Roundup: Media's Take

Joel McCleary and Mark Medish: A History of American Assassination Programs

[Joel McCleary and Mark Medish served as advisers respectively to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.] State-sponsored assassinations are back in season. Targeted snuff jobs of state enemies are on the rise from Dubai to Dagestan, from Yemen to Waziristan. Even the United States has returned to the practice: American military drones and special operations have been pushing the limits of President Ford’s 1976 executive ban against assassinations.... The last era of

Douglas Rogers: Zimbabwe’s Accidental Triumph

[Douglas Rogers is the author of “The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe.”] IN the midst of a wave of post-election political violence in Zimbabwe in 2008, Brian James, a white farmer who had been evicted from his property years earlier during President Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned lands, found himself surrounded by a throng of black Zimbabweans in downtown Mutare, my hometown. The 50-strong crowd danced, sang and chanted political slogans for more than 20 minutes before Mr

Anatole Kaletsky: The Old Politics is Dead in the UK, but Where is the New?

[Anatole Kaletsky writes for the Times (UK).] So what is it about? All the political parties have now launched or previewed their manifestos. Their leaders have given dozens of interviews and speeches. The beancounters have done their assessments, confirming what everybody knew in the first place — that none of the policies and promises come close to adding up. After a week of campaigning, the polls are exactly where they started, undecided voters remain undecided and b

Norman J. Ornstein: A Pragmatic Moderate Faces the 'Socialist' Smear

[The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] In the 1950s, Democratic senators from the solidly Democratic South uniformly supported segregation and opposed civil rights and voting rights bills. They dutifully spent long hours on the Senate floor filibustering such efforts. Legend has it that during one marathon filibuster, after Olin Johnston of South Carolina, a populist liberal on economic matters, handed off the baton to Strom Thurmond, Johnston went

Andrew B. Wilson: Saved by the Bomb

[Andrew B. Wilson, a former Business Week bureau chief in Dallas and London, is a freelance writer living in St. Louis, Missouri.] In looking for superlatives to describe the two-day Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it "the largest (such) conference (hosted by the United States) since the one that came together (in San Francisco) around the founding of the United Nations in 1945." There is some irony

Paul B. Henze and S. Enders Wimbush: Russia's Encounter With Islam

[Mr. Henze was a member of President Carter's National Security Council and spent 20 years as a resident consultant at RAND. He is the author of "The Plot to Kill the Pope" (Holiday House, 1985). Mr. Wimbush is senior vice president of the Hudson Institute and a former director of Radio Liberty.] When bombs killed 40 people in Moscow's metro in late March, Russians received another poignant reminder of an increasingly likely future. These bombings were preceded by at least

Krzysztof Bobinski: Poland’s Second Katyń: Out of the Ashes

[Krzysztof Bobinski is the president of Unia & Polska, a pro-European think-tank in Warsaw. He was the Financial Times Warsaw correspondent (1976-2000) and later published Unia & Polska magazine.] Everyone tries to behave well when confronted by tragedy. Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, is proving no exception. He and the Russian authorities have behaved with notable compassion in the aftermath of the Polish plane-crash near the city of Smoleńsk on the mo

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Ghost of Bobby Lee

[Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.\ Ken Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until--in all honesty--some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me per

Ben Macintyre: In Dark Times Poland Needs the Sunlight of Truth

[Ben Macintyre writes for the Times (UK).] In 1943 Poland’s wartime leader accused Moscow of ordering the Katyn massacre, the systematic murder of 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals. A few months later he was dead, the victim of an air crash. Was it murder? Almost certainly not, but Poland’s painful past, combined with official secrecy, created precisely the muggy and mysterious conditions in which conspiracy theory thrives. In 2010 another Polish leader, Presiden

Bret Stephens: The Fog Over Katyn Forest

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] 'The struggle of people against power," Milan Kundera famously observed, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Is there any place that better captures that truth than the Katyn Forest, or any metaphor more apt for Katyn's place in our historical memory than fog? It was, of course, a very mundane kind of fog that (along with some apparently reckless piloting) b

