Roundup: Media's Take

Eliot Cohen: Why McChrystal Has to Go

[Mr. Cohen teaches at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime."] Gen. Stanley McChrystal is a hero—a selfless, fearless and inspiring soldier. He is also something of a military genius. In Iraq, as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-2008, he created an extraordinary military operation. His command center—a vast open hall resembling the floor of a trading exchange—put l

Charles Homans: How Soyuz Outlasted the Space Shuttle

[Charles Homans is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.] When Michael Barratt, a NASA flight surgeon, arrived at the Russian cosmonaut training facility at Star City in 1993, the space program that once lofted Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin into orbit was at its lowest ebb since the U.S. moon landing. The storefronts in the enclave nestled in the boreal forest 20 miles outside Moscow were mostly closed, their shelves empty of food. The soldiers guarding the compound, Barratt recalls, we

Yulia Latynina: Oil Spill Is BP’s Chernobyl

[Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.] The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico and the huge oil spill that resulted has led to a predictable reaction from many liberals — curses directed at profit-obsessed transnational corporations, calls for introducing exorbitantly high taxes on offshore drilling and appeals to abandon hydrocarbons completely and live in harmony with nature. In reality, howe

James P. Pinkerton: Why Obama Won't Fire McChrystal

[James P. Pinkerton is a writer and Fox News contributor. He is the editor/founder of the Serious Medicine Strategy blog.] There’s something about presidents and Army generals with Scots-Irish surnames in wartime. President Abraham Lincoln had trouble with General George McClellan during the Civil War, Harry Truman had trouble with Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, and now Barack Obama faces trouble with Stanley McChrystal during the Afghan War. There’s somethin

Jonathan Taplin: McCrystal & MacArthur

[Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.]Rolling Stone Magazine dropped a bombshell on Washington this morning that will test Obama's strength as commander in chief. It could be a defining moment in the War in Afghanistan.I've known JannWenner, editor and proprietor of Rolling Stone Magazine for about forty years. For all that time, he has continually labored to keep the magazine relevant and in the l

Eve Fairbanks: Bring Back the Sports Boycott

[Eve Fairbanks is a writer for Newsweek.] ...With the recent exception of American golf, sporting tournaments usually provide little in the way of side fascinations, at least compared to the weirdness smorgasbords that are, say, political campaigns. Discipline is everything, and the imagery is predetermined. In theory, the World Cup constitutes a bazaar of nations, but in reality everything is thoroughly globalized: Nike dictates the fashion, Coke provides the musical jingles, and E

Mark Medish: Where Is Russia?

[Mark Medish, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton.] “We are not a member of the E.U., but we are a European country.” So spoke President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia in an interview with Western journalists last week, on the eve of the G-20 summit and a key meeting with President Barack Obama in Toronto. His words are worth thin

Michael J. Strauss: A Way to Rescue Greece

[Michael J. Strauss, who teaches geopolitics at the Centre d’Etudes Diplomatiques et Stratégiques in Paris, is the author of “The Leasing of Guantánamo Bay.”] Nations sometimes lease pieces of their territory to one another, and the resulting servitude typically benefits both parties: One gets the use of additional space while the other is compensated financially, politically, or in some other way. Nearly every lease has been created at the behest of the country that so

Paul H. Rubin: A Tale of Two Disasters

[Mr. Rubin is a professor of economics at Emory University, and held several senior government positions in the 1980s. He has a summer residence on the Florida Panhandle, where he is fearfully awaiting the arrival of the oil.] In many respects, the Deepwater Horizon disaster and Katrina are mirror images of each other. The harm from Katrina was on state land—mainly Louisiana, but also Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. As a result, President George W. Bush and the federal government

James Traub: In the Beginning, There Was Somalia

[James Traub is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His column, Terms of Engagement, runs weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.] In the waning days of his presidency, with very little planning or even forethought, George H.W. Bush sent 28,000 U.S. troops to support a humanitarian mission in a hapless country of no strategic significance to the United States. That noble endeavor ended, of course, with the fiasco known as Black Hawk Down. Somalia was scarcely history's first failed state,

