Lionel Beehner
Lionel Beehner is a term member and former senior writer at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors and frequent contributor to the New York Times Sunday Travel section. His writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Guardian Online, International Herald Tribune, Baltimore Sun, New York Daily News, Newsday, New Republic, New York Magazine, Slate, Seed, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs Magazine. He teaches op-ed writing at Mediabistro, and is writing a book about U.S. foreign policy and non-state actors.
I am no apologist for the New York City subway. One of the reasons I bought a bike is to avoid its cramped cars, its smelly stations, and its under-repair […]
Syria is in the hot seat. You know you’re in trouble when the only person willing to visit is Hugo Chavez. Iraq accuses Syria of not doing enough to prevent […]
I am sitting in Abu George, a hideout in the old souk of Damascus. It is perhaps the world’s smallest bar. The joint’s avuncular namesake stands behind the small bar, […]
How will we know when we have achieved success in Afghanistan? According to Richard Holbrooke, our special envoy to the region, “We’ll know it when we see it.” That’s a […]
We hear a lot about “compassion” these days in international news. Scotland just released the sole person convicted for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that left 270 people dead. Its rationale? […]
If a bear does his business in the woods and nobody is there to see it, did it in fact happen? I am reminded of this parable amid calls from […]
On its homepage, the State Department lists a number of countries that are unsafe for American tourists. But inevitably, tourists like the three hikers in northern Iraq find themselves on […]
I am based in Beirut this summer, and you can’t pick up a newspaper without reading about a Middle East country wracked by war, a Shiite-led insurgency, and Islamist extremism. […]
As U.S. forces begin their pullout from Iraq, tensions between the Kurdish region and Baghdad are rising. A nationwide census, as mandated by the constitution, has been held up again. […]
Certain terms should not be tossed around lightly, and genocide is one of them—which is why President Obama’s special envoy’s comments on Darfur have created such a stir in the […]
One of the bad things about the Obama administration is that human rights have taken a backseat to more pressing concerns abroad. A case in point was Joseph Biden’s recent […]
It may not be newsworthy that a pair of nuclear-armed Russian submarines was caught patrolling near the U.S. coast. But it was bound to make headlines no less, and for […]