Roundup: Media's Take

H. D. S. Greenway: Cyprus and 'Chosen Trauma'

[HDS Greenway leads the Opinion and Analysis section for GlobalPost. He has been a journalist for 50 years and recently retired from the Boston Globe after a distinguished career] “Chosen trauma,” were the words the political psychiatrist Vamik Volkan used to described the way nations, as well as individuals, can seize upon a wrong done to them to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves. I was reminded of that the other day when the International Crisis Grou

Glenn Greenwald: A Rumsfeld-era reminder about what causes Terrorism

[Glenn Greenwald is a lawyer, columnist, blogger, and author.] The debate over Afghanistan -- or, more accurately, the multi-pronged effort to pressure Obama into escalating -- is looking increasingly familiar, i.e., like the "debate" over Iraq. The New York Times is publishing articles filled with quotes from anonymous war advocates. Permanent war-justifier Michael O'Hanlon is regularly featured in "news accounts" as he all but blames Obama for increasing comb

Melvin A. Goodman: The Urgent Need to Demilitarize the National Security State

[Melvin A. Goodman is national security and intelligence columnist for Truthout. He is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. His 42-year government career included service at the CIA, State Department, Defense Department and the US Army. His latest book is "Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.] The national security policy inherited by President Barack Obama has been increasing

Michael Sexton: No Vietnam echoes in Afghan action

[Michael Sexton is NSW Solicitor-General and the author of War for the Asking: How Australia invited itself to Vietnam.] The most important difference between the two conflicts is that the so-called war in Afghanistan is not a war in any conventional sense. This might, no doubt, strike the troops under fire there as a matter of semantics, but they are really engaged in a police action against the Taliban, a group of insurgents whose support is confined to some regions

WSJ Editorial: Health Costs and History

Washington has just run a $1.4 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2009, even as we are told a new health-care entitlement will reduce red ink by $81 billion over 10 years. To believe that fantastic claim, you have to ignore everything we know about Washington and the history of government health-care programs. For the record, we decided to take a look at how previous federal forecasts matched what later happened. It isn't pretty. Let's start with the claim that a more pervasive fede

Michael Collins: The Case of the Cuban Five: American Justice as a Political Weapon

[Michael Collins is a research assistant for the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy (www.americaspolicy.org).] The case of the Cuban Five is inextricably linked to the ongoing standoff between Havana and Washington. In the early 1990s, the Cuban government sent a group of men known as The Wasp Network to the United States to infiltrate anti-Castro organizations, which had been operating from Miami with apparent impunity since the 1960s. After these anti-Castro

Thomas E. Ricks: The Generals Aren't Necessarily Right (he should remember FDR's lessons)

[Thomas E. Ricks, the author of Fiasco and The Gamble, is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and author of Foreign Policy magazine’s Best Defense blog. He was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post for a total of 26 years.] I am in the midst of researching a book on modern American generalship, and so tend to view the current agonizing over the way forward in Afghanistan in that light. I find myself thinking that President Obama, for all

Peter Bergen: The Taliban-Al Qaeda merger

[Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know.] On July 25, Najibullah Zazi, a lanky man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. The visit was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy. Of course, not many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleac

Ethan Bronner: Painful Mideast Truth: Force Trumps Diplomacy

[Ethan Samuel Bronner has been Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times since March 2008 following four years as deputy foreign editor.] JERUSALEM — As the Obama administration tries to broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is a dark truth lurking: force has produced clearer results in this dispute than talk. The results of the violence may prove short-lived — and possibly counterproductive; condemnation of Israel and Hamas is likely to gr

Jonathan Alter: Post-Bush Stress Disorder: Democrats have too many hang-ups

[Jonathan Alter is also the author of Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War.] In The Godfather, Sonny talks about going "to the mattresses," meaning war with rival Mafia families. Now President Obama and the Democrats are holing up together on their Posturepedics as they work out battle plans on health care, banking reform, and Afghanistan. The question is whether they'll be daring soldiers of the future or content to fight the last war.

