Roundup: Media's Take

Sam Stein: RNC: Jackie Robinson Was A Republican

[Sam Stein is a Political Reporter at the Huffington Post, based in Washington, D.C.] The Republican National Committee released a new website on Tuesday that goes to great lengths to depict the party as open to minority interests. The most obvious example comes on the "Heroes" page where the RNC pinpoints 16 figures who were "Patriots: American Heroes & Famous Republicans." The list includes seven African-Americans, one Hispanic-American, and fo

Dagobert L. Brito and Michael D. Intriligator: For a Solution in Afghanistan, Look South...and In the Past

[Dagobert L. Brito is Peterkin Professor of Political Economy at Rice University and Michael D. Intriligator is Professor of Economics, Political Science, and Public Policy at UCLA.] It has been reported that President Obama is considering military options for Afghanistan that range from a complete military commitment, such as has been suggested by General McChrystal with 40,000 added troops, to a focus on training the Afghan armed forces and police, as has been suggested by Vice Pr

Jeffrey Lord: The Reagan Prize

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.] It's time for the Reagan Peace Prize. Actually, it's past time. The Nobel Peace Prize for President Obama -- for which he was nominated after barely two weeks in office -- merely illustrates once again what has been apparent for not just the last few years but at least ninety years. The Nobel, the legacy of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, has become essentially wo

Richard Bennet: Somalia ... How Not to Win in Afghanistan

[Richard Bennet is a research associate in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He recently returned from a research trip to the Horn of Africa.] As the Afghanistan strategy review dominates conversations in Washington, President Barack Obama's advisors appear split over whether to fully resource a counterinsurgency or scale back the effort to a more limited, counterterrorism approach. Vice President Joe Biden and others, fearing an open-ended engagement, h

Larry Sabato: Why One Vote Matters in the Senate: No Deviations Allowed

[Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics and University Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, is the author of “The Year of Obama.”] A bit too much is being made of the “Olympia Snowe factor.” Does her vote for the Baucus health care reform bill ease passage of some kind of bill on the Senate floor? Probably. But my bet is that the Democrats would have found a way to pass health care even if Senator Snowe had voted nay. They remember the G.O.P. landslide

Max Boot: The Incurable Vietnam Syndrome

[Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and author most recently of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.] President George H.W. Bush thought that after the victory in the Gulf war we had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." How wrong he was. The syndrome was on full display during the 1990s, when pundits and politico

Dick Morris And Eileen McGann: Pessimism: Obama's Political Ally

[Mr. Morris was an adviser to Bill Clinton for 20 years. He is the author of "Condi vs. Hillary." Mrs. McGann, an attorney and consultant, is a CEO of VOTE.com and LegislativeVote.com. She works with Mr. Morris on campaigns and around the world, specializing in using the Internet to win elections.] President Obama has won the peace prize, but nobody thinks he deserves the Nobel in economics. Despite $800 billion of economic stimulus and the accumulation of a $1.4 trillion

Zoe Alsop: Uganda's Anti-Gay Bill: Inspired by the U.S.

[Zoe Alsop is a correspondent for Time in Kampala, Uganda] The late-November afternoon sun bore down on the park in downtown Kampala, and all along the benches, Ugandan office workers took their siestas. There could have been no less likely setting for criminal conspiracies to topple an East African state. Still, the doctor's voice dropped a notch when an office worker in a brown suit settled in close by. The medic shifted a battered fedora over his eyes. "I am the gay doctor," the

Jamie Glazov interviews Lynn O'Shea about the POWs we left behind

[Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy.] Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lynn O’Shea, Director of Research for the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen.FP: Lynn O’Shea, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Tell us what your Alliance is currently working on.O’Shea: Currently, we are working toward t

Zachary Karabell: Deficits and the Chinese Challenge

[Mr. Karabell is the author of "Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It," just published by Simon & Schuster.] The dollar's sharp drop over the past few weeks has led to considerable anxiety about the status of the United States as the dominant force in the global economy. Closely related to this fear is constant worry about the rise of China and the evermore complicated relationship between Beijing and Washing

