Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Lind: Where are the Peasants with Pitchforks?

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] In the aftermath of a global economic collapse brought about in part by the corruption of big government by big finance, many pundits expected a voter backlash in America to take the form of a combination of populist anti-elitism and statist anti-capitalism. But that has not h

Jeffrey Lord: A Society of Beggars? Obama Battles Reagan

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.] Obama or Reagan. In the end, that's the choice. As the country enters the final week of what may be the most important election in a lifetime, these two presidents and their starkly differing visions of America are at the center of what has become a political earthquake.... An infinitely better understanding of both Ronald Reagan and the conservative principles he cham

Stéphanie Giry: Cambodia’s Perfect War Criminal

[Stéphanie Giry is editor-at-large at Foreign Affairs.] The July conviction of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch—the gaunt-faced, fever-eyed 68-year-old head of the Khmer Rouge’s leading torture center—by a special UN–Cambodian criminal court has been seen as a breakthrough in international justice. Years in the making, the trial was the first international criminal case brought against an official of the Pol Pot regime since a Vietnamese show trial in 1979. And despite mixed leg

Ellen Knickmeyer: Blood on Our Hands

[Ellen Knickmeyer was Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad.] In early March 2006, Donald Rumsfeld called a Pentagon news conference to declare Iraq peaceful -- and to say that U.S. reporters in Baghdad were liars for reporting otherwise. Contrary to the jumble of "exaggerated" reporting from Baghdad, the then-secretary of defense said at the Washington press briefing, Iraq was experiencing no such thing as the explosion of sectarian violence that myself and

Jim Bencivenga: Will U.S. Naval Power Sink?

[Jim Bencivenga is a former teacher and Monitor staffer.] For most Americans, naval power is like gravity. They know it's there, they know it's forceful, but they don't really feel it or understand it. So they won't be thinking about the state of US fleet readiness when they vote in midterm elections.... The three great battles to establish and preserve Western civilization took place at sea: (1) the battle of Salamis (480 BC), where the Athenian defeat of

Christopher Dickey: America Turns Inward ... U.S. Foreign Policy After November

[A distinguished journalist and author, Christopher Dickey currently serves as Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor.] Americans have forgotten the rest of the world. Nothing could make that clearer than the candidates running for election to the U.S. Congress and the Senate right now. If you watch the campaign ads, listen to the debates or the candidates themselves, Afghanistan barely figures, Iraq is history, the Middle East peace process a yawn. Forget Chi

Ellen Knickmeyer: We Knew Rumsfeld Lied To Us, Just Not How Much

[Ellen Knickmeyer was Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad.] In early March 2006, Donald Rumsfeld called a Pentagon news conference to declare Iraq peaceful -- and to say that U.S. reporters in Baghdad were liars for reporting otherwise. Contrary to the jumble of "exaggerated" reporting from Baghdad, the then-secretary of defense said at the Washington press briefing, Iraq was experiencing no such thing as the explosion of sectarian violence that myself an

Daniel Ellsberg: Like my Pentagon papers, these Iraq war logs can't be buried

[Daniel Ellsberg is a former US military analyst who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, which revealed how the US public had been misled about the Vietnam war.] Nearly 40 years ago I leaked the Pentagon papers – a top secret 7,000-page study of US decision-making during the Vietnam war which revealed repeated lies and cover-ups by the administration. The Iraq war logs, published this weekend by Wikileaks, could be even more significant. As with Vietnam, we have again s

Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry: The Bender Is Over

[Rich Lowry is editor-in-chief and Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review.] Whatever happens on Election Day, the heroic phase of Obama’s presidency is over. It is over not simply because he will spend the rest of his term playing defense rather than conquering new ground for liberalism. It is over because the assumptions that underlay that first phase of his presidency have already been discredited. Cast your mind back to December 2008. Democrats had just

Hendrik Hertzberg: The Prose and Politics of Daniel Patrick Moynihan

[Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, where he frequently writes the Comment, in The Talk of the Town.] This week, after years of false starts and bureaucratic tangles, a modest groundbreaking ceremony will be held for a project that will go some distance to righting this great wrong. The reincarnation of Penn Station will occupy and transform the body of the monumental Farley Post Office, across Eighth Avenue from the original station and, like t

