Roundup: Media's Take

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Are Cuba's True Martyrs a Portent of a New 1989?

[Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute.] Nowadays, most of those who die for a cause either perish for the wrong cause or bring death to innocent people. Islamist and nationalist terrorists have turned the noble concept of martyrdom into the opposite of what we were taught it meant. We have gone from Socrates drinking hemlock in the name of philosophical inquiry to the female bombers who massacred dozens of Russians at two Moscow subway stations.

Rep. Carol Alvarado: Stop Texas Curriculum Rewrite Until New Board Takes Over

[Ms. Alvarado represents Texas House District 145.] The Texas State Board of Education is failing our children. With politically charged pens they have rewritten the state’s curriculum standards and are doing a disservice to history and our children’s education. The proposed standards strip our rich and complex history down to distorted simplifications based too often simply on the personal beliefs of board members. How can board members claim that our students will be

Michael Klare: Is the World’s Future Resource Map Tilting East?

[Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.]Think of it as a tale of two countries.  When it comes to procuring the resources that make industrial societies run, China is now the shopaholic of planet Earth, while the United States is stay

Harry de Quetteville: Serbia's Apology Is Not Enough

[Harry de Quetteville is the Daily Telegraph's Berlin correspondent.] The terrifying thing about the Srebrenica massacre is that the figures keep changing. Was it 6,000 Muslim men and boys who were herded to the side of pits and shot dead by ethnic Serb soldiers in 1995? Or was it 7,000? The consensus when I was covering the Balkans was: between the two. That was the best guess from the remains recovered from the area around a shattered town in eastern Bosnia. But then

David M. Weinberg: Woe will be a divided Jerusalem

[The writer is director of public affairs at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Affairs. He blogs at www.davidmweinberg.com.] The upshot of last week’s Obama-Netanyahu confrontation is that the White House wants to move Israel rapidly towards a division of Jerusalem. However, the widely held presumption that splitting Jerusalem will lead to prosperity for the city and to peace for Jews and Arabs is an egreg

Con Coughlin: The U.S. Timetable Isn't Right for Afghanistan

[Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of London's Daily Telegraph.] During Barack Obama's surprise visit to Afghanistan last weekend—his first since taking office—he said that American soldiers were fighting to help Afghans "forge a hard-won peace" and that the military operation was essential to "keep America safe and secure." But his vision contains a potentially fatal flaw. The highly optimistic time-frame Mr. Obama has set for the completion

Charles Lane: The Tea Party, and a History of Going to Extremes

[Charles Lane is a columnist for the Washington Post.] The American patriots who flung crates of imported tea into Boston Harbor on Dec. 16, 1773 were acting against their countrymen's economic interest. The Tea Act, adopted by the British Parliament, allowed direct shipping of the East India Company’s surplus tea to North America, bypassing middlemen in London and reducing the price in the colonies. But that price still included a tax, enacted by a parliament in which the Americans

Shelby Steele: Barack Obama's Love Affair with Big Government Liberalism

[Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author most recently of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win" (Free Press, 2007).] It has to be acknowledged that, in his battle for health-care reform, President Obama has shown real presidential mettle. He did what it took to win his way. He put every ounce of his political capital on the line, and he never blinked. For all the wrongheadedness of this reform—an

Robert A. Pape, Lindsey O’Rourke, and Jenna McDermit: What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?

[Robert A. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Lindsey O’Rourke is a doctoral student there, and Jenna McDermit is an undergraduate majoring in anthropology.[ ALMOST every month for the past two years, Chechen suicide bombers have struck. Their targets can be anything from Russian soldiers to Chechen police officers to the innocent civilians who were killed on the subway in Moscow this week. We all know the horror that people willing to kill themse

Martin Marty: Abuse in the News

[Martin Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught chiefly in the Divinity School for 35 years and where the Martin Marty Center has since been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. This article originally appeared in Sightings, published by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] Sightings weekly scans newspapers, magazines, press releases, newsletters, blogs, books,

