Roundup: Media's Take

Malcolm Rifkind: Putin’s Cold War Politics Will Fail Russia

Sir Malcolm Rifkind is MP for Kensington and a former foreign secretary. At the end of the Cold War, the West would have been delighted to know that 20 years hence the Communist Party would again be rejected by the people of Russia, with the non-Communist candidate winning 63 per cent of the vote. But that was at a time when Russia was a young, struggling democracy and it was far from certain that the Communists would never return to power. Today, things are very different. Vladimir Putin’s victory is, for the West, not entirely disagreeable. Rather, like the curate’s egg, it is good in parts. It guarantees that for the next six years Russia will be stable and fairly predictable. It will have, as its president, a leader who is tough and cool. He will conduct a foreign policy with which we are already familiar. It will be nationalist, but not dangerous or irrational on the supreme questions of peace and war. When you are dealing with a state that still has thousands of nuclear warheads, having Putin in the Kremlin should not cause us to lose too much sleep. But there is no getting away from the fact that he has blocked Russia’s embrace of pluralist democracy and the emergence of serious, organised political alternatives to his rule.

Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss: The Ghosts of Presidencies Past. How Today's Republicans Need To Memorialise Reagan and Banish Bush

Leonard Benardo is a writer and associate director of Open Society Foundations. Jennifer Weiss is a New York based writer.

Michael Sean Winters: How the Ghost of Jerry Falwell Conquered the Republican Party

Michael Sean Winters is the author of God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right.

Auden Schendler: Cigarettes' Lessons for Climate Change

Auden Schendler is the author of "Getting Green Done" and a board member of Protect Our Winters.

Robert Young Pelton: When You Destroy a City, Make Sure No One Gets Out Alive

California-based Robert Young Pelton wrote The Hunter, the Hammer, and Heaven about his experiences in Chechnya in 1999 to 2000. He is currently publisher of Somalia Report, a 24/7 news source that works with over 100 Somali reporters. His book The World's Most Dangerous Places contains survival tips from what he has learned in over a dozen conflicts. It was a star-filled night in Chechnya's besieged capital of Grozny....

Jere Van Dyk: The Koran is the Glue That's Held Afghans Together

This post was written by CBS News terrorism analyst Jere Van DykTwo more American soldiers were shot and killed in Afghanistan yesterday. What has gone wrong? The U.S. military wants to stay the course, but the West must learn quickly, before it is too late, how important the Koran is in Afghanistan, and why.It was November 1981. I was a young journalist living with Jalaladin Haqqani, a Mujahideen commander, at Shi-e-Khot, a mountain valley in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. Five times a day, Haqqani stood on the roof of our bombed-out compound, cupped his hands and called his men to prayer. They put their rifles down, lined up, and prayed, paying homage to God, who guided and protected them, and who led them in battle. One evening Haqqani stood on a rock and held the Koran out and his men walked under it on their way to attack an Afghan government fort. The Koran was the Word of God and would protect them and lead them to victory against the godless Communist government and the Soviet Red Army. As they dropped the shells down the mortar that night the Mujahideen shouted "God is great."

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: What Rick Santorum Doesn't Understand About JFK

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the author of Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way. She is on the board of Catholic Democrats.

Andy Kroll: How Empires Fall (Including the American One) -- A TomDispatch Interview With Jonathan Schell

Andy Kroll is an associate editor at TomDispatch and a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine. He writes about politics, business, and campaign finance. He can be reached at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. When Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, a meditation on the history and power of nonviolent action, was published in 2003, the timing could not have been worse. Americans were at war -- and success was in the air. U.S. troops had invaded Iraq and taken Baghdad (“mission accomplished”) only months earlier, and had already spent more than a year fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Schell's book earned a handful of glowing reviews, and then vanished from the public debate as the bombs scorched Iraq and the body count began to mount.

Mark N. Katz: The Costs of American Interventionism

Mark N. Katz teaches international relations at George Mason University and is the author of Leaving without Losing: The War on Terror after Iraq and Afghanistan (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming in March 2012).

Simon Jenkins: We Are Fighting Islamism From Ignorance, As We Did the Cold War

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian as well as broadcasting for the BBC. He has edited the Times and the London Evening Standard.

Roger Kaplan: Hillary Clinton and the Burden of World Leadership

Roger Kaplan is a writer in Washington, D.C.

