Roundup: Media's Take

Gene Lyons: "Justice Jim" Johnson and the Far Right

[Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.] It's customary to describe the death of a figure like Arkansas' "Justice Jim" Johnson as the end of an era. Riddled with cancer, the 85-year-old segregationist killed himself with a deer rifle at the Conway home h

Peter Beinart: Why Washington Is Tied Up in Knots

[Beinart is associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His book The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris will be published by Harper in June.] How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber — and received dozens of new canes from

Gail Collins: Time to Party Like It’s 1854

[Gail Collins is a columnist for the New York Times.] The Conservative Political Action Conference begins Thursday in Washington.... The workshops and panels range from “Is It Time for a Catholic Tea Party?” to “Getting Started in Hollywood.” But the one that caught my eye was “When All Else Fails: Nullification and State Resistance to Federal Tyranny.” How many of you out there thought we had settled the question of whether states have the right to nullif

George Will: A Brief History of Populism in the United States

[George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.] The Republican presidential nominee, an Arizona senator, was a maverick, which was part of his charm. He spoke and acted impulsively, which was part of his problem. Voters thought his entertaining dimensions might be incompatible with presidential responsibilities. For example, he selected a running mate most Americans had never heard of and who had negligible experience pertinent to the presidency. This was 1964. Barry Gol

John Nagl and Mitchell Reiss: Iraq lessons can guide Afghan surge

[John Nagl is president of the Center for a New American Security and a retired Army officer who helped write the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Mitchell Reiss is diplomat-in-residence at the College of William & Mary and author of the forthcoming Negotiating with Evil.] As US forces fight to clear Taliban militia from the town of Marjah in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, commanders need to look again at what we learnt in Iraq. A key cause of success in tha

Christian Caryl: Obama's 'Mission Accomplished' Moment on Iraq

[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy. His column, “Reality Check,” appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.] On Feb. 10, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden gave an interview to CNN. Most of the next day's headlines predictably focused on his assessment that al Qaeda probably isn't capable of mounting another 9/11-style attack. What garnered far less attention was his take on Iraq. "You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the

Simon Tisdall: This isn't Falklands II

[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.] It was Karl Marx who said "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce" – and in the case of the abruptly reigniting dispute over the Falkland Islands, aka Las Malvinas, there is reason to hope he was right. Argentina's latest protests, sparked by the prospect of an oil bonanza around the islands, could easily be dismissed as hot air. But that was the mistake Britain made

Fred Pearce: The Chagos archipelago – where conservation meets colonialism

[Fred Pearce is an environment writer and author of The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change.] How do you greenwash a large airforce base? A base that is responsible for bombing nearby countries, and which was built on an island you confiscated from residents who are now living in exile on the other side of the world? Easy. You announce the creation of a giant nature reserve which will be off-limits to its former inhabitants. Not to the m

Richard Lourie: Russians Must Take Responsiblity for Themselves

[Richard Lourie is author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography”] As a rule, I’m not much one for statistics, but every so often one stops me cold. In the December issue of Russian in Global Affairs, political scientist Igor Zevelev pointed out in his article “Russia’s Future: Nation or Civilization” that “Russians … now make up almost 80 percent of the country’s population (compared with 43 percent in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century and 50 p

Bennett Ramberg: The Libya Option for Iran

[Bennett Ramberg served in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the administration of former U.S. President George H.W. Bush. © Project Syndicate.] If nothing else, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons were far more audacious than Iran’s. During the 1970s, he approached China, India and Pakistan. Fortunately, despite the fact that India and Pakistan were not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — and thus were not subject to its pro

Yevgeny Bazhanov: Dispersing the CIA Myth as a Catalyst for the Soviet Collapse

[Yevgeny Bazhanov is vice chancellor of research and international relations at the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.] Governments have often blamed foreign elements for instigating revolutions. Opponents of the 1789 French Revolution considered it the fruit of an English and Lutheran plot, and Russian authorities considered the Decembrists to be French agents. Bolshevik leaders were thought to be agents of the German military, and Adolf Hitler viewed the Bolsheviks a