Wen Liao: Bismarck’s lessons for Beijing

[Wen Liao is chairwoman of Longford Advisors, a political, economic and business consultancy.] Both America and China have blinked in their dispute over the renminbi’s exchange rate. A fortnight before Tim Geithner was due to pronounce on whether China manipulates its currency, the US Treasury secretary postponed the report. The decision followed President Hu Jintao’s announcement that he would attend this week’s US-led nuclear disarmament summit for forthright discussions on imposi

Tevi Troy: A New Wave of American Populism Could be Good for the Jews

[Tevi Troy is a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former White House liaison, under President George W. Bush, to the American Jewish community.] “Christoph Waltz played a Nazi obsessed with finding Jews,” Steve Martin said at the Academy Awards this year, referring to the Austrian actor’s Oscar-winning turn in Inglourious Basterds. Martin then gestured ostentatiously to the theater filled with Hollywood’s glitterati and added, “The mother lode.” Martin’s joke brou

Adam Chmielewski and Denis Dutton: A Fog of Questions in the Polish Plane Crash Tragedy

[Adam Chmielewski is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wroclaw in Poland and the author of "The Psychopathology of the Political Life." Denis Dutton is a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and editor of the website Arts & Letters Daily.] Everyone in Poland is mourning the catastrophic plane crash in a forest near Smolensk that killed the nation's president, his wife and 94 other senior members of the Polish political eli

Anne Applebaum: Out of Tragedy, a Detente of Sorts Between Russia, Poland

[Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and is married to Poland's foreign minister.] Last Saturday, the Polish president, the Polish national bank chairman, the chief of the Polish general staff and a host of other military and political leaders, some of whom were my friends and my husband's colleagues, died in a tragic plane crash in the forest near Smolensk, Russia, not far from where 20,000 Polish officers were secretly murdered by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago. Yet

Eugene Robinson: Haley Barbour's 'Diddly' Sense of Slavery's History

[Eugene Robinson is a columnist for the Washington Post.] It was bad enough when Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed "Confederate History Month" without mentioning slavery, but at least he came to his senses and apologized. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's contention that the whole controversy "doesn't amount to diddly" is much worse. "I don't know what you would say about slavery," Barbour told CNN, "but anybody that thinks that yo

Amy Wilentz: Renew Haiti from the Ground Up

[Wilentz is the author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti Then and Now," which is being reissued with a new postearthquake introduction.] Everyone was talking about reimagining Haiti at the UN donors' conference two weeks ago. Haitian representatives and Haiti's friends, as they are called - including the U.S., France, Brazil, Canada, the UN and the Red Cross, as well as the two global development banks - got together to decide what to contribute and how those funds should be app

Anna M. Grzymala-Busse and Joshua A. Tucker: The Unlikely Triumph of Polish Democracy

[Anna M. Grzymala-Busse is an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Joshua A. Tucker is an associate professor of politics at New York University, a National Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a co-author of the political science and policy blog The Monkey Cage.] One of the worst days for Poland is rapidly becoming one of its greatest. The country's president, its armed forces' chiefs of staff, and its National

Marc Ambinder: Sexual Politics and the Supreme Court

[Marc Ambinder is the politics editor of The Atlantic. He has covered Washington for ABC News and the Hotline, and he is chief political consultant to CBS News. He has 11,171 followers on Twitter. Wait, 11,172.] Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the woman who tops President Obama's short list for the Supreme Court, is the subject of a baffling whisper campaign among both gay rights activists and social conservatives: those whispering assume she's gay, and they want her -- or someone --

Roger Pilon: Is Federal Power Now Unlimited?

[Roger Pilon is vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute and director of Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies.] With stormy midterm elections just ahead, and much of President Obama’s agenda still undone, the last thing congressional Democrats needed is the distraction of a difficult and protracted Supreme Court confirmation battle. Yet that’s likely what’s in store after Friday’s announcement that Justice John Paul Stevens, the court’s liberal lion,

Timothy Rieger: Pentagon Must Stop Dissembling Before Repeal of DADT

[Timothy Rieger, a former congressional lobbyist and LGBT advocate, is a writer living in Miami.] The military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is an easy target for an editorial board to express its moral indignation over the lies of U.S. military leaders. The Times has published several editorials on the subject, most recently the March 29 piece on retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan's false allegations that gay Dutch troops were partly to blame for the Srebrenica massacre.