The Obama administration closed the U.S. Embassy in Damascus on Monday and pulled all American diplomats out of violence-wracked Syria as the U.S. stepped up pressure on President Bashar Assad to leave power.

Robert Ford, the American ambassador, and 17 other U.S. officials left Syria and were expected to travel back to the United States. Ford informed Syrian authorities of the decision to leave earlier in the day, State Department officials said. Two diplomats left by air and the others went overland to Jordan.

Their departure comes two weeks after the State Department warned that it would close the embassy unless Assad’s government better protected the mission, citing safety concerns about embassy personnel and a recent series of car bombs. And it coincides with a U.S. effort to build an international coalition in support of Syria’s opposition. [Read more...]

In a milestone toward ending a decade of war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday that U.S. forces would step back from a combat role there as early as mid-2013, more than a year before all U.S. troops are scheduled to come home.

Panetta cast the decision as an orderly step in a withdrawal process long planned by the United States and its allies, but his comments were the first time the U.S. had put a date on stepping back from its central role in the war. The defense secretary’s words reflected the Obama administration’s eagerness to bring to a close the second of two grinding ground wars it inherited from the Bush administration.

Promising the end of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan next year would also give President Barack Obama a certain applause line in his re-election stump speech this fall. [Read more...]

Iran is feeling the bite from economic sanctions imposed over its nuclear program, which is capable of producing a weapon although Iranian leaders have not yet decided to do so, top intelligence chiefs told Congress on Tuesday.

“The sanctions have been biting much, much more literally in recent weeks than they have until this time,” CIA Director David Petraeus said at a Senate intelligence committee hearing.

“What we have to see now is how does that play out, what is the level of popular discontent inside Iran, does that influence the strategic decision-making of the Supreme Leader and the regime, keeping in mind that the regime’s paramount goal in all that they do is their regime survival,” he said. [Read more...]