On a scorching day in August, 2006, Wajeha al-Huwaider threw off her abaya, the enveloping black cover worn by Saudi women, and donned a calf-length pink shirt, pink trousers, and a matching pink scarf. She then took a taxi, from Bahrain, to a signpost on the bridge marking the border with Saudi Arabia. She got out and, with a large poster declaring, “Give Women Their Rights,” marched toward her homeland. Within twenty minutes, she was picked up by Saudi security forces, interrogated for a day, and officially warned. An intelligence officer, she recounted to me later, had pointed at her mouth and said, “Control this, and we won’t have a problem.”

Gender

President Trump told world leaders at the UN that the nuclear deal with Iran and other nations was an "embarrassment to the United States." Iran's President Rouhani went home and presided over a parade including new long-range ballistic missiles -- which were not part of the deal. But Trump and US hardliners say they should have been, and should be in the future. So they're calling for re-negotiation. Critics call that so unlikely it puts American diplomats in a bind — especially when North Korea already has nuclear weapons and accuses the US of "declaring war."

On Monday, I sat in One U.N. Plaza, the high-rise hotel across the street from the United Nations, and watched a parade of European diplomats head into meetings with Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani. Boris Johnson, the blond-mopped British foreign minister, sauntered through the lobby in deep conversation with his delegation. The new French President, Emmanuel Macron, led by a military officer wearing the distinctive stovepipe kepi, and accompanied by a dozen aides and several photographers, scurried by next. One by one, the Europeans came to confer with the leader of a country that has been ostracized by the outside world, for decades, as a pariah. No longer.

وفقا للإستراتيجية الأميركية الكبرى، التي حددها الأميرال آرثر ك. سيبروفسكي في عام 2001 ونشرها نائبه توماس بارنت عام 2004، يجب تدمير كامل الشرق الأوسط الموسع باستثناء إسرائيل والأردن ولبنان.

The current spasm of international terrorism, an age-old tactic of warfare, is often traced to a bomb mailed from New York by the anti-Castro group El Poder Cubano, or Cuban Power, that exploded in a Havana post office, on January 9, 1968. Five people were seriously injured. Since then, almost four hundred thousand people have died in terrorist attacks worldwide, on airplanes and trains, in shopping malls, schools, embassies, cinemas, apartment blocks, government offices, and businesses, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The deadliest remains the 9/11 attack, sixteen years ago this week, which killed almost three thousand people—and in turn triggered a war that has become America’s longest.

Over the past half century, the United States has fought only one big war—in Kuwait, in 1991—that was a conventional conflict. Operation Desert Storm launched a U.S.-led coalition against the Iraqi Army after it occupied oil-rich Kuwait. The combat was quick (six weeks) and successful in its limited goal: expelling Saddam Hussein’s forces from the small Gulf sheikhdom. Fewer than a hundred and fifty Americans died in battle.

he American diplomat Brett McGurk is the central player in the seventy-two-nation coalition fighting the Islamic State, a disparate array of countries twice the size of NATO. He has now worked all of America’s major wars against extremism—in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—under three very different Presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump. McGurk served in Baghdad after the ouster of Saddam Hussein; he used his experience clerking for the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court to help draft Iraq’s new constitution. President Bush brought McGurk back to Washington to serve on the National Security Council and help run the campaign against Al Qaeda. President Obama tapped him to work Iraq and Iran at the State Department. McGurk was visiting Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, when ISISseized nearby Mosul. In 2015, he became Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. President Trump kept him on.

For three years, Lena Kandes and her family lived under isis rule in Mosul. Sequestered in her home after being forced to abandon her university studies, she created an online alias—which she asked me to use—so she could connect with the outside world but not be traceable by the Islamic State’s goons. “We were prisoners there,” she told me earlier this year in Kurdistan, where her family had fled. “We got close to losing our minds.” Through a window, she watched a crowd stone to death a woman suspected of adultery. Kandes felt especially vulnerable because her father had been a contractor for the U.S. military. They had hosted U.S. Army officers at their home.