Roundup: Media's Take

John B. Judis: Stop Calling It Egypt’s Revolution … because the country hasn’t yet had one

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] The massive protests that forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s departure have been widely described as a revolution. And that’s fine. If there is an Internet revolution, a Reagan revolution, and even an Obama revolution, then there has certainly been an Egyptian revolution. But there is another meaning of revolution that applies specifically to events

Michael Schwartz: Why Mubarak Fell

[A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Michael Schwartz is the author of War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Haymarket Press). Schwartz's work on protest movements, contentious politics, and the arc of U.S. imperialism has appeared in numerous academic and popular outlets over the past 40 years.] Memo to President Obama: Given the absence of intelligent intell

Maureen Dowd: Worth a Bottle of Whiskey

[Maureen Dowd writes for the NYT.] Our 3,413th day at war in Afghanistan seemed like a good day to learn about Afghanistan. The longest stretch of war in American history has merited the shortest attention span. I didn’t go to Kabul on the secretary of defense’s Doomsday plane this time. I signed up with the Pentagon for time travel, flying through history watching a remarkable seven-hour marathon of a 12-play series called “The Great Game.” The plays use r

Patrick Seale: Has the Israel-Egypt peace treaty really helped 'stability'?

[Patrick Seale is a British writer, who specializes in Middle East affairs. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East.] Israel has been unnerved by Egypt's revolution. The reason is simple: it fears for the survival of the 1979 peace treaty - a treaty which by neutralizing Egypt, guaranteed Israel's military dominance over the region for the next three decades. By removing Egypt -- the strongest and most

Olivier Roy: This is not an Islamic revolution

[Olivier Roy is professor of social and political theory at the European University Institute in Florence. His most recent book is "Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways".] In Europe, the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have been interpreted using a model that is more than 30 years old: the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Commentators have been expecting to see Islamist groups - the Muslim Brotherhood and their local equivalents - eithe

Ahmed Rashid: Cairo needs help to avoid al-Qaeda’s grip

[The writer’s latest book is Descent into Chaos. A revised edition of his Taliban was published last summer.] Despite victory for democratic forces in Egypt, current instability may still give al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic groups the chance to expand their influence. Egypt needs international help quickly to ensure the reform agenda is speeded up, and that extremists cannot lay down roots. For centuries Egypt has been the heart of the Arab world; its trend setter

Jonathan Freedland: A better way to push democracy, but the west's love-bombing has risks too

[Jonathan Freedland writes a weekly column for the Guardian.] They say that if failure is an orphan, then success has many fathers – and Egypt's revolution has proved the truth of that aged wisdom all over again. The latest to file a paternity claim is Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary to George W Bush. Out hawking his new memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld reckons it was Bush's "freedom agenda" that paved the way for the current revolutionary spirit sweeping the Arab wo

Michael Lind: Hey, Liberals: Time to Give the Beck Bashing a Rest

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] What dumb thing did Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck just say? You don’t need to watch Fox News to find out. The progressive media will tell you. The economy is still in a coma, revolution is rocking the Middle East -- but you can be sure that Rachel Maddow and Chri

Dennis Prager: In Vietnam, Hating Communism Anew

[Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.] It was difficult to control my emotions — specifically my anger — during my visit to Vietnam last week. The more I came to admire the Vietnamese people — their intelligence, love of life, dignity, and hard work — the more rage I felt for the Communists who brought them (and, of course, us Americans) so much suffering in the second half of the 20th

Anne Applebaum: Channeling Egypt's Energy of the Crowd into Positive Change

[Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the WaPo.] I didn't have a pen in hand when I heard the broadcast from Cairo over the weekend, and I didn't write down the precise words used by a woman demonstrator, interviewed at length by a BBC radio journalist, just after she heard the news of Hosni Mubarak's resignation. But I remember the sentiments with great precision: Exhilaration, excitement, elation, euphoria. She was proud to be an Egyptian. She had never thought it was possible that E

Bret Stephens: Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] It's what the good people on West 40th Street like to call a "Times Classic." On Feb. 16, 1979, the New York Times ran a lengthy op-ed by Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, under the headline "Trusting Khomeini." "The depiction of [Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false

Scott Turow, Paul Aiken, and James Shapiro: Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?

