Roundup: Media's Take

John J. Rooney: Ancient History from Just Yesterday

[John J. Rooney is a professor emeritus and the director of the master's program in clinical counseling at La Salle University. He can be reached at rooney@lasalle.edu.] Before World War II, there were seven of us who palled around together. We met mostly in front of or inside Salvatore's family grocery store, on Fox Street below Hunting Park, fooling around and figuring out what to do for some fun that evening. During the war, l

Bryan Doerries: Answering the Call to Help Our Soldiers Heal

[The writer is a New York-based director and translator. In 2009, he co-founded, with producer Phyllis Kaufman, Theater of War Productions, a company that aims to use theater and community to inspire awareness and action.] After a reading of Sophocles' "Ajax" and "Philoctetes" for members of the Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Stewart, Ga., a soldier approached me. His hands were trembling and he was fighting back tears.... For the past year, Phyllis

Ted Galen Carpenter: Obama’s Security Strategy is Clueless

[Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books and more than four hundred articles on international issues. His latest book is Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America (2008). He is also a contributing editor to The National Interest.] The most striking feature about President Obama’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) document is that there is very little new in it. True, the tone of

Frida Ghitis: Kosovo is not the right model for Palestinians

[Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist, author and consultant.] Not many people would look toward Pristina as the stuff of dreams. This Balkan city has come a long way since I last came here a decade ago, when the ruined place still smoldered after a vicious war. Today, Pristina’s bustling cafes and restaurants and the occasional park have their charm, but charming is not the first word that comes to mind when you think of long-suffering Kosovo. And yet, Kosovo, the breakaway pr

Clive Crook: Obama’s security strategy falls short

[Clive Crook is Washington columnist for the Financial Times.] The administration of Barack Obama sees its new National Security Strategy – a statement the White House sends Congress from time to time – as a work of great importance, a radical departure from its predecessor’s thinking. It is neither; nor, for that matter, is it a strategy. Ordinarily, one might be unconcerned. A document is just a document, after all: actions are what count. The worrying thing is that t

Peter Preston: Afghanistan ... Vietnam, minus the jungle

[Peter Preston is a columnist for the Guardian and the Observer.] There is, said the American secretary of defence, no certainty "that a conventional military victory, as commonly defined, can be achieved here … We seem to have gotten caught in a sinkhole." He's talking about Afghanistan surely, as the thousandth US military death is recorded and coalition losses creep towards 2,000? No: that was Clark Clifford in 1968. And the sinkhole that finally cost more than 200,000

Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen: America's Casualty Gap

[Douglas L. Kriner is an assistant professor of political science at Boston University. Francis X. Shen is a fellow in the MacArthur Foundation Law & Neuroscience Project and a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt Law School. They are the authors of the recently published book "The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities."] Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 5,000 Americans have lost their lives in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — almost 600

Danny Heitman: Louisiana, Land of Audubon … and Now?

[Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of "A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House."] The oil spill disaster off the coast of my home state of Louisiana is stark evidence that humans have an awesome power to change the natural landscape, often for the worse. But landscapes also have the power to change us, as John James Audubon was reminded when he arrived in Louisiana in 1821. In Louisiana, Audubon e

Joe Mathews: California, Ruined by the Supermajority

[Joe Mathews, a contributing writer for Opinion, is senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the coauthor of "California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It."] You don't need to know anything about electricity to understand what's wrong with Proposition 16, the initiative sponsored by the parent company of the Northern California utility PG&E, on the June 8 ballot. You only need to know California's tortured history with supermajorit

Jessica Valenti: The Fake Feminism of Sarah Palin

[Jessica Valenti is the author of "The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession With Virginity Is Hurting Young Women" and the founder of Feministing.com. She has written previously for Outlook on women's rights in the United States and on virginity.] ...Given that so-called conservative feminists don't support women's rights, how can they paint their movement as pro-woman? Why are they not being laughed out of the room? Easy: They preempt criticism of their lack

