Roundup: Media's Take

John D. Negroponte: Did We Just Have A Saigon 1975 Moment in Iraq?

[John D. Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005, the first director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush, and later, deputy secretary of state. He is now vice- chairman of McLarty Associates, a leading international strategic advisory firm in Washington, D.C.] On Thursday, the last U.S. combat brigade to leave Iraq crossed into Kuwait, fulfilling President Barack Obama's pledge to withdraw all but 50,000 American troops from a country with

Robert Fisk: US troops say goodbye to Iraq

[Robert Fisk is The Independent's Middle East correspondent.] When you invade someone else's country, there has to be a first soldier – just as there has to be a last. The first man in front of the first unit of the first column of the invading American army to reach Fardous Square in the centre of Baghdad in 2003 was Corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment. For that reason, of course, he pointed out to me that he wasn't a soldier at all. Mar

Pratap Chatterjee: Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373

[Pratap Chatterjee is a freelance journalist, TomDispatch regular, and senior editor at CorpWatch who has worked extensively in the Middle East and Central Asia, including nine trips to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He has written two books about the war on terror: Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004) and Halliburton's Army (Nation Books, 2009).]"Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have bee

Ben White: 1948 and Israel's Deceptive Bargaining Position

[Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer, specializing in Palestine/Israel.] The refrain from Israeli politicians and the country’s allies and apologists is familiar: There can be no peace deal until the Palestinians "recognize" Israel as "a Jewish state." While this can sound reasonable to the casual listener in the West, this demand actually points to critical flaws in the "peace process" and the way in which the international community approac

Parag Khanna: Beyond City Limits

[Parag Khanna is senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the forthcoming How to Run the World.] The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not -- and will not be -- one global village, so much as a network of different ones....

Larry P. Goodson: Why the U.S. and Pakistan Must Draw Closer

[Larry P. Goodson is the author of “Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban” and a forthcoming book about Pakistan.] The recent Wikileaks exposure of over 90,000 classified US documents about the Afghan war revealed a Pakistan that has been both a major American ally and, at times, engaged in supporting the very Taliban who kill US soldiers in Afghanistan. No wonder Washington’s and the American public’s frustration with

Steven J. Rosen: Obama should pick up where Bush left off in the Middle East

[Steven J. Rosen served for 23 years as foreign policy director of AIPAC. He now heads the Washington Project of the Middle East Forum.] The opening of direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians, rumored for weeks, is likely to put the spotlight back on U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East policy. That isn't necessarily a good thing. The Israeli public does not trust him and will be looking for signals of his intentions. If he does not restore confidence in the role of the

David Pilling: China at Number Two ... and counting

[David Pilling is the Financial Times' Asia Editor.] This week, I received an e-mail from a friend in Tokyo tagged: “Greetings from Number Three, Japan.” He was mourning the passing of an era. The quarterly numbers he was alluding to suggest that, even in dollar terms, China is now the world’s second-biggest economy. There it will remain until, catastrophe or stagnation aside, it overtakes the US to become Number One. Dollar comparisons are pretty arbitrary, as much inf

Bennett Ramberg: The Nowhere Bomb

[Bennett Ramberg has served as a foreign policy analyst and a consultant to the Department of State, U.S. Senate, Nuclear Control Institute, Henry Stimson Center, Global Green and Committee to Bridge the Gap.] Should Jerusalem bring its bomb out of the basement? Israel, for at least the moment, is the sole possessor of atomic weapons in the Middle East, with an arsenal that now includes approximately 200 warheads. But it is also the only nuclear-armed nation to hide its cache behind

Tom Bethell: Our One-Term President

[Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).] It's a good bet right now that Barack Obama will be a one-term president. The enthusiasm that once shielded this hyphenated American has dissipated. His supporters, although still numerous, have discovered that he lacks Bill Clinton's

Thomas Sowell: Dismantling America

[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] "We the people" are the familiar opening words of the Constitution of the United States — the framework for a self-governing people, free from the arbitrary edicts of rulers. It was the blueprint for America, and the success of America made that blueprint something that other nations sought to follow. At the time when it was written, however, the Constitution was a radical departure from the autocra

Jonah Goldberg: Lack of Foresight Lets Mosque Controversy Balloon

[Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.] The Ground Zero mosque controversy is one of the stupidest debates of our time. I don’t mean the substance of the debate (though there’s no shortage of stupidity on that front either). I mean that we are having it at all.... With the Ground Zero mosque, we have gotten the exact opposite. The supposedly pragmatic political wise men have been blinde

Stephen M. Walt: Why America is Going to Regret the Cordoba House Controversy

[Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.] Apart from a brief post praising New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's forthright stance on the Muslim community center controversy, I haven't said much about this issue. I had naively assumed that Bloomberg's eloquent remarks defending the project -- and reaffirming the indispensable principle of religious freedom -- would pretty much end the controversy, but I underestimated w

Harold Meyerson: Reviving California's Economy: Meg Whitman Versus Jerry Brown

[Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.] For all their differences, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown agree on one thing: California needs an industrial policy. For half a century, aerospace was California's dominant economic engine. But then the end of the Cold War led to a radical contraction of the aerospace industry. Since then, the state has subsisted on bubbles, and it has wilted each time they popped. Neither the dot-com industry nor housing — the two ch

Haris Tarin: A Muslim's Faith in America

[Haris Tarin, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, is the director of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.] When my parents decided to leave their war-ravaged homeland of Afghanistan in the 1980s, they had the option of migrating to a number of different countries, but sought one that they could make their "home." You see, my father was a government official in the Afghan Education Ministry, before the Russian invasion and the subsequent takeover

Aaron David Miller: Ground Zero's Wounds Are Still Too Deep to Build Upon

[Aaron David Miller is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He served as an adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations from 1988 to 2003. His forthcoming book, "Can America Have Another Great President?," will be published by Bantam Books.] If there is one lesson to be learned from the controversy over the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, it is that messing with memory, particularly tr

Alex Epstein: Obama Follows Nixon On Oil Spills

[Mr. Epstein is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.] Which former president does Barack Obama most resemble? When it comes to handling oil spills, the answer is Richard Nixon. Like our current president, Nixon too presided over a major offshore oil blowout—the three million gallon Santa Barbara spill of 1969. And, like Mr. Obama, Nixon responded by whipping up anti-oil sentiment and passing a sweeping moratorium on drilling. This parallel is important

Michael Lind: Happy Birthday, Social Security!

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] On Saturday, Aug. 14, Social Security celebrated its 75th birthday. For three-quarters of a century, America’s most successful social program, signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the depths of the Depression, has helped Americans in multiple ways. By providing a guaranteed income to all Americans in retirement, Social Security has made utter destitut

Alexander Golts: Putin’s Power Vertical Stretches Back to Kursk

[Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.] Russia’s 10-year anniversary of the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine played out as expected: maudlin prayers for the 118 crew members who perished, bombastic speeches and pompous television programs. Those who bore direct responsibility for the tragedy, such as former Northern Fleet commander Admiral Vyacheslav Popov — who was given a cushy job as a senator in the Federation Council — did not even

Tom Bethell: Our One-Term President

[Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).] It's a good bet right now that Barack Obama will be a one-term president. The enthusiasm that once shielded this hyphenated American has dissipated. His supporters, although still numerous, have discovered that he lacks Bill Clinton's