Roundup: Media's Take

Stephanie Pearson: Falklands ... Last Outpost of the British Empire

[Stephanie Pearson is a contributing editor to Outside magazine.] To the rest of the world, the Falklands War may have seemed like a bizarre blip on the geopolitical radar screen. But in the Falklands (known to Argentina as "Las Islas Malvinas"), the 74-day conflict is remembered rather differently. It started on April 2, 1982, when more than 1,000 Argentine special forces landed near the capital city of Stanley, and it ended 10 weeks later when Argentina surrendered after

James Joyner: Are Nuclear Weapons Obsolete?

[James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council.] Do all sane people agree that a nuclear weapons-free world would be best? Are nuclear weapons militarily obsolete, desirable only for political posturing? That seems to be the consensus of an influential group of European leaders making the rounds in Washington this week. Earlier this week, the Atlantic Council hosted a delegation from the Pugwash Conferences and the Top Level Group for a working lunch on the

Alan Philps: An opportunity for Iraqis to rewrite their history

[Alan Philps is a reporter for the Telegraph, UK.] Before his death in 1933, King Feisal of Iraq wrote “with a heart full of sorrow” that there was no such thing as an Iraqi people. The country was made up of “unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.” If the old king

Owen Polley: Northern Ireland Proves Peace is Possible

[Owen Polley is a freelance writer.] Thousands of lives were lost during the three decades that Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority and Catholic minority clashed. Since 1998, though, guns have been exchanged for talks. Up for debate recently has been the future control of local policing and justice powers in Northern Ireland. London is ready to hand over power, but the exact details are a source of deep division between Northern Ireland’s two largest par

Tom De Luca: Save Your Outrage for the Unconstitutional Filibuster

[Tom De Luca, a professor of political science at Fordham University, is coauthor of “Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics.”] The debate over healthcare reform should have been about doctors, patients, insurance and drug companies, and coverage. Instead, much of the attention has been focused on a “preexisting condition” in the Senate: the filibuster. A filibuster allows a senator to delay or defeat legislation throug

Adan Liptak: America and Europe Have Very Different Ideas of Privacy

[Adam Liptak is the Supreme Court correspondent of The New York Times.] “On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services.... “Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teac

Roger Cohen: Iran in Its Intricacy

[Roger Cohen is a columnist for the New York Times.] A year has passed since President Obama’s groundbreaking Nowruz offer to Iran of engagement based on mutual respect. Iran is now a different country, its divided regime weaker and confronted by the Green movement, the strongest expression of people power in the Middle East and a beacon for the region. Obama’s outreach has achieved this: the unsettling of Iran’s revolutionary power structure. That alone was worth the g

David Brooks: Tea Partiers are the Wal-Mart Hippies

About 40 years ago, a social movement arose to destroy the establishment. The people we loosely call the New Left wanted to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution. Today, another social movement has arisen. The people we loosely call the Tea Partiers also want to destroy the establishment. They also want to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution. There are many differences between

Asli Aydintasbas: Bashing Turkey's Army

[Asli Aydintasbas is a columnist for the Turkish daily Milliyet.] I should be rejoicing. Dozens of Turkish Army officers and retired generals have been rounded up this past week on suspicion of plotting against the elected government led by the Islamic-inspired A.K. Party. The 5,000 pages of documents that landed on the doorstep of a small anti-military paper in late January have suggested the officers planned to bomb Istanbul’s historic mosques, shoot down Turkish air

Richard Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru: The Obama Administration's Assault on American Exceptionalism

[Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor for National Review. Richard Lowry is a syndicated columnist and a commentator for the Fox News Channel.] It’s almost a commonplace on the left that conservatives are “nihilists” for their opposition to President Obama. It’s opposition for opposition’s sake, an unprincipled exercise in partisan obstruction — mindless, toxic, destructive. When directed at Obama, “no” is an indefensible word, devoid of philosophical content. Another, dif

John Feffer: Has the U.S. Empire of Bases Reached Its High-Water Mark in Okinawa?

[John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website. For more information on the growing movement against the U.S. base in Okinawa, join the Facebook group

Gabriel Winant: Goodbye, Ulysses. Hello, Ronnie!

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] The GOP needs an icon and, ever since his popularity crashed to unrecoverable depths in his second term, George W. Bush hasn't been available. Not that the right will admit that they ever saw W. as an icon: When his numbers went south, conservatives rushed to proclaim that he'd never really been one of them.... This is no news to anyone who’s heard a Republican speak in

Andrew Baker: A Synagogue in Cairo

[Rabbi Andrew Baker is director of international Jewish affairs at the American Jewish Committee (AJC).] One of Cairo’s most historic synagogues and a yeshiva, restored by the Egyptian government, is to be rededicated next week. Known colloquially as “Rav Moshe,” the yeshiva was the original study of Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides, the renowned physician, rabbinic scholar and leader of the Egyptian Jewish community in the 12th century. Accessible only by foot along narrow com

Wesley Pruden: An FDR Lesson Obama Missed

[Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.] Barack Obama is trying to be the new FDR before the concrete settles around his image as the new Jimmy Carter. History will ultimately decide, but last week's celebrated health care summit made him look more like Mr. Jimmy than FDR. The president was full of self-righteous talk, mostly about himself, and he twice felt it necessary to remind everyone that he's the president, recalling Richard Nixon's bizarre re

Chris Hedges: Socialism is Not a Dirty Word

[Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He served for eight years as the Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, where he shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, for coverage of terrorism. Hedges also received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.] We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney

Jill Lawrence: Obama Applies the Edmund Burke Theory of Leadership to Health Care

[Jill Lawrence is a PoliticsDaily.com columnist and former national political correspondent for USA Today.] Why would President Obama and his party press onward to pass a landmark health bill in the face of polls that suggest it's risky to do so? Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell calls it "stunning" and says they are projecting arrogance. "Every election in America this fall will be a referendum on this issue," McConnell says. That's one way t

Daniel Henninger: Bring Back the Robber Barons

[Daniel Henninger is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.] Let's bring back the robber barons. "Robber baron" became a term of derision to generations of American students after many earnest teachers made them read Matthew Josephson's long tome of the same name about the men whose enterprise drove the American industrial age from 1861 to 1901. Josephson's cast of pillaging villains was comprehensive: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan,

Naomi Klein: Milton Friedman did not save Chile

[Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of the international bestseller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.] Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September '08 and everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn't been easy to be a fanatical follower of the late economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market fundamentalism that his admirers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological victories, however far fetch

Raymond Ibrahim: How the Islamist Mindset Rationalizes - and Promotes - 'Sex Sins'

Is it inconsistent for Muslim"holy warriors" to engage in voyeuristic acts of lasciviousness? Because would-be jihadists and martyrs have been known to frequent strip bars — such as the 9/11 hijackers and Major Nidal Hasan, whose"late-night jiggle-joint carousing stands at odds with the picture of a devout Muslim" — many Americans have concluded that such men cannot be"true" Muslims, leading to the ubiquitous conviction that they are"hijacking Islam." In fact, Islamists rely on seve

Chris Hedges: The Death of American Journalism

[Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, worked for The New York Times for 15 years and before that for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He is the author, most recently, of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”] Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in “The Death and Life of American Journalism” argue correctly that the old models for delivering the news are dead. They see the go