Roundup: Media's Take

Melik Kaylan: Myths of Babylon and the reality of Iraq's heritage

[Mr. Kaylan is a columnist for Forbes.] Whatever other mistakes were made in Iraq, it certainly didn't help the cause of peace that the U.S. and its coalition partners were routinely blamed for the destruction of Iraq's heritage—from allowing the National Museum in Baghdad to be overrun by looters, to neglect of sundry archeological sites, including the most revered ancient site of Babylon. Today, after extensive recovery efforts, the National Museum is again open to t

Rick Rozoff: 1989-2009: Moving The Berlin Wall To Russia's Borders

[Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/] November 9 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the government of the German Democratic Republic opening crossing points at the wall separating the eastern and western sections of Berlin

Rami G. Khouri: Arab Autocracy

[Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of The Daily Star and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.] BEIRUT — The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall passed very quietly in the Arab world, because the meaning of the wall’s fall — the transition from total state control to human freedom — also bypassed the Arab world. Not the Islamic world, or the Middle East, but the Arab world. For

Andrew C. McCarthy: September 10 ... It’s Worse Than That

[National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).] ‘September 10 America.” The phrase signifies a reprise of the “terrorism is just a crime” mindset that reigned in the years before the 9/11 attacks. Like other observers, I’ve groused in recent months that we are back to that self-destructive ethos. I was wrong. If the Fort Hood atrocity tells us anything, it i

Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown: Google and the Copyright Wars

[—Messrs. Sanford and Brown are partners at Baker Hostetler in Washington, D.C. Their firm is not involved in the Google books case.] On Monday, a federal court in Manhattan granted yet another extension to Google and a group of authors and publishers as they try to reach a settlement in the landmark digital books case. They are expected to submit a revised proposal today. But whatever the ultimate agreement, this case is a giant missed opportunity. The class action sui

Gordon M. Goldstein: Vietnam, Afghanistan and learning from history

[Gordon M. Goldstein is the author of "Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam".] As President Kennedy pondered the risks of accidental war in the nuclear age -- a nightmare he would confront head on in the Cuban missile crisis -- he asked his senior advisors to read Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August," a narrative tracing the chain of events that led to World War I. Today, President Obama is also reflecting on history'

Marci A. Hamilton: Why the Stupak Amendment to the Healthcare Reform Bill Is Unconstitutional

[Professor Marci A. Hamilton holds the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, where she is the founding Director of the Intellectual Property Law Program. She has been a visiting scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary, the Center of Theological Inquiry, and Emory University School of Law.] The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops registered a major victory this week, when it succeeded in pressuring members of the

The National, Editorial: The US and peace: more than a dance

There’s an increasing sentiment in the US, particularly among the liberal Left, that America has done all it can in the Middle East. If the Israelis and Palestinians don’t want peace, then why should America make them? Even more pernicious is the notion that withdrawing from the debate will allow the two sides to grow up and solve problems like adults. This is false. If the US had entered the process by choice, then it had no business being involved in the first place; but that is not the case.

Meghan Cox Gurdon: The Wall separates Reagan from Obama

[Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.] If you knew nothing more of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama than what each man said about freedom at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, it would still be painfully obvious which of the two was a fierce defender of liberty, and which the avatar of toothless internationalist generalities. At the h

R. Taggart Murphy: Japan ... From Protectorate to Ally?

[R. Taggart Murphy is professor in the MBA Program in International Business at Japan's Tsukuba University. He is a former senior non-resident visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of The Weight of the Yen and, with Akio Mikuni, of Japan's Policy Trap.] When President Obama arrives in Tokyo on Friday, he will confront a country that seeks to be an ally of the United States. For Japan has never been an American ally. It was first a rival, then an enemy, and fina

Samuel P. Jacobs: The Missing Pages in Palin's Book

[Samuel P. Jacobs is a staff reporter at The Daily Beast. He has also written for The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and The New Republic Online.] Sarah Palin’s book hits stores on Tuesday. For Washington’s navel-gazing elite, particularly its Republican branch, the publishing event of the season carries with it a crucial question: Does the former vice-presidential candidate mention you? It used to be that there was an easy way to find out. All the big names in to

Michael Hayes: Afghanistan and memories of the Khmer Rouge

[Michael Hayes is senior editor of the Phnom Penh Post, a paper he co-founded in 1992.] The lodge where I stay in Kabul was badly damaged on Oct. 8 when a suicide car bomb exploded 80 meters down the road near the Indian Embassy. Seventeen Afghans working in photocopy shops near the embassy were killed and another 60 wounded. The Indian diplomats were unharmed. No apologies were offered by the perpetrators for the killings. Nobody was hurt at my lodge, but

William Rivers Pitt: The New Wall

[William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress. ] My eighteenth birthday fell on November 9, 1989. I woke that morning and came downstairs with three simple tasks to achieve: go

Ellen Goodman: The False Choice

[Ellen Goodman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary appears in more than 300 newspapers. Since 1976, she has written about social change and its impact on American life. She was one of the first women to open up the oped pages to women’s voices and is today, according to Media Watch, the most widely syndicated progessive columnist in the country.] Boston - It was one of those small shocks that come unexpectedly in the wake of a death. Just days after the country had buried Ted Kenned

R. Taggart Murphy: Before Sunrise

[R. Taggart Murphy joined the Graduate School of Business Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in September, 2004. Previously, he had taught in the College of International Studies and Graduate School of International Political Economy at the University's main campus and has been a Senior Non-Resident Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution.] When President Obama arrives in Tokyo on Friday, he will confront a country that seeks to be an ally of the United States. For Japan has

Michael Reagan: Forgetting the Cold War's Heroes

This past week I have been in Europe to help commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I went into this trip with a great deal of enthusiasm and an expectation that the heroes responsible for that momentous event be justly recognized. Sadly, I was instead reminded of how much we have willingly forgotten. Over the past several months, the Reagan Legacy Foundation has been working hard to ensure that Berliners remember the vital role my father played in bringing

Karl Rove: 'A Referendum on This White House'

[—Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.] Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia governors' races last week—despite eight campaign appearances in the two states by President Barack Obama—have unnerved Democrats. Over the weekend, White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod tried to calm jittery Democrats who might go wobbly on the president's ambitious agenda by telling NBC's Chuck Todd that next year's congres

Jonathan Schell: The Fifty-Year War

[Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.] I was about to write that there can be no military solution to the war in Afghanistan, only a political one. But I almost fainted with boredom and had to stop. Who, as President Obama lengthily ponders his decisions regarding the war, wants to repeat a point that's been made 11,000 t

Joe Klein: Iraq Surge ... What Lessons for Afghanistan

[Joe Klein joined TIME magazine in January 2003 to write a regular column on national and international affairs.] I've just finished a remarkable book called The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. It is the best grunt's-eye view of the war in Iraq that I've read; certainly, it's the best written. But it also raises, implicitly, the mystery of our qualified success there. Finkel follows an Army battalion through the 2007 surge, as it attempts to secure a particularly nasty and neglected

Nancy Gibbs: The Fort Hood Killer: Terrified ... or Terrorist?

[Nancy Gibbs is an essayist and editor at large for TIME magazine, a best selling author and commentator on politics and values in the United States. She is the co-author with Michael Duffy of the New York Times Bestseller The Preacher and the Presidents; Billy Graham in the White House (2007)] What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center, deep in the heart of Texas, under secur