[Scott Turow, a novelist, is the president of the Authors Guild. Paul Aiken is its executive director. James Shapiro, a member of the guild’s board, teaches Shakespeare at Columbia.] ARCHAEOLOGISTS finished a remarkable dig last summer in East London. Among their finds were seven earthenware knobs, physical evidence of a near perfect 16th-century experiment into the link between commerce and culture. When William Shakespeare was growing up in rural Stratford-upon-Avon,

Leon Hadar: Don’t Party Like It’s 1989 - It's More Like 1848

[Leon Hadar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute.] The uprising in Egypt and challenge to the Middle East’s autocratic rulers could have produced a sense of déjà vu for the late German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. Notwithstanding her reputation as a progressive thinker, Arendt believed that the erosion in the power of Europe’s conservative ruling elites and the strong national states they controlled helped set the stage for rise of totalitarianism and the horrific wars th

David Rothkopf: In the Middle East, too much knowledge of history can be dangerous

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.] The problem with experience is that it doesn't prepare you for what you have never seen before. This is also a challenge for experts, for whom their knowledge of the past is usually an advantage, but sometimes can be their worst limitation. This has certainly been the case in the past several weeks with the events in Tunisia and Egypt. Old M

Neil Buckley: Arab wave unlikely to hit former Soviet states

[Neil Buckley is the FT's Eastern Europe Editor.] The jubilant scenes on Cairo’s Tahrir Square that greeted the fall of Hosni Mubarak have been likened to those that accompanied the toppling of communist regimes across eastern Europe in 1989. But in many states inside the former Soviet Union democracy never fully took root. So, could the wildfires of Tunisia and Egypt spread to them? Some are already making bold forecasts. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, t

Joseph Nye: The Misleading Metaphor of Decline

[Mr. Nye is a professor at Harvard and author of "The Future of Power" (Public Affairs, 2011).] Is the United States in decline? Many Americans think so, and they are not alone. A recent Pew poll showed that pluralities in 13 of 25 countries believe that China will replace the U.S. as the world's leading superpower. But describing the future of power as inevitable American decline is both misleading and dangerous if it encourages China to engage in adventurous policies or

Michael Barone: Which Uprising? Iran, China, East Germany?

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.] It looks like 2/11/11 will go down in history with 11/9/89, not 6/4/89. 6/4/89 is when the Chinese military obeyed orders to massacre protesters in Tiananmen Square; 11/9/89 is when East German leaders announced the opening of the Berlin Wall and declined to order border guards to shoot the Berliners who began dismantling the barrier that had stood for 28 years. On 2/11/11, last Friday, as the Egy

Michael Medved: Obama Isn't Trying to 'Weaken America'

[Mr. Medved hosts a daily, nationally syndicated radio show and is the author of "The 5 Big Lies About American Business" (recently out in paperback by Three Rivers Press).] Some conservative commentators may feel inclined to spend Presidents Day ruminating over Barack Obama's evil intentions, or denouncing the chief executive as an alien interloper and ideologue perversely determined to damage the republic. Instead, they should consider the history of John Adams's White H

Jen Marlowe: From An Israeli Prison to Tahrir Square

[Jen Marlowe is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, author, playwright, human rights advocate, and founder of donkeysaddle projects. Her new book, The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker, co-written with and about Palestinian peace activist Sami Al Jundi, has just been published by Nation Books. H

Roya Hakakian: Egypt Through the Lens of Iran's 1979 Revolution

[Roya Hakakian is the author of Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Crown 2004) and the forthcoming Assassins of the Turquoise Palace (Grove/Atlantic Press 2011).] Ever since the crowds flooded into Tahrir Square, I've begun talking to the living-room television. "Drop that hand!" I shouted at the raised fist of a pro-Mubarak thug a few days ago. On Friday, watching the fireworks over the skies of Cairo, I enviously mumbled: "How come