Roundup: Media's Take

Gareth Evans: Taking Disarmament Seriously After 65 Years

[Gareth Evans, a former foreign minister of Australia and president emeritus of the International Crisis Group, is a co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament and professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne.] People sometimes forget that the boy who cried wolf ended up being eaten. True, nobody has been killed by a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 65 years ago this month. And, with Cold War tensions long p

Karl Rove: The Blame Bush Strategy Won't Work

[Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of "Courage and Consequence".] To save themselves in the midterm elections, Democrats are counting on selling two themes: The state of the economy is all George W. Bush's fault, and Republican policies will take us backwards. President Obama relished going to Texas this week to blame his predecessor for the current bad economy. Nice try, but it won't work

Ted Galen Carpenter: Hamid Karzai and America's Vietnam Mistake

[Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs. Malou Innocent is a foreign policy analyst at Cato.] Amid growing debate about whether the United States should stay in Afghanistan, one issue of agreement is that Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, is both the central figure in the war and its weakest link. Recent embarrassing controversies between Karzai and Wash

Nicolai N. Petro: Why the FSB is Not the KGB!

[Nicolai N. Petro is professor of politics at the University of Rhode Island (USA). He served as the U.S. State Department's special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under George H.W. Bush.] A series of amendments to the law on Russia's main domestic security agency, better known by its Russian initials FSB, was signed into law last month. These amendments codify a practice that security agencies all over the world typically like to shroud in secrecy--the surveillance of pri

Harold Meyerson: Why the GOP Really Wants to Alter the 14th Amendment

[Harold Meyerson writes a column for the WaPo.] ...The Republican war on the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause is indeed directed at a mortal threat -- but not to the American nation. It is the threat that Latino voting poses to the Republican Party. By proposing to revoke the citizenship of the estimated 4 million U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants -- and, presumably, the children's children and so on down the line -- Republicans are calling for more than

Con Coughlin: Obama is running out of Iraq for all the wrong reasons

[Con Coughlin is Executive Foreign Editor of the Daily Telegraph.] In his haste to withdraw America's remaining combat troops from Iraq, President Barack Obama appears to have overlooked one rather vital consideration. The Iraqis are desperate for them to stay. Iraq might be a very different place today from the country that was oppressed by Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, but it still has some way to go before it completes the transition to the functioning democracy th

Ariel Cohen: Reset the Russian Reset Policy

[Mr. Cohen is senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Policy at the Heritage Foundation.] Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently proclaimed Eurasia a Russian "sphere of exclusive interests." Moscow has backed up those words with every available foreign-policy tool: diplomacy (including recognition of breakaway republics), arms sales, defense pacts, base construction—even regime change. This month marks the second an

Ben Adler: Revoking Birthright Citizenship: What Would Bush Do?

[Ben Adler is National Editor of Newsweek.com.] As Matt Bai recalled in his New York Times column this weekend, President George W. Bush wanted a part of his political legacy to be expanding Republicans' appeal to nonwhites, in particular among Latinos. This hardly seemed a preposterous notion when he took office: Bush had performed respectably among Latino voters in Texas, and many Latinos are devout Catholics who lean conservative on social issues. So much for that! A

Nile Gardiner: The Obama Presidency Increasingly Resembles a Modern-Day Ancien Régime

[Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.] What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and Democracy in America would be less than impressed with the extravagance and arro

Michael Winship: The Wall and the Mosque: Divide and Unite

[Michael Winship is senior writer at Public Affairs Television in New York City.] The current fight over the building of an Islamic study center near Ground Zero here in Manhattan is reminiscent of another battle nearly thirty years ago. Then, too, ignorance, rage and prejudice threatened to destroy the creation of something intended to help mend a grievous wound and foster understanding and reconciliation. In May 1981, a jury of architects and sculptors announced the r

Jeffrey Lord: Nixon: The Republican Strategist of 2010

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.] Lots of Republicans had scored victories in 1946, but there was something about Nixon that set the teeth of the American liberal establishment on edge. Nixon had campaigned for Congress against a twelve-year Democratic incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, presumed to be a political Goliath, using the slogan: "Where's the meat?" "Where's the meat?" meant, literally, just that. The

