Roundup: Media's Take

Amy Wilentz: The Dechoukaj in Haiti This Time

I first stepped onto the broad central square that was the heart of the Haitian government on the morning of Feb. 7, 1986. Just hours earlier, when it was still night, I’d seen Jean-Claude Duvalier, heir to his father’s dictatorship, flee the country with his wife, children and mother, driving a BMW sedan down the airport road and taking it onto a United States cargo plane bound for France. He’d left so late that I was exhausted when dawn came, but still we all descended on the sprawling plaza t

Gerry Adams: Another Good Friday

[Gerry Adams is president of Sinn Féin, member of the Legislative Assembly of Northern Ireland for West Belfast and abstentionist MP for West Belfast at Westminster.] It was another "Good Friday" in the peace process yesterday. Hillsborough Castle was the setting for the final piece of the jigsaw of devolution which saw agreement between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist party on the transfer of policing and justice powers and other outstanding matters arising from the

Niall Stanage: End of American Era in Northern Ireland

[Niall Stanage is a New York-based, Irish-born journalist and the author of Redemption Song: An Irish Reporter Inside the Obama Campaign (Liberties Press, Dublin).] British and Irish leaders announced on Friday, with much fanfare, that an accord had been reached to allow Northern Ireland to take over its own law-and-order powers from Britain. The agreement, which should take effect in April, saves the Catholic-Protestant government in Belfast. Though the agreement can p

Mikhail Gorbachev: Soviet Lessons From Afghanistan

[Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union.] Afghanistan is in turmoil, with tensions rising and people dying every day. Many of them — including women, children and the elderly — have nothing in common with terrorists or militants. The government is losing control of its territory: of the 34 provinces, the Taliban controls a dozen. The production and export of narcotics is growing. There is a real danger of destabilization extending to neighboring count

Don Bohning: Influx from Haiti? South Florida Takes It in Stride

[Don Bohning is a retired Miami Herald reporter and editor and the author of “The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba 1959-1965.” ] For South Florida, it’s become old hat. A crisis erupts in one of its Caribbean neighbors and the area braces to accommodate the refugee deluge that often follows. It happened in the early 1960s, after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. It happened in the 1970s, when Jamaican politics boiled over into political violence. I

Chales Krauthammer: The Great Peasant Revolt of 2010

"I am not an ideologue," protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.... This being a democracy, don't the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don't they understand Massachusetts? Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Resul

Robert Naiman: Eat Your Spinach: Time for Peace Talks in Afghanistan

[Robert Naiman is senior policy analyst at Just Foreign Policy.]In the last week, The New York Times and Inter Press Service have reported that the Obama administration is having an internal debate on whether to supports talks with senior Afghan Taliban leaders, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, as a means of ending the war in Afghanistan. Senior officials like Vice President Biden are said to be more open to reaching out because they believe it will help shorten the war.Wou

Shadi Hamid and Steven Brooke: Promoting Democracy to Stop Terror, Revisted

[Shadi Hamid is deputy director of the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Steven Brooke is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. He was formerly a research associate at the Nixon Center.] U.S. democracy promotion in the Middle East has suffered a series of crippling defeats. Despite occasionally paying lip service to the idea, few politicians on either the left or right app

Bruce Anderson: Blair... The Hubris of a Tragic Hero Who Fell for the Enlightenment Myth

[Bruce Anderson is a British conservative political columnist.] Tony Blair has an almost Shakespearian ability to capture a great world on a small stage. But it was not just good theatre. Mr Blair set out to transcend narrow legalities. He invited us to interpret his actions in the broadest of contexts: to stop taking a magnifying glass to the small print and to judge his good faith by his global ambitions. Yet even if we were to accept his invitation, this would not turn him into H

