Roundup: Media's Take

Fred Branfman: On Torture and Being "Good Americans"

[Fred Branfman is a writer and long-time political activist. His email address is fredbranfman@aol.com and his website is www.trulyalive.org. He is writing a book entitled Facing Death at Any Age.] As a teenager, I could not understand how the German people could claim to be "good Germans," unaware of what the Nazis had done in their names. I could understand if these ordinary German people h

Jim Hoagland: The 30 Year War in Iraq

Iraq has endured civil war for 30 years. It has not suited Western policymakers or the media to call it that, nor to face up to the implications of the appalling sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing that this long conflict has generated. That must now change. What peace there was in Iraq before the American invasion was the peace of the graveyard. Saddam Hussein's forces launched the genocidal campaign against the Kurds in 1987. The Shiite south was the target of mass murder and

Sidney Blumenthal: A deluded king and his court lickspittles

Republicans representative of their permanent establishment have recently and quietly sent emissaries to President Bush, like diplomats to a foreign ruler isolated in his forbidden city, to probe whether he could be persuaded to become politically flexible. These ambassadors were not connected to the elder Bush or his closest associate, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who was purged last year from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and scorned by the current p

Barbara McKenna: Beware the new thought police

... Recently, the Horowitz campaign to restrict faculty speech took an even more negative turn with the publication of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery Publishing Inc., 2006). The promotional blurb reads: “Coming to a Campus Near You: Terrorists, racists, and communists—you know them as The Professors. “Horowitz exposes 101 academics—representative of thousands of radicals who teach our young people—who also happen to be alleged ex

Max Boot: Up close, Iraq gets blurry

ARE WE WINNING or losing in Iraq? Liberals and conservatives safe at home have no trouble formulating glib answers to that fundamental question. The former can always point to setbacks, the latter to successes. The picture becomes blurrier, the future murkier when you spend time in Iraq, as I did last week. After traveling from Qatar to Baghdad on a C-17 transport aircraft, I jumped off a Blackhawk helicopter on Feb. 22 at Forward Operating Base Warhorse near the city of Baqubah, 30

Joshua Green: Republicans might—or might not—want to look backward for lessons on handling life under a cloud

Legend has it that certain Eskimo tribes in northern Canada had a fiercely efficient way to dispatch elders who outlived their usefulness and became a burden on the community: put them on an ice floe and shove them off to sea. That kind of cold-eyed realism is hardly alien to the tribes of Washington, D.C., forever locked in their own struggle for survival. And if the Republican scandals centered upon the former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the lobbyist Jack Abramoff suddenly metastasize

Michael Rubin: In Iraq, Iranian practice outsmarts American principle

[Mr. Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of Middle East Quarterly.] ...Step-by-step, Iranian authorities are replicating in Iraq the strategy which allowed Hezbollah to take over southern Lebanon in the 1980s. The playbook -- military, economic and information operation -- is almost identical. Hezbollah's story begins in 1982. As the Israeli army evicted the PLO from Lebanon, Ayatollah Khomeini dispatched his elite Revolutionary Guard

WSJ Editorial: What's the alternative to promoting freedom in the Middle East?

In the matter of Middle East elections, the results of which we don't always like: Anyone out there have a better idea? We ask amid some recent wringing of hands following elections for the Palestinian legislature, in which the terrorist group Hamas won an outright majority; elections in Iraq, where voters cast their ballots along sectarian lines, and a strong showing by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's parliamentary elections late last year. "For s

John Wertman: Bush's Obstruction of History

At some point in the next few months, President Bush is expected to announce his choice for the location of his presidential library. Once it's open, most of the media attention is likely to focus on the public exhibits, which will no doubt extol the president's compassionate conservatism, his leadership immediately after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and his impressive selections of John Roberts and Sam Alito for the Supreme Court. More important to history, howe

Bob Herbert: Ike Saw It Coming

Early in the documentary film "Why We Fight," Wilton Sekzer, a retired New York City police officer whose son was killed in the World Trade Center attack, describes his personal feelings in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. "Somebody had to pay for this," he says. "Somebody had to pay for 9/11. ... I wanna see their bodies stacked up for what they did. For taking my son." Lost in the agony of his grief, Mr. Sekzer wanted revenge. He want

Jonathan Alter: The Imperial (Vice) Presidency

Fox News's exclusive interview with Vice President Dick Cheney was, as CNN's Jack Cafferty sniped, "like Bonnie interviewing Clyde," but Brit Hume posed some good questions. When asked if he still thinks after everything that happened that he handled the story the right way, Cheney replied, "I still do." To me, this was the most revealing part of the whole episode. Cheney believes in what might be called partisan accountability—you answer only to your own side, on your own t

George F. Will: An Election Breakwater?

