The Philadelphia Enquirer quotes VP and Hariri Center Director Francis Ricciardone on the threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham:
“ISIS . . . is a manifestation of a larger problem – the breakdown of the legal order that underpinned the [Mideast] region,” says Francis Ricciardone, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, who now heads the Middle East program at the Atlantic Council in Washington. Until recently, he says, “There was an accountability of states . . . before the world, a degree of governance . . . under rules that were understood. Much of that is gone across the region.”