Amy Davidson: A Beer with the General

[Amy Davidson is a senior editor at The New Yorker.]It’s always good to read the footnotes, especially when they’re written by Seymour Hersh. This week, President Obama asked the Senate to restore the rank of General John Lavelle, who had been demoted and forced to resign in 1972 for supposedly ordering the unauthorized bombing of targets in North Vietnam—bombings that violated the rules of engagement at the time. (A sergeant had written to his senator about being told to falsify

Jonah Goldberg: Constitutional Amendments and Citizenship Rights

[Jonah Goldberg writes a column for the LA Times.] It's like clockwork. Whenever conservatives propose a constitutional amendment, progressives suddenly rediscover the delicate gears of the constitution and the horrible dangers of "tinkering" or "tampering" with its precision craftsmanship. Consider the sudden brouhaha over the idea of revising the 14th Amendment to get rid of automatic birthright citizenship (which would make us more like Europe, by the way). He

Henry Olsen: Unemployment: What Would Reagan Do?

[Mr. Olsen is a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute.] Friday's grim labor report is the latest confirmation that our economy is not recovering. A loss of 131,000 jobs and a stagnant 9.5% unemployment rate are bad enough. But a deeper look—at the little-known civilian employment-population ratio—shows how hard it's going to be to pull out of our crisis, and why the Obama administration's policies are unlikely to do the job.... ...America is suffering its

William McGurn: Are Americans Bigots?

[William McGurn is a columnist for the WSJ.] When in 1983 Ronald Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," the reaction from his betters was swift. Writing in the New York Times, Anthony Lewis called it "primitive"—and wondered (naturally) what the Europeans would think. A headline in Time referred derisively to "The Right Rev. Ronald Reagan." All agreed on one thing: this kind of black-and-white moralizing had no place in American poli

Richard Cohen: The Economist's Unforgivable Silence on Sayyid Qutb's anti-Semitism

[Richard Cohen is a columnist with the Washington Post.] I always read the Economist magazine. I like many things about it, but I particularly cherish its book reviews. They are cogent and snappily written, and they often deal with books that I don't find reviewed elsewhere. An example is a forthcoming biography of one of contemporary Islam's most important thinkers, Sayyid Qutb. The book gets a good review. It's more than I can say for the Economist itself. Qutb was ha

Christopher Hitchens: Mau-Mauing the Mosque

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.] The dispute over the construction of an Islamic center at "Ground Zero" in Lower Manhattan has now sunk to a level of stupidity that really does shame the memory and the victims of that terrible day in September 2001. One might think that a mosque or madrassa was being proposed in the place of the fallen towers themselves or atop the atomized ingredients of

Stephan Salisbury: Anti-Muslim Fears and the Far Right

[Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland (Nation Books).]There is a distinct creepiness to the controversy now raging around a proposed Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan.  The angry “debate” over whether the building should exist has a kind of glitch-in-the-Matrix feel to it, leaving in its wake an aura of something-very-bad-about-to-happen.It’s n

Nicolai N. Petro: Why the FSB is not the KGB!

[Nicolai N. Petro is Professor of politics at the University of Rhode Island (USA). He served as the U.S. State Department's special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under George H.W. Bush.] A series of amendments to the law on Russia's main domestic security agency, better known by its Russian initials FSB, was signed into law last month. These amendments codify a practice that security agencies all over the world typically like to shroud in secrecy--the surveillance of pri

M. J. Akbar: Kashmir's History of Blood and Tears

[Mobashar Jawed "M.J." Akbar is a leading Indian journalist and author.] General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief, was commissioned in August 1971. The other four-star general in the Pakistan army, Tariq Majeed, is due to retire on October 7, which makes him an exact contemporary. Lt Gen Khalid Shameem Wyne, chief of general staff, will lay down his baton on March 8 next year and is consequently just a few months junior. Lt Gen Syed Absar Hussain, who is in charge of Army S