Roundup: Media's Take

Lee P. Ruddin: How to Rebuild the Special Relationship

[Lee P. Ruddin is Roundup Editor for HNN. He lives in England.]Barack Obama is the first American president since the Second World War not to be touched in any way by the triumph over fascism which forged the so-called special relationship.  Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had fathers who fought alongside Brits in the 1940s and both went on to become pillars in the Atlantic alliance as commander-in-chief.  Unlike the 42nd President of the United States—a Rhod

E.J. Dionne Jr.: How Obama Changed the Right

[E.J. Dionne Jr. writes a column for the Washington Post.] Barack Obama's campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism. But one of his presidency's major legacies may be a revolution on the American right in which older, more secular forms of politics displace religious activism. The reaction to Obama has also radicalized parts of the conservative movement, giving life to conspiracy theories long buried and strains of thinking s

Roya Wolverson: Before BP ... The History of Allowing Industries to Police Themselves

[Roya Wolverson is a staff writer on economics at the Council on Foreign Relations' CFR.org in New York.] In Obama’s June 15th Oval Office speech on the oil spill, he railed against a “failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility—a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves.” Obama was getting at a real problem. As economic historian Edward Balleisen points out, the trend over the past half century

Edward Stourton: Kyrgyzstan ... Stalin's deadly legacy

[Edward Stourton is a BBC broadcaster and the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Sunday programme, and a former presenter of the Today programme on the same network.] Two days before Osh erupted, my BBC colleagues and I dined at the city's sole international restaurant. It was a balmy evening, and we were shown to a table on the terrace. But our absorption in the menu was interrupted by an embarrassed waitress; the other group on the terrace didn't like us so close, and we woul

William Dalrymple: We Should Learn from the 1842 Anglo-Afghan War

[William Dalrymple os a travel writer and historian.] Shortly after his return from Afghanistan in 1843, an Army chaplain, Reverend G. R. Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote: ‘A war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government, which directed, or the great

Henry Allen: From Vietnam to Afghanistan: Not Winning Hearts and Minds

[Henry Allen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000, was a Post editor and reporter for 39 years.] I'd done some counterinsurgency work as a corporal in the Marine Corps. This was in 1966, three years earlier. I was at Chu Lai, south of Danang. We gave away truckloads of flour, cement and roofing tin. The Vietnamese were cool with their thanks, but that was understandable. We'd gotten a warm response from one village chief we worked with until the Viet Cong w

Haggai Carmon: The Sick Man Upon the Bosphorus: Déjà Vu?

[Haggai Carmon is an international lawyer and the author of four intelligence thrillers. He heads Carmon & Carmon, a boutique firm with an intelligence gathering and asset recovery arm called Globalaw.] On May 14, 1876, the New York Times ridiculed the Ottoman Empire, reminding its readers that "It is now some twenty years since we began to hear about the 'sick man upon the Bosphorus,' yet the same sort of talk, under somewhat different conditions, is current today. The Ott

Aung Lynn Htut: The Burma-North Korea Axis

[Aung Lynn Htut is a former senior intelligence officer in Burma’s Ministry of Defense. He is working on his memoirs.] Why did Burma renew ties with North Korea? Regime preservation. In the aftermath of the 1988 nationwide uprising in Burma, many foreign joint ventures for the production of conventional weapons were cancelled. Than Shwe began the secret re-engagement with North Korea in 1992, soon after he took control of Burma’s ruling clique. He argued th

Paul Krugman: That ’30s Feeling

[Paul Krugman is a columnist for the NYT.] Suddenly, creating jobs is out, inflicting pain is in. Condemning deficits and refusing to help a still-struggling economy has become the new fashion everywhere, including the United States, where 52 senators voted against extending aid to the unemployed despite the highest rate of long-term joblessness since the 1930s. Many economists, myself included, regard this turn to austerity as a huge mistake. It raises memories of 1937

Yotam Jacobson: Have We Lost Turkey?