Rajan Menon: Russia's Hot Spot in the North Caucasus

[Rajan Menon is a professor of international relations at Lehigh University.] The suicide bombings of two Moscow subway stations that killed 39 people Monday appear to have emanated from a place that few people could find on a map: Russia's North Caucasus region, a sliver of land wedged between the Black and Caspian seas that is home to 7 million people. Russian czars annexed the North Caucasus in the latter part of the 19th century after wars that lasted several decade

Harold Meyerson: A Flawed American Political Model Aids China

[Harold Meyerson is a contributor to the Washington Post.] I don't mean to sound nostalgic for the Cold War, but we've got to stop conducting ourselves as if nobody is looking.... The Cold War at least compelled us to pay attention to the things our adversaries said about us. Contesting the Soviets for the allegiance of postwar Europe and the newly post-colonial nations of Africa and Asia involved more than economic aid, intelligence operations and military might. It al

Alexander Golts: An Illusory New START

[Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.] As soon as the details of the new START follow-up agreement were made public on Friday, two points became clear: First, despite the overblown rhetoric, there will be no significant reductions in nuclear arms, and, second, Moscow gave in to practically all U.S. demands. The treaty allows each side to maintain 700 deployed nuclear delivery vehicles (ballistic missiles, submarines and fighter bombers), as w

Gabriel Winant: More Americans Disagree About Israel, but Elite Consensus Holds Together

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] Today is Passover, and at seders everywhere (including the White House) last night, hungry Jews finished the ceremony and started eating with the traditional invocation, "Next year in Jerusalem." But -- at least for the people at my seder -- just mentioning the word "Jerusalem" is enough right now to evoke groans and despair, given recent events. The

Joan Walsh: What's the Matter with White People?

[Joan Walsh is the editor-in-chief of Salon.com] Frank Rich's column "The Rage Is Not About Health Care" got a lot of attention this weekend. It ran through the examples of Republican overreaction and right-wing rage in response to the passage of healthcare reform – all of it well-covered in Salon -- and concluded the rage mainly stems from the fact that whites are about to become the minority in this country. Rich isn't wrong (although calling last week's upr

Michael Lind: The U.S. is Stuck in the Cold War

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] What does America's deepening war in Afghanistan have to do with the American trade deficit? Answer: Both are the results of Cold War policies that made sense at one time but are now harmful to the United States.... During and after the Korean War, the U.S. rebuilt its military and stationed troops along "tripwires" from Central Europe to East Asia. The U.S. encoura

David B. Ottaway: Egypt after Mubarak

[David B. Ottaway was the Washington Post's Cairo bureau chief from 1981-85. He recently returned from a trip to Egypt and is the author of "The Arab Tomorrow" in the current issue of the Wilson Quarterly.] In early March, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak flew to Germany, where he underwent gallbladder surgery. That an 81-year-old man would have serious health problems was not unusual. But the fact that the intensely private Mubarak publicly announced his infirmity was so

Ben Macintyre: Winston Churchill ... an unlikely adviser in the Afghan conflict

[Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large for The Times and contributes a regular column.] General Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, has found an unlikely adviser in the continuing struggle against the Taleban. This new counsellor is British, a former journalist, soldier, writer, painter and politician. He is also dead, and the last time he was anywhere near Afghanistan was in 1897. Winston Churchill has come to the aid of the Allies.

Michael Tomasky: Whither the 'Special Relationship'?

[Michael Tomasky is a contributor to Guardian America.] My first reaction to reading the Guardian's article about the group of MPs calling for an end to the "special relationship" was: you're seven years late. If Tony Blair had been a little more concerned about being seen as George Bush's poodle – and had followed the will of clear majorities of his own party and his broader public, and worried more about Britain's worldwide image at the time – then the speci

Jonah Goldberg: A Few Broken Windows is No Kristallnacht

[Jonah Goldberg writes a column for the LA Times.] Apparently there's a self-proclaimed militia leader named Mike Vanderboegh who runs an obscure, low-traffic blog out of Pinson, Ala. (population 5,007). Mr. Vanderboegh recently called on his fellow "sons of liberty" to break the windows of Democrats who voted for healthcare reform. So let's start with the obvious: Vanderboegh is an idiot, and anyone who followed his advice is an idiot too. These people are bu