclement and economic strangulation.

Lindsay Moran spent several years as a case officer at the CIA after graduating from Harvard and later wrote a 2005 book about her experiences, "Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy" (Putnam), a ribald retelling of the manifold challenges of being both   adventurous and female at one of America's stodgiest and strictest national-security services.

The KSM case points up what's wrong with the way the Bush administration fights terrorism. How the next president can do better.

Jalal Sharafi was carrying a video-game, a gift for his daughter, when he found himself surrounded. On that chilly Sunday morning, the second secretary at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad had driven himself to the commercial district of Arasat Hindi to checkout the site for a new Iranian bank.

More than anything else he has done in his second term, George W. Bush's embrace of a fuel-for-nukes accord with North Korea shows that he is adjusting to the harsh realities of diplomacy—and straying ever further from the ideology of regime change.

He is 83 now, very gray and a bit saggy around the edges. But nearly 40 years after he first convened the Paris Peace Talks, Henry Kissinger is still playing the globe like a three-dimensional chessboard.

It may have been the last time George W. Bush felt really good about Iraq. Last June, as the president flew back from a surprise visit to Baghdad--and his first sitdown with the new Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki--he was visibly excited.

Why are Washington policymakers so skeptical that George W. Bush's surge plan for Iraq can work? In large part because they don't trust Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

George W. Bush is clearly getting tough with Iran. He took aim at Tehran in his speech to the nation Wednesday night, stressing that he holds the Iranian government responsible for helping to destabilize Iraq.

Most top U.S. military officials—even members of George W. Bush's administration such as national-security adviser Stephen Hadley—did not recommend a "surge" or escalation of U.S. troops into Iraq when they were interviewed by the Iraq Study Group last fall, says group member Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton.

Air strikes this week on alleged Al Qaeda figures in Somalia may prove to be one of the last counterterrorism operations associated with a controversial Pentagon general who has overseen the deployment of secret U.S. Special Ops teams against suspected terror plotters, defense experts close to the Pentagon and intelligence community tell NEWSWEEK.Lt.

For a mailman's son who put himself through school working at a Campbell's Soup factory in hardscrabble Camden, N.J., there must be a special poignancy to knowing that your task over the next two years is to rescue the reputation of a blue-blooded president who's gotten himself into a bind in the Middle East.But that's going to be William (Fox) Fallon's job as commander of CENTCOM—the first admiral ever to be named to head the traditionally land-oriented regional command, which covers Iraq,...

It was a time of terrible weakness. We were a nation kicked in the gut by Vietnam and Watergate and stagflation. Gerald Ford—who was a strong and honorable man but who had no mandate or electoral legitimacy—was an emblem of that weakness.

Just a few weeks ago, Capt. Brad Velotta was kicking in doors in the most dangerous city in the world. Now he's kicking back with his wife, Jodi, who can hardly believe he's home from Baghdad at last. "He is my buddy, my pal and the love of my life," she gushed in an e-mail. "I never once second-guessed that.

Judging from the generals who are taking charge in Iraq, America won't be shying away from battle there any time soon. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who assumed command of multinational forces in Iraq on Thursday, is known throughout the Army as a kick-in-the-doors guy.

It's been a rough season for neoconservatives, the group that has dominated U.S. foreign policy since the attacks of September 11. They've been largely run out of the Bush administration, beset by infighting, and mocked by a foreign-policy establishment that hailed their power just a few years ago.

Perhaps the signature moment of John Bolton's tenure as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations came last summer, when the No. 2 official at the U.N., Mark Malloch Brown, had the temerity to suggest some helpful hints to Americans.

The forthcoming report by James Baker's Iraq Study Group has enjoyed the biggest public buildup since the Segway. And it is likely to be just as big of a bust.Here's why the Baker-Hamilton report is destined to land with a thud, after weeks of messianic hype.