[The writer is a tour guide and a regular contributor to travel magazines.] It has been more than two weeks since we have been engaged in a media and public outcry in the aftermath of the flotilla incident and Turkey’s reaction to it. The notion that the Turks should be punished, either by means of denying them the commerce from Israeli tourism, or by a diplomatic offensive, such as reminding the world about their crimes against the Armenians during World War I, is heard more freque

Cathy Young: Racism, Civil Rights, and Libertarianism

[Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.] Thanks to Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky and son of maverick libertarian Republican Ron Paul, we find ourselves in an unlikely debate about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the legal permissibility of race discrimination in the private sector. Late last month on the Rachel Maddow

Nick Turse: BP and the Pentagon's Dirty Little Secret

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.]Residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are livid with BP in the wake of the massive, never-ending oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico -- and Barack Obama

Steve Richards: The real purpose of public inquiries

[Steve Richards is a columnist at the Independent.] Even after the magnificently authoritative investigation into Bloody Sunday I remain an inquiry-sceptic. We have too many inquiries and nearly all of them fail to illuminate. Some of them add to the haziness. Others reach the wrong conclusions and, later, there has to be an inquiry into the original inquiry. Nearly always they are called for motives that are impure. There are few high-profile inquiries that come about because a gov

Craig Murray: Kyrgyzstan ... Death, dictators and the Soviet legacy

[Craig Murray was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004.] It is arguable that the wave of ethnic killings in southern Kyrgyzstan that started last Saturday – which has left hundreds of Uzbeks dead and tens of thousands homeless – is, at root, the fault of Joseph Stalin. The Soviet Union was in theory just that – a union of Soviet socialist republics. Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were three of them. But whatever the theory, Stalin had no intention

Michael Tomasky: A Historical Argument Against Despair

[Michael Tomasky is the Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and American Editor-at-Large of the Guardian (UK).] On the day in late April when Barack Obama gave his speech at Cooper Union urging financial regulation reform, The Huffington Post, one of the most important liberal websites we have, could hardly have made more clear to its readers what it thought about Obama’s appeal to his audience. "Two Presidents, Two Messages to Anti-Reform Bankers," ran the headline ov

Dayo Olopade: At the World Cup, the Empire Strikes Back

[Dayo Olopade is an African soccer fan and a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.] In July 1978, an obscure Nigerian literary magazine called Third World First published a posthumous essay from South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko. In it, Biko rejects the "lie" of black inferiority reinforced by 19th and 20th century colonialism. "To make the lie live even longer, blacks have to be denied any chance of accidentally proving their e

Ethan Porter: V-Day in the Culture Wars for the Left

[Ethan Porter is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.] His left arm trembling, his back stiff, and his gait still nearly regal, The Greatest held the torch aloft and lit the flame. Millions–several hundred million, in fact–watched, and many cheered. Here was Muhammad Ali, representing America on the highest world stage. This was Atlanta, 1996, at the opening of the Olympic Games; 25 years had passed since his last match, and the wounds he used to delight in opening

Lee Harris: The Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals

[Lee Harris is the author of The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). His previous books include The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (Basic, 2007) and Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (Free Press, 2004).] Intellectual critics of the Tea Party movement most often attack it for its lack of ideas, especially new ideas — and these critics have a point. But the point they are making

Joel Kotkin: To See the Future of America's Working Classes, Look at England

[Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in Febuary, 2010.] ...In Britain alcoholism among the disaffected youth has reached epidemic proportions. Britain now suffers among the highest rates of alcohol consumption in the advanced industrial world, and unlike in most countries,

Mark Arax: Suddenly, the Israel Lobby Discovers a Genocide

[Mark Arax is the author of several books, including the most recent, “West of the West.”] Some of the most powerful leaders in the American Jewish community have stepped forward in recent days to acknowledge the 1915 Armenian Genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turkey. On the surface, this would seem unremarkable. As victims of the Holocaust, Jews might be expected to stand beside the Armenians and their tragedy. After all, the massacres and death marches across Anatolia