Roundup: Media's Take

Source: NYT
Feb 19, 2010

Anthony Shadid: Old Mistakes in Iraq Cast a Long Shadow

[Anthony Shadid is Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times.] Fittingly, it was Order No. 1. Five days after becoming proconsul in Iraq in May 2003, L. Paul Bremer III issued the decree with the imperial panache of a man partial to the combat boots of an occupier and the business suit of a bureaucrat. With it, he banned the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein and unleashed a process that continues today. In English, his euphemism was de-Baathification. But Mr. Bremer, who

Source: Newsweek
Feb 19, 2010

Jon Meacham: The System’s Not to Blame - We Are

[Jon Meacham is the Editor of Newsweek.] History can be a problem. if you spend a lot of time thinking about the political past, you tend to see the events of the present time differently than you do if you are consumed by the passions of the hour. A habit of mind that puts most things in context with what has happened before—weighing them, if you will, to gauge their gravity in comparison to ages past—has its virtues and its vices. The chief virtue is that you probably know how we

Source: Newsweek
Feb 19, 2010

Eleanor Clift: The 2010 Midterms are Looking a Lot Like the 1994 Election

[Eleanor Clift is contributing editor to Newsweek.] Florida Senate candidate and tea-party darling Marco Rubio is riding the wave of what he calls "the single greatest pushback in American history." While his view of history and the impact of other populist movements can be debated, there's no doubt that Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts has thrust Senate Democrats into a deep panic. They complain they have no message and no leadership, and they're angry at their leader,

Source: Foreign Policy
Feb 19, 2010

Andrew Swift: A Guide to the International Conflicts Playing out at the Winter Olympics

[Andrew Swift is a researcher at Foreign Policy.] THE SIX-PARTY TALKS ON ICE The politics: North Korea's nuclear program has destabilized the Asian political scene for years. The six-party talks aimed at resolving the crisis -- between North Korea, South Korea, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia -- have continued intermittently, with no final, satisfactory result. The Hermit Kingdom regularly fires off ballistic missiles, enraging and scaring the interested par

Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 18, 2010

Jeff Randall: David Cameron and the Tories Should Learn Lessons from History

[Jeff Randall is the Daily Telegraph's editor at large.] ...“Our finances have been brought into grave disorder. No British Government in peace time has ever had the power or spent the money in the vast extent and reckless manner of our current rulers... no community living in a world of competing nations can possibly afford such frantic extravagances... the evils which we suffer today are the inevitable progeny of that wanton way of living.” This analysis, crisp and in

Source: The American Conservative
Feb 18, 2010

David Franke: The Mount Vernon Declaration in Historical Perspective

[David Franke was one of the founders of the conservative movement in the 1950s and 1960s, when Democrats and liberals were the ones who believed in big government, fiscal recklessness, and an imperial presidency. This article originally appeared on LewRockwell.com.] ...[D]ozens of top conservative muckamucks met on February 17 at an estate that was an original part of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. There they signed “The Mount Vernon Statement” with the subtitle: “Constitutional

Source: NYT
Feb 18, 2010

David Brooks: The Decline of Trust in the Power Elite

[David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.] One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in yourself, and the path upward from there was grooved in your favor. Since then, we have opened up oppor

Source: The Nation
Feb 18, 2010

Barbara Crossette: Sri Lanka Wins a War and Diminishes Democracy

[Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN. She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995.] In its 62 years of independence, Sri Lanka has never had a better chance than it has now to stamp out the last fires of ethnic hatred, violence and mindless chauvinisms that have left over 80,000 people dead in

Source: LA Times
Feb 18, 2010

Erwin Chemerinsky: UC Irvine's Free Speech Debate

[Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.] College campuses, especially at public universities, are places where all ideas should be expressed and debated. No speech ever should be stopped or punished because of the viewpoint expressed. Of course, there must be rules to regulate the time, place and manner of such expression to preserve order and even to make sure that speech can occur. These general principles are unassailable, but their application to

Source: Time.com
Feb 18, 2010

Peter Beinart: Why Washington Is Tied Up in Knots

[Beinart is associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His book The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris will be published by Harper in June.] How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber — and received dozens of new canes from