Benjamin Ross: The Hundred Years' War over Toxic Chemicals

[Benjamin Ross is author of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment, to be published in September by Oxford University Press.] In America, chemicals are innocent until proven guilty. It’s a rule that’s been in place for one hundred years and still applies to compounds used every day in industry and in your home. This may be changing at last. In April Congressman Henry Waxman, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, made regulation of

Hervé Kempf: American Chernobyl

[Hervé Kempf is a French writer and journalist. He has written for the French newspaper Le Monde since 1988. Translated by Leslie Thatcher is Truthout's literary editor, French translator and sometime book reviewer.] An uncontrollable industrial catastrophe, a worm-eaten system controlled by a rigid nomenklatura, a dynamic leader who wants to change things: doesn't that remind you of something? Yes, of course: Chernobyl, the Soviet Communist Party, Gorbachev. Let's reca

Lucian A. Bebchuk: Don’t Gut Proxy Access

[Lucian A. Bebchuk, a professor of law, economics and finance and the director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School, is the author of “The Case for Shareholder Access to the Ballot,” “The Myth of the Shareholder Franchise” and “Private Ordering and the Proxy Access Debate.”] The Senate’s representatives on the conference committee finalizing financial regulatory overhaul have proposed weakening the proxy-access provisions included in both the House and Senate

Patti Davis: Ronald Reagan, America's Father

When I was 9, I gave my father soap-on-a-rope for Father’s Day. I’d found it in the closet where my mother stored gifts that she didn’t want and intended to pass on to someone else. I made him a card with a drawing of a horse on it, since he had been helping me with my artwork. Father’s Day, like his birthday, was a puzzling experience. I never knew what to give my father. He had dozens of neckties, drawers full of sweaters, and I certainly couldn’t afford any kind of equestrian gear on my allow

Eleanor Clift: What Would the Tea Party Do?

[Eleanor Clift became a contributing editor of Newsweek in September 1994.] The Tea Party movement is premised on love for the Constitution. Activists carry a pocket-size copy of the document to underscore their commitment to a strict application of its wise words. They believe that the policies President Obama is putting in place trample on the Constitution and sacrifice American individuality and ingenuity on the altar of a misplaced view of social justice. With Obama getting hit

Joshua Horwitz: "Second Amendment Remedies"

[Joshua Horwitz, J.D., is Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Mr. Horwitz is a graduate of the University of Michigan and received his law degree from the George Washington University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the co-author of a book, Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea, that was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2009. Mr. Horwitz has spent nearly two decades working on gun violence

Leon T. Hadar: Popping Pipe(s) Turkey Dreams

[Leon T. Hadar is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy, international trade, the Middle East, and South and East Asia. He is the former United Nations bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post and is currently the Washington correspondent for the Singapore Business Times.] Reports that Turkey would halt military cooperation with Israel and not send back the ambassador it withdrew after the deadly Israeli commando operation to st

Jonathan Alter: Obama, BP, and Theodore Roosevelt

[Jonathan Alter is an award-winning columnist, television analyst and author. Since 1991, Alter has written a widely-acclaimed Newsweek column that examines politics, media and social and global issues.] The BP spill is a failure not just of technology but ideology. That oil flows into the ocean from the deregulatory tide of the last 30 years. President Obama is right to compare the fiasco to 9/11. If he can frame the message more memorably than he did in his Oval Office address, Ob

Timothy Ruddin: Jerry Brown and his Joseph Goebbels Gaffe

[Timothy Ruddin is a columnist for the LA Times.] Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown doesn't deny that he recently compared his Republican rival Meg Whitman's approach to political advertising to that of the fanatical Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Brown, however, told a San Francisco radio show Thursday that he made the remark in "a private conversation.... Nobody had a pencil." He said, "Nobody said, 'By the way, is this a statement that

Bret Stephens: Iran Cannot Be Contained

[Bret Stephens is a deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the author of the paper’s Global View, a weekly column.] Quietly within the foreign-policy machinery of the Obama administration—and quite openly in foreign-policy circles outside it—the idea is taking root that a nuclear Iran is probably inevitable and that the United States and its allies must begin to shift their attention from forestalling the outcome to preparing for its aftermath. According to th