Roundup: Media's Take

Robert Samuelson: The Danger Behind China's 'Me First' Worldview

[Robert Samuelson is a columnist for the Washington Post.] It's become apparent from recent events that America's political, business and scholarly elites have fundamentally misjudged China. Conflicts with China have multiplied. Consider: the undervalued renminbi and its effect on trade; the breakdown of global warming negotiations in Copenhagen; China's weak support of efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; its similarly poor record in pushing North Korea to reli

E.J. Dionne: What Bill Clinton Could Teach President Obama

When word went out that Bill Clinton had been rushed to the hospital, the prospect that he was in danger made me wish that President Obama had spent more time learning lessons that only Clinton can teach.... ...Clinton, like Obama, started out as a unifier who disdained ideological quarrels and saw himself as a problem-solver. There is not a dime's worth of difference between Clinton's war on "the brain-dead politics of both parties" and Obama's insistence that "there

Bruce Anderson: We not only have a right to use torture. We have a duty

[Bruce Anderson is a columnist at the Independent.] Torture is revolting. A man can retain his human dignity in front of a firing squad or on the scaffold: not in a torture chamber. Torturers set out to break their victim: to take a human being and reduce him to a whimpering wreck. In so doing, they defile themselves and their society. In Britain, torture has been illegal for more than 300 years. Shortly after torture was abjured, we stopped executing witches: all part of a move

Caryl Churchill and Amir Amirani: The people's brakes on war

[Caryl Churchill has been a leading British playwright for more than 30 years. Amir Amirani is an Iranian-born British film-maker who is working on a documentary about the Iraq War.] Seven years ago today, it was hard to believe how many people were on the streets trying to prevent the Iraq war. There was anger and foreboding, but also a feeling of exhilaration. Surely a march this big would have some effect. As we know, it didn't. Yet the numbers on that 15 February 20

Shahid R. Siddiqi: Threats to Pakistan’s Strategic Nuclear Assets

[Shahid R. Siddiqi began his career in the Pakistan Air Force. He later joined the corporate sector with which he remained associated until recently in a senior management position.] Indian explosion of its nuclear device in 1974 drew only a customary “show of concern” from the Western powers. But Pakistan’s nuclear program, initiated in response to the Indian acquisition of nuclear weapons, evoked immediate and “serious concern” from the same quarters. Ever since, Pakistan has been

Michael Barone: Under Obama, Crony Capitalism Again Rules the Day

[Michael-Barone is senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner. A resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is also a Fox News Channel contributor and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.] In his best-seller "Inside U.S.A.", the hugely readable journalist John Gunther described America as it was in the last year of World War II. He interviewed hundreds of politicians, businessmen and journali

Christopher M. Fairman: The Case Against Banning the Word 'Retard'

[Christopher M. Fairman is a professor at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. He is the author of a book subtitled "Word Taboo and Protecting Our First Amendment Liberties," whose title is unprintable here.] Does the word "retard" have less than three weeks to live? Long before Rahm Emanuel, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh made the word fodder for political controversy and late-night punch lines, a movement was underway to eliminate it

Michael Parenti: What Do Empires Do?

[Michael Parenti's recent books include: God and His Demons (Prometheus 2010); Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.] When I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, as might be expected, some of my U.S. compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States

Thomas Friedman: 1977 vs. 1979 in the Muslim World

[Thomas Friedman is an American journalist, columnist and multi Pulitzer Prize winning author. He is an op-ed contributor to The New York Times, whose column appears twice weekly. He has written extensively on foreign affairs including global trade, the Middle East and environmental issues. He has won the Pulitzer Prize three times, twice for International Reporting (1983, 1988) and once for Commentary (2002). He has been a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 2004 until the present.]

Mark Ames: The Hero of the Orange Revolution Poisons Ukraine

[Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull) and The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove). He is a regular contributor to eXiled Online.] If you've been wondering what ever happened to that wonderful Orange Revolution in Ukraine--because let's face it, it was probably the last feel-good moment America collectively experienced in an otherwise bummer-packed decade--Sunday's

Sam Husseini: U.S. Afghanistan Offensive Violates Olympic Truce

[Sam Husseini is a writer and political activist. He is the communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that promotes progressive experts as alternative sources for mainstream media reporters.] Earlier today I sent a note to several friends, writing that it "would be interesting if the U.S. started the offensive in Afghanistan tonight, since the ancient Greeks stopped their wars to have Olympics; but we've followed a different path

Stephen Farrell: Marja 50 Years Ago: Model Villages and American Money

[Stephen Farrell is a columnist for the New York Times.]Marja, an area of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand Province, is the focus of an imminent NATO military operation. Tribal elders are being assured that government and NATO forces will rid the area of Taliban fighters, and that they will be consulted on the appointment of l

Alexander Cockburn: Fifty Years After Greensboro, Whatever Happened to the American Left?

[Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.] Fifty years ago this month, history took a great leap forward. On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students from Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at a segregated lunch counter

Michael Gerson: Guantanamo prison ... Ugly but necessary

[Michael Gerson's column appears on Wednesdays and Fridays.] It is the oddest of unintended airport stopovers -- a short stay at Guantanamo Bay. Helicopter flights for the ship I was trying to reach off the coast of Haiti had been canceled. So I slept in an Air Force tent at Camp Freedom, an arrow's shot from where Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is imprisoned -- his stay now extended longer than the Obama administration would wish. "Guantanamo" has

George H. Wittman: The Old Afghan Waltz

[George H. Wittman is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger and was the founding chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy.] "Getting in line" and "getting with the program" are old expressions in the Pentagon. The Navy version is to be "on board." You've got to get in line or be on board if you expect to "get ahead" at the good old DoD. In regard to war fighting in Afghanistan, the current program with which everyone is s

Johann Hari: Obama's secret camps are worthy of Bush's

[Johann Hari is a British journalist and writer.] Osama bin Laden's favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father's cave in favour of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever travelled the other way. Osama's vision can't even inspire h

Richard N. Haass: Only one force can stop Iran now ... its people

[Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of War of Necessity, War of Choice: a Memoir of Two Iraq Wars.] In Iran the clock is ticking. In fact, three clocks are ticking simultaneously — in the country’s nuclear laboratories, at the negotiating table and on the streets. Its future depends on which clock ticks fastest. Demonstrations filled the streets yesterday, accompanied by the clear sound of a political crackdown as the regime

Con Coughlin: A bloody history may be about to repeat itself in Iran

[Con Coughlin is the author of 'Khomeini's Ghost'.] Despite facing the worst political crisis since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established his uncompromising Islamic theocracy in February 1979, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters were still able to summon hundreds of thousands of pro-government supporters onto the streets. In many respects the atmosphere in Tehran on Thursday was not dissimilar to that in 1979, when government forces battled to prevent an

Naomi Klein: Haiti: A Creditor, Not a Debtor

[Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002).] If we are to believe the G-7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it ha

Peter Roff: ‘President’s Day’ is a Ridiculous Insult to George Washington

[Peter Roff is a columnist for U.S. News & World Report.] On Monday America will again observe Presidents' Day, the holiday established to honor all the former chief executives of the United States. It wasn't always so. In 1968, under the provisions of the so-called "Long Weekend Act," the United States Congress changed the calendar in order to move George Washington's birthday to the most convenient Monday. The three-day weekend the act created, while hel