Source: NYT
Feb 18, 2010

Gail Collins: Time to Party Like It’s 1854

[Gail Collins is a columnist for the New York Times.] The Conservative Political Action Conference begins Thursday in Washington.... The workshops and panels range from “Is It Time for a Catholic Tea Party?” to “Getting Started in Hollywood.” But the one that caught my eye was “When All Else Fails: Nullification and State Resistance to Federal Tyranny.” How many of you out there thought we had settled the question of whether states have the right to nullif

Source: WaPo
Feb 18, 2010

George Will: A Brief History of Populism in the United States

[George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.] The Republican presidential nominee, an Arizona senator, was a maverick, which was part of his charm. He spoke and acted impulsively, which was part of his problem. Voters thought his entertaining dimensions might be incompatible with presidential responsibilities. For example, he selected a running mate most Americans had never heard of and who had negligible experience pertinent to the presidency. This was 1964. Barry Gol

Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 18, 2010

Fred Pearce: The Chagos archipelago – where conservation meets colonialism

[Fred Pearce is an environment writer and author of The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change.] How do you greenwash a large airforce base? A base that is responsible for bombing nearby countries, and which was built on an island you confiscated from residents who are now living in exile on the other side of the world? Easy. You announce the creation of a giant nature reserve which will be off-limits to its former inhabitants. Not to the m

Source: The New Republic
Feb 17, 2010

Richard A. Posner: Maybe It Wouldn't Have Been So Bad if Roosevelt Packed the Supreme Court

[Richard A. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. This is a review of Jeff Shesol's new book, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (Norton, 2010)] In 1937 President Roosevelt tried to “pack” the Supreme Court--increase its size so that he could fill the vacancies thus created with liberals, who would shift the balance of power from the conservative majority that had inv

Source: American Prospect review of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal, Nation Books, $25.00, 394 pages
Feb 17, 2010

Robert Kuttner: How the Religious Right Has Taken Over the Republican Party

[Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.] Anyone who has followed Max Blumenthal's investigative writings on the far right's takeover of the Republican Party should not have been surprised when John McCain added Sarah Palin to th

Source: Salon.com
Feb 17, 2010

Gene Lyons: "Justice Jim" Johnson and the Far Right

[Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.] It's customary to describe the death of a figure like Arkansas' "Justice Jim" Johnson as the end of an era. Riddled with cancer, the 85-year-old segregationist killed himself with a deer rifle at the Conway home h

Source: Financial Times (UK)
Feb 17, 2010

John Nagl and Mitchell Reiss: Iraq lessons can guide Afghan surge

[John Nagl is president of the Center for a New American Security and a retired Army officer who helped write the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Mitchell Reiss is diplomat-in-residence at the College of William & Mary and author of the forthcoming Negotiating with Evil.] As US forces fight to clear Taliban militia from the town of Marjah in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, commanders need to look again at what we learnt in Iraq. A key cause of success in tha

Source: Foreign Policy
Feb 17, 2010

Christian Caryl: Obama's 'Mission Accomplished' Moment on Iraq

[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy. His column, “Reality Check,” appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.] On Feb. 10, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden gave an interview to CNN. Most of the next day's headlines predictably focused on his assessment that al Qaeda probably isn't capable of mounting another 9/11-style attack. What garnered far less attention was his take on Iraq. "You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the

Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 17, 2010

Simon Tisdall: This isn't Falklands II

[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.] It was Karl Marx who said "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce" – and in the case of the abruptly reigniting dispute over the Falkland Islands, aka Las Malvinas, there is reason to hope he was right. Argentina's latest protests, sparked by the prospect of an oil bonanza around the islands, could easily be dismissed as hot air. But that was the mistake Britain made

Source: WaPo
Feb 17, 2010

Jason Capehart: A Scary Tea Party Looks Like Right-Wing Extremists in the 1990s

Republicans looking to harness the grassroots energy of the Tea Party movement are playing with a raging fire.... We've been down this road before. In the 1990s, there was lots of talk about the excesses of government power, a U.N.-run New World Order and black helicopters on which the federal government would swoop in to take away Americans' freedom and money. Two deadly confrontations with federal authorities -- in Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992) with white supremacist Randy Weaver and i