The electorate's dyspeptic mood about the nation's politics reflects the fact that, as is frequently the case, the party in power in Washington has done much to earn a rebuke but the opposition party has done nothing to earn a reward. Herewith a tour of the political horizon nine months before the November elections, and 33 months before the first presidential election since 1952 without an incumbent president or vice president running—and just the second in 28 years without a Bush on the ballot

Steve Sailer : Cesar Chavez, Minuteman

[Steve Sailer is TAC's film critic and a VDARE.com columnist.] In California, only three birthdays are official state holidays: Jesus Christ's, Martin Luther King's, and Cesar Chavez's. Beatification as a secular saint, though, isn't always good for the soul. A recent four-part expos by reporter Miriam Pawel in the Los Angeles Times revealed how the labor leader turned revered ethnic icon descended into paranoia, megalomania, and general crack-pottery in the 15 years before his dea

John Laughland: Deterrence worked with the Soviets. Why not Iran?

Since the end of the Cold War [deterrence] has been consigned to the dustbin of history. Today's neocons do not conclude from the possibility that Iran might obtain the bomb that countermeasures must be taken to deter her from ever using it. Instead, they bleat that Iran is infringing the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty-one of the stupidest treaties ever to have entered the annals of diplomacy because it elevates hypocrisy to a principle of international law by saying that only so

Matthew Pearl: Lawrence Summers's fall began 140 years ago

[Matthew Pearl is the author of "The Dante Club" and the forthcoming novel "The Poe Shadow.] BEFORE Lawrence Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard on Tuesday, the last upheaval of equal magnitude at the university was 140 years ago. That older drama was perhaps the most consequential episode in the history of American higher education; one that not only created the institution where a Larry Summers could flourish as a graduate student and professor

Steven R. Weisman: What Civil War Could Look Like

... "A civil war in Iraq would be a kind of earthquake affecting the whole Middle East," said Terje Roed-Larsen, the special United Nations envoy for Lebanon and previously for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It would deepen existing cleavages and create new cleavages in a part of the world that is already extremely fragile and extremely dangerous. I'm not predicting this will happen, but it is a plausible worst-case scenario." A first question for the United

John Kifner: When a Country Cracks ... History Lessons

... The sequence of [last week's] events [in Iraq] evoked past crises involving conflict between entrenched ethnic or religious groups — the fodder for civil war. They have a rhythm of their own. Often tensions seem to build to an unbearable level, then suddenly ease. Sometimes something so awful happens that it is a turning point. That was the case during the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. At the beginning of February 1994, a mortar fell on an outdoor market where Bosnians bought used

Andrew L. Yarrow: Fifty years ago, America's future was limitless. So what happened to optimism?

America has never been richer, but it once was much more optimistic — even utopian — about its future. In 1956, Fortune magazine published "The Fabulous Future," a book of essays by luminaries forecasting a nation of technological and economic wonders by 1980. Adlai Stevenson spoke of "the most extraordinary growth any nation or civilization has ever experienced." George Meany predicted "ever-rising" living standards. And David Sarnoff gushed, "The

Dana Milbank: John Yoo says it's a myth that Congress declares wars

For generations, civics students have learned that the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Yesterday, the man who built the legal underpinnings of the Bush administration's terrorism strategy revised the curriculum. John Yoo, the former Justice Department official whose writings justified the administration's treatment of military prisoners and the National Security Agency eavesdropping program, announced that Congress's warmaking powers are just a figment of the &

Mark Engler: Finding the tipping point for Vietnam -- and for Iraq

[Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and a contributor to Newsday, In These Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and TomPaine.com. He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com. Research assistance for this article provided by Kate Griffiths.] In the center of the CostOfWar.com home page, an upward-racing ticker, presented in a large, red font, keeps a steady tally of the money spent for the U.S. war in Iraq. Every time I visit, it