Bret Stephens: A Perfect Nobel Pick

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs, which runs every Tuesday in the U.S. and is also published in the European and Asian editions of the paper.] Pop quiz: What do Bertha von Suttner, Henri La Fontaine, Ludwig Quidde, Norman Angell, Arthur Henderson, Eisaku Sato, Alva Myrdal and Joseph Rotblat have in common? Answer: Barack Obama. If you're drawing blanks on most of these names, don't be hard on yourself: The

Jeremy Philips: The Internet is already our era's big disrupter (book review)

[Mr. Philips is executive vice president of News Corp., which owns Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.] In the Middle Ages, a simple military innovation helped to create an entirely new social structure. By introducing saddle stirrups made out of flexible leather rather than rigid metal, Charlemagne enabled mounted soldiers to keep their balance while moving freely—and to fight more formidably than their earthbound compatriots. To give these "knights&

JoongAng Daily Editorial: A historic textbook (with input from Korea, China and Japan)

Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada presented a plan to produce a history textbook written with the input of historians from Korea, China and Japan. The thinking is that crafting a joint history book could help resolve deep-rooted conflicts among the three countries. We sympathize with him and believe that it is necessary to publish joint history textbooks as a part of a concerted effort to help the three nations move past these issues and work together to create a new future-oriented form o

Roger Atwood: Taking Stock of Looting in Iraq

[Roger Atwood, a contributing editor at Archaeology magazine, is the author of “Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers and the Looting of the Ancient World.”] AS United States troops begin withdrawing from Iraq, we should take stock of the staggering damage that Iraq’s ancient archeological sites have suffered from looting over the last few years. After the 2003 invasion, swarms of looters dug huge pits and passages all over southern Iraq in search of cuneiform tablets and cylind

Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola: The Myth of "America"

[Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan," (Haymarket Books, 2009), and "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jason Coppola is the director and producer of the documentary film "Justify My War," which explores the rationalization of war in American culture, comparing the siege of Fallujah with the massacre

Azam Nizamuddin: Dispelling the Myths Behind Columbus

[Azam Nizamuddin is Adjunct Professor, Department of Theology at Loyola University of Chicago.] Ever since the election of Barack Hussain Obama as President, many myths have circulated as to his origins. While most reasonable observers have rejected the "birthers" phenomenon, some ideologically disposed people along with some Congressional leaders, have adopted some of this defamatory mythology. Mythologies about famous personalities are nothing new. In fact, mythologies o

Robert D. Kaplan: Time for Decisiveness on Afghanistan

[Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C.] When it comes to foreign policy, Republicans and Democrats are each suspect in their own way. Republicans used to be the party of competence in world affairs. They lost that aura during President George W. Bush's first six years in office, when he mismanaged the wars both in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The Democrats, for their part, are ofte

Fred Hiatt: Obama Policies Risk Bolstering Tyrants

[Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor of The Post. He writes editorials for the page and a biweekly column that appears on Mondays.] "Our concern is that the Obama administration is perceived to be softening on human rights." If that comment came from a human rights lobbyist, you might not pay too much mind. But I heard it from Anwar Ibrahim, a Malaysian leader who is one of the world's foremost spokesmen for Islamic democracy -- and who is himself under t

Michael M. Phillips and Guy Chazan: An Award Often Tinged by Politics

19th century dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel envisioned the Peace Prize that bears his name as honoring those "who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations." But the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, which Friday named President Barack Obama as the 2009 laureate, has throughout its history been captive to the politics of the time. In October 1989, for example, with China's Tiananmen Square uprising still fresh, the committee announced it was aw

Mary Anastasia O'Grady: George Shultz on the Drug War

[Mary Anastasia O'Grady is a member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board and editor of the "Americas," a weekly column that appears every Monday in the Journal and deals with politics, economics and business in Latin America and Canada.] When George P. Shultz took office as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state in 1982, his first trip out of the country was to Canada. His second was to Mexico. "Foreign policy starts with your neighborhood," he tol