The New Yorker

On Christopher Robin, War and PTSD
By Robin Wright 

Named by my parents after Christopher Robin, I’ve been a lifelong Pooh-ologist. I memorized A. A. Milne’s “Vespers”—an enchanting little poem about his son’s bedtime prayers—as a tot decades ago. I can recite it still. That first poem, published in 1923, paved the way for the quartet of books that launched the winsome boy and his stuffed pal Winnie-the-Pooh, among the most cherished of characters in children’s literature. Last year, I visited the original bear and his chums—Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, and Roo—where they reside, behind glass, in the children’s reading room at the New York Public Library. The century-old toys had just returned from rehabilitation at the stuffed-animal hospital, the librarian told me. For months now, I’ve eagerly awaited the première of “Goodbye Christopher Robin,” the film based on the real life of Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A. A. Milne and the basis for the mythical child. I hoped it would restore the simple sweetness of the narrative and the characters, from before they were Disneyfied.

In its many layers, the movie does much more. Pooh is largely a prop for a very adult exploration of the clash between reality and innocence, war and peace, privacy and fame, and parent and child. For all the sunny cinematography and British-esque scenes in the re-created woods of Sussex, the movie is candid about life’s cruelties, as well as the illusions that create much-needed escape.

It is antiwar at its core. 

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/on-christopher-robin-war-and-ptsd

The New Yorker

ISIS Jihadis Have Returned In the Thousands
By Robin Wright

Over the past few months, as the size of the Islamic State’s caliphate rapidly shrunk, the Pentagon began citing the number of enemy dead as an important barometer of longer-term success. “We have killed, in conservative estimates, sixty thousand to seventy thousand,” General Raymond Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, told the Aspen Security Forum, in July. “They declared an army, they put it on the battlefield, and we went to war with it.”

A high kill rate, which once misled the U.S. military about its prospects in Vietnam, has eased concerns in the U.S. today about future attempts at revenge from isis’s foreign fighters. “We’re not seeing a lot of flow out of the core caliphate, because most of those people are dead now,” Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie, Jr., the director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, confidently told reporters this month. “They’re unable to manifest the former activities they did to try to pose themselves as a state.”

Yet the calculus is pivotal now that the isis pseudo-caliphate has collapsed: Just how many fighters have survived? Where are they? What threat do they pose? Between 2014 and 2016, the perpetrators of all but four of the forty-two terrorist attacks in the West had some connection to isis, the European Commission’s Radicalization Awareness Network said, in July.

A new report, to be released Tuesday by the Soufan Group and the Global Strategy Network, details some of the answers: At least fifty-six hundred people from thirty-three countries have already gone home—and most countries don’t yet have a head count. On average, twenty to thirty per cent of the foreign fighters from Europe have already returned there—though it’s fifty per cent in Britain, Denmark, and Sweden. Thousands more who fought for isis are stuck near the borders of Turkey, Jordan, or Iraq, and are believed to be trying to get back to their home countries.

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/isis-jihadis-have-returned-home-by-the-thousands

The New Yorker

The Ignominious End of the ISIS Caliphate
By Robin Wright 

History will record that the Islamic State caliphate—a bizarre pseudo-state founded on illusory goals, created by a global horde of jihadis, and enforced with perverted viciousness—survived for three years, three months and some eighteen days. The fall of Raqqa, the nominal isis capital, was proclaimed on Tuesday by the U.S.-backed militia that spearheaded the offensive, a coalition of Kurdish and Arab militias advised by U.S. Special Forces. Mopping-up operations were still going on (especially around the Raqqa stadium, which isis fighters had converted into an arms depot and prison), but the liberation of Raqqa marked the symbolic demise of the Islamic State’s rule.

“How far they’ve fallen. It’s a striking contrast to three years ago, when they planted the flag, in the summer of 2014, and proclaimed God’s kingdom on Earth had come again—and now they’ve evaporated,” Will McCants, the author of the best-selling book "The ISIS Apocalypse: the History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic States," told me.

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-ignominious-end-of-the-isis-caliphate

The New Yorker

Trump Defies World on Iran 
By Robin Wright 
Defying most of the world, President Trump announced on Friday that the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal is no longer in the U.S. interest, and took the first step toward unraveling it. The accord—brokered jointly with Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia, during two years of often tortuous diplomacy—is the most significant agreement stemming proliferation of the world’s deadliest weapon in more than a quarter century. It now faces a precarious future—with the United States, not Iran, shaping up as the first country to violate its terms.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-defies-the-world-on-iran