Roundup: Media's Take

Abraham Sofaer: A Reagan Strategy for Iran and Syria

[Mr. Sofaer, George P. Shultz senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, was legal adviser to the Department of State from 1985 to 1990.] The Iraq Study Group's recommendation that the Bush administration drop its preconditions and negotiate with Syria and Iran has been praised as a "no-brainer" -- and condemned as an improper effort to reward rogue regimes. Neither reaction is correct. Negotiating with enemies can be a useful aspect of effective diplomacy. But succes

John Graham: Iraq Is Vietnam - And You'd Better Believe It

[John Graham shipped out on a freighter when he was sixteen, took part in the first ascent of Mount McKinley's North Wall at twenty, and hitchhiked around the world at twenty-two. A Foreign Service officer for fifteen years, he served in Libya during the revolution and in the war in Vietnam. In the mid-seventies, he planned nuclear war strategies for NATO, then served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator John Glenn.] I was a civilian advisor/trainer in Vietnam, arriving just as US

George Beres: As carols get overlooked, the sounds of Christmas can become strange

Half-a-century again I started having misgivings over what was described as Christmas music. Where, I wondered, did "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" fit in? It has grown worse with the years. Now there's Yule music from Southern rap called "crunk" and dance hall reggae with Santa on stage. That was the focus of a recent Wall Street Journal feature called "Santa's Greatest Hits." It's a

Rebecca Solnit: The First 25 Years of the 21st Century ... A Look Back

[Rebecca Solnit lives in and loves the peninsular republic of San Francisco, where she is working on a new book. Her most recent books are still Hope in the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.] [For Solomon Solnit (b. Oct. 18, 2006)] The View from the GrassI've been writing the year-end other-n

Paul Rogat Loeb: How Democrats can keep the youth vote

[Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time, and Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy & Action of the American Campus. See www.paulloeb.org To receive Loeb's monthly articles email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe

Joshua Spivak: The incumbent-free election of 2008

[Joshua Spivak is an attorney and media consultant. ] As candidates start jumping into the presidential sweepstakes, observers might miss an important fact about 2008: The upcoming presidential primary elections may be the most democratic and wide-open in American history, one that could result in a full debate on each party's basic core beliefs. This election is different not because of Iraq or the Democrats' recent electoral success. Rather it is a rare anomaly: 2008 is the first pr

Andrew Sullivan: Thirty Years' War brewing in the Middle East

Americans, by and large, are unfamiliar with much of history. Their passion is the future, not the past; and their focus is understandably on their own vast and varied continent, not on the minute details of distant foreign lands. The new chairman of the House intelligence committee cannot tell the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite, and his predecessor was not much better. And I’d wager that no one in the US Congress was forced in school, as I sadly was, to study Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. B

Frances Harrison: Reporter puzzled by how to cover the Teheran Holocaust meeting

Iran has been severely criticised for hosting a conference questioning the Holocaust. Delegates included not only some of the world's best-known Holocaust deniers, but also white supremacists and anti-Semites. In the BBC there's a lot of talk about impartial broadcasting. I've always wondered how that would work if you were the BBC correspondent in Nazi Germany reporting on Hitler. Would you not have to take sides? Well I got closer than ever before to this problem re

Sidney Blumenthal: Shoot first, avoid questions later

In the original account authorized by Vice President Dick Cheney of his shooting of Harry Whittington, given by Katharine Armstrong, heiress and hunting companion, to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and later elaborated on to other news outlets, the 11 members of the hunting party set off on the morning of Feb. 11 in two trucks for the wilds of the 50,000-acre Armstrong Ranch in search of quails. After lunch, whose menu was described as antelope, jicama salad, bread and Dr Pepper, the hunters di

David Horowitz: Jimmy Carter: Jew-Hater, Genocide-Enabler, Liar

[David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.” It chronicles his odyssey from radical activism in the ‘60s to his current position as the head of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and who one journalist has called "the left's most articulate nemesis." His book, The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as “The perfect guide

David Brooks: The truth about poverty stats

... In “The Mismeasure of Poverty” in Policy Review, [Nicholas] Eberstadt notes that the percentage of Americans living under the poverty rate has been stagnant for 30 years, suggesting that antipoverty efforts have failed, and that life has not improved for the nation’s poor. The problem, Eberstadt continues, is that there are anomalies in the official statistics. Why does the poverty rate tend to go up as unemployment falls? Why hasn’t it budged while the amounts of money the gove

Charles Krauthammer: Past the Apogee ... America Under Pressure

[Charles Krauthammer writes an internationally syndicated column for the Washington Post Writers Group. He is also a monthly essayist for Time magazine, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, and a weekly panelist on Inside Washington. He was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, and Financial Times recently named him America's most influential commentator. This enote is based on his keynote address at FPR

Max Boot: Throw the Iraq report in the trash

BLUE-RIBBON panels are easy to mock, but some actually do perform a valuable service. The base-closing commissions, for example, were able to close down military installations that weren't needed but that Congress couldn't pull the plug on. The 9/11 commission produced a definitive and enthralling account of the worst terrorist attack on American soil. And then there is the Iraq Study Group. The money spent on its deliberations should have been redirected to some worthier purpose, s

Mark D. Tooley: The "School of the Assassins" Fiction

[Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.] A record number of left-wing demonstrators (14,000-22,000), many of them church officials and activists, showed up for this year’s annual march in November against the Defense Department’s formerly named School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Now officially called “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), its left-wing critics prefer “School

Fred Barnes: Lincoln's Fifth Column (and Bush's)

As if Abraham Lincoln didn't have enough distractions while pursuing a war to restore the Union, he also had to worry about what he called "the fire in the rear." He was speaking metaphorically. The fire was actually a group of Northern Democrats known as Copperheads. They opposed the Civil War, sympathized with the Southern secessionists, were mostly racists themselves, loathed Lincoln, blamed him and not the Southerners for starting the bloody fight, and impeded the war

Ralph Peters: From Metternich to Jim Baker

[Ralph Peters is a retired military officer, columnist, and the author of 21 books, including the recent Never Quit the Fight.] THE SUPERANNUATED membership of the Iraq Study Group shepherded by former secretary of state James Baker conjures a line from the film The Sixth Sense: "I see dead people." Two centuries ago, Europeans dreaming of reform and freedom must have felt just as crestfallen as they watched their continent's ghoulish elder statesmen gather for the Congres

Harlan Cleveland: Iraq ... What to Do Before Walking Away

[Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, a Princeton graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. In government he has been a high official of the Marshall Plan, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In academia he has served as dean of two graduate schools of public affairs (the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the

Frank Rich: The Sunshine Boys Can't Save Iraq

... THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war’s violence boiled over soon after (Tet), prompting a downturn in American public opinion. Allies in our coalition of the willing — Thailand, the Philippines, Australia — had balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas

Peter Steinfels: In Politics, the ‘God Gap’ Overshadows Other Differences

Why is there so much fascination with the so-called God gap, the finding that the more religiously observant Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Republican? Or, to put it the other way round, the more secular Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Democratic? The question was raised Tuesday by Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow and public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute, at a conference for journalists sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and

Christopher Hayes: 9/11 ... The Roots of Paranoia

[Christopher Hayes, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is a senior editor of In These Times.] According to a July poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was