Robert D. Kaplan: Eastern Islam and the 'Clash of Civilizations'

[Robert D. Kaplan is the author, most recently, of "Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power." He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for the Atlantic.] Islam has been an American obsession for at least a decade. The 9/11 attacks and the intractable violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — however much we have been the cause of it — have left us bewildered and terrified by this seemingly austere and martial

Diane H. Mazur: The R.O.T.C. Myth

[Diane H. Mazur, a professor of law at the University of Florida and a former Air Force officer, is the legal co-director of the Palm Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of “A More Perfect Military.”] EVERYONE knows that Ivy League universities banned the Reserve Officer Training Corps from their campuses during the Vietnam War. Forty years later, the bans continue, though the reason has shifted from war protest to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” polic

Gary Younge: Obama was never going to have the room to effect radical change

[Gary Younge is a feature writer and columnist for the Guardian based in the US.] In his book Where Do We Go from Here? Martin Luther King recalls the only time that he was booed at a meeting. His hecklers were young black power supporters. "Unfortunately, when hope diminishes the hate is often turned most bitterly towards those who originally built up the hope … For 12 years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress … They were now booing because they fe

Michael Barone: Why the US has turned against Obama

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the 'Washington Examiner', a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author of 'The Almanac of American Politics'.] Why have American voters gone so sour on Barack Obama's Democratic party? It's a question that must puzzle many in Britain who – Conservative as well as Labour and Lib Dem – welcomed Obama's election two years ago and saw him leading America and the world into broad, sunlit uplands. But now it appears

Robert Fisk: WikiLeaks Exposé ... The Shaming of America

[Robert Fisk is The Independent's award-winning Middle East correspondent.] As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims. Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation again

Menzies Campbell: The Iraq War ... Nasty, Brutish and Refusing To Go Away

[Sir Menzies Campbell is former leader of the Liberal Democrats.] It simply will not go away. Every time it seems that Iraq, Britain's worst foreign policy judgement since Suez in 1956 might at last slip down the political agenda, it bounces back. If it is not David Miliband's public spat with Harriet Harman at the Labour Party conference, it is the chilling but not surprising news that Iran is brokering the deal to resolve the political impasse in Iraq and install a government mont

Jay Cost: Will Obama Follow Truman's Example?

[Jay Cost is a staff writer for the Weekly Standard.] All signs are that the Republican party will retake the House of Representatives on November 2. If that happens, the president will find himself at a fork in the road, the first of his presidency. How he responds to a new Republican majority will set the tone for the rest of his term and could determine whether he will win reelection in 2012. History offers guidance on this point. Since World War II, two Democratic p

Christopher Dickey: Americans Grow Apathetic Over Foreign Policy

[Christopher Dickey currently serves as Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor.] Americans have forgotten the rest of the world. Nothing could make that clearer than the candidates running for election to the U.S. Congress and the Senate right now. If you watch the campaign ads, listen to the debates or the candidates themselves, Afghanistan barely figures, Iraq is history, the Middle East peace process a yawn. Forget China. Forget Latin America. Russia is an

Leon T. Hadar: Post-Midterms Foreign Policy: Will They Make a Difference?

[Leon T. Hadar is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy, international trade, the Middle East, and South and East Asia.] Assuming that the Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives (and the Senate?) what kind of effect will that have on the Obama Administration's foreign policy? Studying the lessons of another Democratic President who after two years in office and impressive GOP wins in the midterms found his

Alyssa Battistoni: The "Culture of Poverty" Myth Returns

[Alyssa Battistoni is a writer and graduate student in geography and environment at Oxford University.] The New York Times caused a stir earlier this week with its assertion that the "culture of poverty" theory of urban decline is back in vogue. But the real news isn't that it’s coming back -- it's that it ever went away in the first place. The theory may have been formally rejected by academic sociologists for a time, but the culture of poverty has remained a