Shahid R. Siddiqi: Threats to Pakistan’s Strategic Nuclear Assets

[Shahid R. Siddiqi began his career in the Pakistan Air Force. He later joined the corporate sector with which he remained associated until recently in a senior management position.] Indian explosion of its nuclear device in 1974 drew only a customary “show of concern” from the Western powers. But Pakistan’s nuclear program, initiated in response to the Indian acquisition of nuclear weapons, evoked immediate and “serious concern” from the same quarters. Ever since, Pakistan has been

William Pfaff: Europe Needs to Believe in Its Own Adequacy

[William Pfaff is the author of eight books on American foreign policy, international relations, and contemporary history, including books on utopian thought, romanticism and violence, nationalism, and the impact of the West on the non-Western world. His newspaper column, featured in The International Herald Tribune for more than a quarter-century, and his globally syndicated articles, have given him the widest international influence of any American commentator.] Much has been w

Peter Lippman: Bosnian Voices, Yugoslavian Memories from the Last Balkans War

[US human rights activist Peter Lippman has traveled, worked, and lived in the former Yugoslavia extensively since 1981.] Most of the news coming from Bosnia-Herzegovina in the last decade has been dark and foreboding, full of tales of corruption and nationalist manipulation on all sides. However, those who are familiar with Bosnia know that the country is also the home of many good people who understand the situation in which they find themselves, and who are struggling to save the

Juan Gabriel Tokatlián: Obama and Latin America: Curse of the 'Local'

[Juan Gabriel Tokatlián is Director of Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina).] The former speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington, “Tip” O’Neill, captured the reality of daily political life in the United States - and everywhere else - in a phrase that justly became famous: “All politics is local”. When applied on too great a canvas, however - perhaps according to the principle “all foreign policy is domestic politic

Farhang Jahanpour: Iran - What Happened, Where Now?

[Farhang Jahanpour is a British national of Iranian origin. He received his Ph.D. Degree in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge and is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan. He has taught at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, as well as teaching online courses for Oxford, Yale and Stanford. He spent a year as a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard.] The passing of eight months since the fraudulent presidenti

Bernard Weiner: Can the Ticking Middle East Conflict Be Defused?

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, and has written numerous articles on the Middle East conflict (www.crisispapers.org/weinerpubs.htm#essays). A former writer/editor for two decades with the San Francisco Chronicle, he now serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To com

Nassrine Azimi: Japan's Iran Moment

[Nassrine Azimi is senior adviser at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (Unitar).] In April 1953, defying the British, the Japanese petroleum tanker Nissho Maru left the port of Abadan in southern Iran, its hulls filled with crude oil. The owner of the tanker, Idemitsu, was one of only a handful of companies that dared buy Iranian oil in those days — two years earlier the Iranians had nationalized their oil industry, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was fighting

Jason Capehart: A Scary Tea Party Looks Like Right-Wing Extremists in the 1990s

Republicans looking to harness the grassroots energy of the Tea Party movement are playing with a raging fire.... We've been down this road before. In the 1990s, there was lots of talk about the excesses of government power, a U.N.-run New World Order and black helicopters on which the federal government would swoop in to take away Americans' freedom and money. Two deadly confrontations with federal authorities -- in Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992) with white supremacist Randy Weaver and i

Tony Kinsella: Debt-free Haiti can banish spectre of slavery

[Tony Kinsella is a columnist at the Irish Times.] Although we regularly witness history in the making, the process is often far from evident. Sometimes it’s hesitant, as in last week’s reluctant shuffle of Europe’s leaders towards a unified response to Greece’s financial crisis. Sometimes it’s illegible, as in deciphering the impact of Viktor Yanukovich’s victory in the Ukrainian presidential elections. And sometimes, very occasionally, the making of history is crysta