Orlando Patterson: Jamaica’s Bloody Democracy

[Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard.] THE violence tearing apart Jamaica, a democratic state, raises serious questions not only about its government’s capacity to provide basic security but, more broadly and disturbingly, the link between violence and democracy itself. The specific causes of the turmoil are well known. For decades political leaders have used armed local gangs to mobilize voters in their constituencies; the gangs are rewarded with t

Katherine Zoepf: Why So Few Medals of Honor in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Katherine Zoepf, who writes regularly for The Times, is working on a book about young women in the contemporary Arab world.] ON NOV. 15, 2004, several Marines in dress uniforms came to Rosa Peralta’s San Diego home to tell her that her 25-year-old son, Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta, had been killed in Falluja by an improvised explosive device. Rosa Peralta was widowed three years earlier when her husband, a mechanic, was crushed to death in a freak accident while working on a garbage

Peggy Noonan: Obama Was Supposed to Be Competent

[Peggy Noonan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal whose work appears weekly in the Journal's Weekend Edition and on OpinionJournal.com.] I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts. There was the tearing and unnecessary war over hi

Dana Milbank: Obama - Apologist in Chief

[Dana Milbank is a columnist for The Washington Post.] For eight years we had a president who refused to accept blame. Now we have one who seems to enjoy it. In the hour President Obama spent at the podium in the East Room last week holding a news conference on the Gulf oil spill, he practiced every form of self-flagellation short of bringing out a cat-o'-nine-tails. "The culture had not fully changed in MMS" -- the agency that polices oil drilli

Patrick Cockburn: A stable Iraq is still a very long way off

[Patrick Cockburn is a columnist at the Independent who won the 2009 Orwell journalism prize.] Seven years after the US and Britain invaded Iraq, the country remains highly unstable and fragmented. So divided are parties and communities that no government has emerged from the general election three months ago, which was intended to be a crucial staging post in Iraq's return to normality. Political leaders have not even started serious negotiations on sharing power. &qu

Chris Wilson: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Baathists?

[Chris Wilson is an associate editor at Slate in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter.] Saleh al-Mutlaq had been a member of Iraq's Baath Party since it first attempted to seize power in 1963, when he was 14 years old. Though the Baathists were quickly expelled that year, they returned in force in 1968, and Mutlaq rose in prominence in the party. In less than a decade, he became involved in a research foundation directly connected to Saddam Hussein, who was then Iraq's vice presid

Philip Stephens: Is Merkel the New Thatcher?

[Philip Stephens is a columnist at the Financial Times.] Angela Merkel has begun to sound awfully like Margaret Thatcher. Germany has caught the British disease. If the affliction keeps hold, Europe is doomed. The European Union has learnt to live with Britain’s bean-counting. It will not survive a German decision to play the same zero-sum game. The international investors who have put the eurozone under siege are placing two mutually supportive bets. One is about econo

Michael Bohm: MAD About Nothing in Russia

[Michael Bohm is the opinion page editor of The Moscow Times.] After the New START agreement was signed last month, limiting Russia and the United States to 1,550 warheads each, U.S. President Barack Obama said he would like to pursue further reductions in both countries’ nuclear arsenals, including tactical weapons. This has sparked a heated debate among Russian security analysts. Many conservatives are warning that further reductions would render Russia’s strategic forces ineffect

Sally Kohn: Why Ethnic Studies Are Good for America

[Sally Kohn, Chief Agitation Officer of the Movement Vision Lab, is a community organizer, writer and political commentator.] There’s a proverb that says, "Until the lion tells his own story of being hunted, history will always glorify the hunter." This, in essence, is the reason for ethnic studies. The wonderful thing about America is that we are and have always been a nation of many stories coming together as one. But an unfortunate fact of our history has b

B. R. Myers: South Korea’s Collective Shrug

[B. R. Myers, the director of the international studies department at Dongseo University, is the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters.”] One of the students at my university was killed in the attack that sank a South Korean naval vessel on March 26. A visual communications major, Mun Yeong-uk was only a few months from concluding his military service when a North Korean torpedo split the warship, the Cheonan, in half. His classmates loy