Mona Charen: Syria is Another Instance of Western Sympathy for Despotic Regimes

Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a firm statement to the Syrian elite this week, urging them to overthrow the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. “The longer you support the regime’s campaign of violence against your brothers and sisters, the more it will stain your honor,” she advised. Only now? Only after thousands of men, women, and children have been murdered, tens of thousands wounded, and countless homes destroyed by artillery shells has the Obama team finally shed its illusions about the Syrian regime? A mere eleven months ago, when peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Dara and other cities were met with bullets, Secretary Clinton referred to Assad as a “reformer.” She was not alone. Last year, Germany’s foreign minister Guido Westerwelle visited Assad and declared him indispensable for a “constructive solution” to the Middle East’s problems. A leading German think tank, which advises the foreign ministry, called Assad a “modernizer.” Rare is the sceptered thug who does not attract fawning admiration from some in the free and democratic West...

William J. Broad: Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here

William J. Broad is the author of “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards,” published this month by Simon & Schuster.The wholesome image of yoga took a hit in the past few weeks as a rising star of the discipline came tumbling back to earth. After accusations of sexual impropriety with female students, John Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles, told followers that he was stepping down for an indefinite period of “self-reflection, therapy and personal retreat.”...Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness....Early in the 20th century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain. They devised a sanitized discipline that played down the old eroticism for a new emphasis on health and fitness.

Neal Ascherson: Will Scotland Go Its Own Way?

Neal Ascherson is the author, most recently, of “Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland.” “THE Breakup of Britain”? It sounds like a fantasy fiction title. To many people across the world, including the English themselves, it is inconceivable that this deep-rooted United Kingdom, the oldest royal democracy in the world, could split apart.In the last few weeks, however, official London has panicked over the rising clamor of voices from all over the British Isles suddenly agreeing that the archaic structure of “Great Britain” is overdue for a shake-up — even a breakup.Nowhere are these voices in better harmony than in Scotland. If “Britain” is more than a word on a passport, why do most Scots now feel their primary identity is not British? What would it mean to be English if the Scots walked away? And should the Welsh follow them? A fresh wind of new ideas is blowing from Scotland and tempting all the queen’s subjects to reimagine their identities....

Roya Hakakian: What Two Enemies Share

Roya Hakakian is the author of “Assassins of the Turquoise Palace.”“IF a war were to break out between Iran and Israel, whose side would you be on?” someone asked me on Facebook a few weeks ago, when an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was reportedly imminent.From early adolescence, at the start of Iran’s 1979 revolution, my loyalties have so often been questioned that I’ve come to think of such suspicions as my Iranian-Jewish inheritance.

Joan Walsh: Santorum’s JFK Story Makes Me Want to Throw Up

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large.“We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief.”Rick Santorum teed off on a venerated former president Sunday morning for telling America that the separation of church and state was “absolute..” Was it the guy responsible for the above quote? No, that was Ronald Reagan, running for re-election in 1984 (h/t BB).

Jon Gertner: True Innovation at Bell Labs

Jon Gertner is the author of the forthcoming “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.”“INNOVATION is what America has always been about,” President Obama remarked in his recent State of the Union address. It’s hard to disagree, isn’t it? We live in a world dominated by innovative American companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. And even in the face of a recession, Silicon Valley’s relentless entrepreneurs have continued to churn out start-up companies with outsize, world-changing ambitions.But we idealize America’s present culture of innovation too much. In fact, our trailblazing digital firms may not be the hothouse environments for creativity we might think. I find myself arriving at these doubts after spending five years looking at the innovative process at Bell Labs, the onetime research and development organization of the country’s formerly monopolistic telephone company, AT&T....In his recent letter to potential shareholders of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg noted that one of his firm’s mottoes was “move fast and break things.” Bell Labs’ might just as well have been “move deliberately and build things.” This sounds like the quaint pursuit of men who carried around slide rules and went to bed by 10 o’clock. But it was not.

Scott Stewart: The Myth of the End of Terrorism

Scott Stewart writes for Stratfor.

Hugo Restall: Hong Kong Was Better Under the British

Mr. Restall is the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia.

Chas Freeman: The China Bluff

Chas Freeman, chairman of Projects International, is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This article is adapted from remarks delivered at The Center for the National Interest on February 16, 2012.