Roundup: Media's Take

Scott Martelle: The Collapse of Detroit

[Scott Martelle's "The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial," will be published in May. He lives in Irvine.] Imagine for a moment that every single person living in the city of San Jose, plus another 150,000 or so, just up and left. Vanished. Poof. Gone. Leaving their homes, business buildings and factories behind. That is, in effect, what has happened to the city of Detroit, according to 2010 U.S. Census data released this week. The ci

Richard Haass: Bleak history lessons for Libya's future

[The writer is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars.] This year sees the 25th anniversary of the publication of Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, a text on how best to use lessons of the past. It provides a corollary to the aphorism that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. This is especially relevant in Libya, where history has been enlisted to make t

George Weigel: How Democrats View the World

[George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow at Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.] Criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the current Libyan crisis, following hard on the heels of similar criticisms of its approach to the dramas of Tunisia and Egypt, has tended to focus on the president’s personality and his alleged incapacity for global leadership. There’s doubtless an element of truth in this,

Tom Malinowski: Why Isn't Obama Getting Credit for Stopping an Atrocity?

[Tom Malinowski is the Washington director of Human Rights Watch.] Here is one lesson we can draw from the mostly negative media commentary about the Obama administration’s actions in Libya: Presidents get more credit for stopping atrocities after they begin than for preventing them before they get out of hand. The U.S.-led NATO intervention that stopped mass killing in Bosnia in 1995, for example, came only after 200,000 people had already been killed. But because we h

Anne Applebaum: The French & British Go to War Again

[Anne Applebaum is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on foreign affairs.] ‘Freedom fries,’ served instead of French fries back in 2003, are no longer on the menu in Washington DC. French wine, out of fashion after Jacques Chirac refused to join our ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq, is no longer shunned. Au contraire. In one Washington restaurant last Saturday night, someone at my table raised a toast to the new leaders of the free world: ‘Vive la France!’ What else could we

Jack Shafer: There's No Such Thing as a Bad FOIA Request

[Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.] ...I have no dog in the fight between Cronon and the Republican who filed the records request, other than my long-term support of strong local, state, and federal FOIA laws and rigorous application of them. Yeah, I know, there's a huge element of the political stunt to the filing. But calling it McCarthyesque, as Fallows does, is a complete overreach. Joe would have never done anything so flatfootedly procedural! Likewise, denouncing the req

Ronald Brownstein: How Obama is Like Ike

[Ronald Brownstein is the political director of Atlantic Media.] In 2008, many of Barack Obama's supporters thought they might be electing another John F. Kennedy. But his recent maneuvers increasingly suggest that they selected another Dwight Eisenhower. That's not a comment on President Obama's effectiveness or ideology, but rather on his conception of presidential leadership. Whether he is confronting the turmoil reshaping the Middle East or the escalating budget war

Robert Haddick: The Latest Temptation of Air Power

[Robert Haddick is managing editor of Small Wars Journal.] After one week, Odyssey Dawn, the operation aimed at protecting Libya's civilians from Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's forces, seems to be bumping up against the limitations of its U.N. Security Council mandate. Coalition military officials believe they have demolished Qaddafi's air force and have suppressed his air-defense systems. But in spite of increasing airstrikes against Qaddafi's tanks and artillery, his ground forces are

Stephen R. Weissman: Why is the U.S. Withholding Old Documents on Covert Ops in Congo, Iran?

[Stephen R. Weissman, former staff director of the House of Representatives’ Africa Subcommittee, is the author of “American Foreign Policy in the Congo 1960-1964” and “A Culture of Deference: Congress’s Failure of Leadership in Foreign Policy.”] The US government has reacted strongly to Pfc. Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosure of recent diplomatic cables via Wikileaks. We have heard State Department officials make their good case that indiscriminate leaks of contemporary communica

Joan Walsh: Obama, Al Smith and the Triangle Fire

[Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large] I wrote Wednesday about the unexpected widespread attention to the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It has a lot to do with post-Wisconsin agitation on the left and beyond. The tragedy is also genuine American history: No less an expert than Franklin Delano Roosevelt's labor secretary called March 25, 1911, "the day the New Deal began," and as the mother of the New Deal, Frances Perkins would know.

Chip Ward: How the “Peaceful Atom” Became a Serial Killer

[Chip Ward was a founder of HEAL Utah, a grassroots group that has led the opposition to the disposal of nuclear waste in Utah and the construction of a new reactor next to Green River.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and

Congressonal Research Service: No-Fly Zones: Strategic, Operational, and Legal Considerations for Congress

[The Congressional Research Service (CRS) works exclusively for the United States Congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS has been a valued and respected resource on Capitol Hill for nearly a century.]Editor's Note: This is the summary of a longer policy report issued by the CRS.The ongoing uprising in

Clifford D. May: An Arab Spring?

[Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.] Readers of tea leaves, tarot cards, and goat entrails may be able to predict the future. But prognostication is an ability that few journalists, politicians, diplomats, and intelligence officials have demonstrated consistently over time. So while it’s clear that the Muslim world is in the throes of a major transformation, let’s not pretend we know how t

Meir Javedanfar: Iran and Saudi Arabia cold war has entered a new era

[Meir Javedanfar is an Iranian-Israeli Middle East analyst and co-author of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran.] Democracy is arriving in the Middle East, albeit slowly. But what is making progress at a much faster pace is the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Some described the fall of the Mubarak government, preceded by the fall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, as the Middle East's Berlin Wall moment. The parallels with the cold war in E

Fred Kaplan: Is Libya Like Kosovo?

[Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, is now out in paperback. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.] It's worth noting, four days into the air campaign against Libya, that we're just four days into the air campaign against Libya.... The hand-wringing from all sides is reminiscent of NAT

Frank N. von Hippel: A Nuclear Meltdown Could Happen Here

[Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist, is a professor of public and international affairs at Princeton and co-chairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. From 1993 to 1994 he was responsible for national security issues in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.] IT will be years before we know the full consequences of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. But the public attention raised by the problems there provides

Bruce Anderson: Palmerston proves an inspiration for David Cameron

[Bruce Anderson is a British conservative political columnist.] Politicians propose, history disposes. Many heads of government come to office believing that they can write their own agenda. They quickly learn the error of their ways. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan always knew that foreign affairs would be crucial; they were governing in the shadow of the Cold War. Once that was won, largely thanks to them, their successors could dream of greater latitude. Francis

Luis Alberto Moreno: Lessons in liberation from Latin America

[The writer is president of the Inter-American Development Bank.] As Egypt, Tunisia, and other Middle Eastern nations eye the perilous transition to democracy, President Barack Obama is giving voice to a rapidly growing sentiment: they should look to the recent experience of Latin America. During his just-concluded trip to the region Mr Obama saw the extraordinary advances the region has made since the “lost decade” of the 1980s, when military regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Pe

Yulia Latynina: West Goes From Commanders to Cowards

[Yulia Latynina hosts a radio talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.] Let me reveal a secret: The real reason the West is bombing Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is to put al-Qaida in power. Take for example Mustafa Abdul Jalil, head of Libya’s National Transitional Council. He defends radical Islam. In my opinion, all of the turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East is the natural consequence of recent decades in which the world’s open society has weakened militarily and mor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Tony Blair's Kiss of Death

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a British journalist and contributor to the Guardian.] Just before Tony Blair left Downing Street in the summer of 2007, he was interviewed in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash, the transatlantic writer on international affairs. At a time when Blair’s stock had fallen low, and when his own party was desperate to see the back of him, he was presented with glowing enthusiasm: “Tony Blair bounds into the garden of 10 Downing Street, looking as if he's ready for