Michael Mukasey: Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists

[Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.] The Obama administration has said it intends to try several of the prisoners now detained at Guantanamo Bay in civilian courts in this country. This would include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and other detainees allegedly involved. The Justice Department claims that our courts are well suited to the task. Based on my experience trying such cases,

Mark Thompson: The Soviets in Afghanistan ... Obama's Déjà Vu?

[Mark Thompson is Washington Correspondent for Time Magazine.] "It's a tricky situation," said the decision-maker huddled with his inner circle debating what to do next in Afghanistan. "We went in, but how to get out — our head[s] are splitting from this. Of course we can just pull out fast, without thinking of anything and blame the former leadership who started all this." The dilemma may sound familiar as the Obama Administration weighs General Stanley McChryst

John Graham: Afghanistan—Winning Lessons from Vietnam

[A Foreign Service Officer for fifteen years, John Graham was in the middle of the revolution in Libya and the war in Vietnam. For three years in the mid-seventies, he was a member of NATO's top-secret Nuclear Planning Group, then served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator John Glenn. At the United Nations, he was deeply involved in U.S. initiatives in Southern Africa, South Asia and Cuba.] There are many differences between our wars in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. There are also

Gordon P. Erspamer: MKULTRA Legacy: The Stain of Dishonor and the Prerequisites for Redemption

[Gordon P. Erspamer is the lead counsel in the class action complaint which is pending in San Francisco Federal District Court, Vietnam Veterans of America, et al. v. Central Intelligence Agency, et al., Case No. 09-0037 CW (ND Cal. 2009). More information regarding this lawsuit can be found at www.edgewoodtestvets.org.] Despite the passage of four decades, America and its military have never come to grips with its own ghastly programs

Sam Ferguson: In Pursuing Human Rights, Argentina Displays a Broken Justice System

[Sam Ferguson is currently a Yale Law School Robina International Human Rights fellow, and is residing in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is writing a book about prosecuting military atrocities committed during the Dirty War. In March, he will begin a Fulbright Fellowship.] Buenos Aires, Argentina - Buenos Aires' Comodoro Py judicial building is situated far from the city's municipal core, sandwiched between the city's busy bus terminal and the country's main port. Long distance buses

Brett Arends and Dave Kansas: Eighty Years After the Great Crash -- 'Is It the '30s Again?'

Editor's Note: It was the worst thing to happen to the U.S. since Fort Sumter. October, 1929. Wall Street crashed and helped drive the country into the Great Depression—a deep economic and spiritual wound that has afflicted three generations of Americans. Eighty years later, as the country struggles through the harsh aftermath of another crash, two Sunday Journal contributors mark a grim anniversary and weigh the question that haunts everyone:"Is this the 1930s all over again?"

John R. Bolton: Obama's Jimmy Carter Foreign Policy

[John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."] Weakness in American foreign policy in one region often invites challenges elsewhere, because our adversaries carefully follow diminished American resolve. Similarly, presidential indecisiveness, whether because of uncertainty or internal political struggles, signals that the United States may not respond to

Gordon Goldstein: From Defeat, Lessons in Victory

PRESIDENT OBAMA recently told Congressional leaders something many of them did not want to hear. It was time to “dispense with the straw man argument that this is about either doubling down or leaving Afghanistan,” he is said to have declared, frustrating those on both sides of the aisle who have sought to portray the choices in Afghanistan as just such a simplistic dichotomy. While the president continues to analyze his military options with senior advisers, some parameters of his

Lewis Sorley: The Vietnam War We Ignore

[Lewis Sorley, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, is the author of “A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam.] AS President Obama and his advisers contemplate a new course for Afghanistan, many commentators are suggesting analogies with earlier conflicts, particularly the war in Vietnam. Such comparisons can be useful, but only if the characterizations of earlier wars are accurate and lessons are appropriately applied.

Jon Meacham: The Obama-Dubya Connection

[Jon Meacham became Editor of Newsweek in October 2006, after serving as Managing Editor since November 1998.] George H.W. Bush was delighted with his guest. Last Friday at the 41st president's library on the campus of Texas A&M in College Station, Bush and President Obama met to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Points of Light service program, part of Bush 41's legacy to the country. Unfailingly polite, Bush wrote the Aggie community before Obama's visit. The note was fa