Ryan Streeter: Making Poverty History: A Short History

[Ryan Streeter is a senior fellow at the London-based Legatum Institute and can be followed on Twitter here.] Former chief economist of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development David Henderson coined the appellation, “Global Salvationism,” to describe the kind of behavior one witnesses at gatherings such as this past week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. WEF was created in 1971 so that elites from around the world could gather to “map out solution

Daniel Finkelstein: Remember Churchill When You Think of Iraq

[Daniel Finkelstein is a weekly columnist and Chief Leader Writer of The Times.] On May 13, 1940, shortly after lunch, Neville Chamberlain entered the House of Commons to be greeted by a massive ovation. Order papers were waved, MPs shouted, MPs cheered. And shortly afterwards the Prime Minister followed him. But for Winston Churchill there was only a low murmur. His fellow Conservatives were virtually silent. The Prime Minister then rose to deliver his first speech si

Lawrence Lessig: The Fundraising Congress

[Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, is co-founder of the nonprofit group Change Congress.] We are now one year into the Obama presidency, and it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed: Not because it is too conservative or too liberal, but because it is too conventional. President Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign, which promised to "fundamentally change the way Washington works."... At th

Robert Farley: An End to the "Long War"

[Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, University of Kentucky. He contributes to the blogs Lawyers, Guns, and Money and TAPPED.] On Monday, the Obama administration released a pair of critical documents indicating the path it intends to take on military and defense issues. One of these documents was the budget for fiscal year 2011, which calls for an increase in defense spending as well as the restructuring of a coup

Henry Kissinger: Don't Forget Iraq

[The writer was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.] In a 71-minute State of the Union address, President Obama managed no more than 101 perfunctory words about Iraq. Throughout its term, the administration has recoiled from discussing Iraq's geostrategic significance and especially America's relation to it. Yet while Iraq is being exorcised from our debate, its reality is bound to obtrude on our consciousness. The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq will not alter the g

Harold Meyerson: A Jobs Lesson from the New Dealers

The Democrats have shifted their focus, they tell us relentlessly, to jobs, jobs, jobs. Would that they had. In fact, the job proposals coming from the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are far too small to seriously reduce the massive unemployment created when the financial and housing bubbles popped. Many Democratic leaders know that, and some want to do more. The current proposals, I was told this past weekend by George Miller, chairman of

Ian Buruma: Battling the Information Barbarians

[Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His latest book, "Taming the Gods," will be published in March.] In 1661, Adam Schall, a Jesuit missionary from Germany and astronomer at the Chinese imperial court, fell victim to jealous mandarins, and was sentenced to death for teaching false astronomy and a superstitious faith. He was only just saved from being strangled, when a sudden thunderstorm convinced his judges that nature had spoken against their verd

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: How the British Empire is Striking Back

I did try to sit through the Blair show. An unfortunate combination of Asiatic high emotion and feminine fragility made me feeble. I had to walk away, knocking over a large goblet of dark red wine, the colour of blood. It stained the beautiful wooden floor. From TB, then, the final words. I Did It My Way and Je ne regrette rien. So long folks. The Tory poster of Blair as the devil man now seems prescient.... The Chilcot panel could have included a dispassionate Muslim academic or on

Mario Canseco: History Repeats Itself as Obama Faces Slump Similar to Carter's

[Mario Canseco is Vice-president, Public Affairs, at Vancouver-based global public opinion firm Angus Reid Strategies.] A year has passed since Barack Obama became the first African-American president in the history of the United States. His supporters point to several feats, such as the decision to tackle health care reform, as proof that Obama is on the right course. His detractors complain about a series of broken promises, including the delay in closing the Guantanamo Bay detent

Peter Beinart: The Republicans' Reagan Amnesia

[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published by HarperCollins in June.] Republicans love hallowing Ronald Reagan’s name. Too bad they know so little about the guy. Last week in Hawaii, the Republican National Committee almost passed a

Salome Zourabishvili: The Wilting Petals of Georgia’s Rose Revolution

[Salome Zourabishvili is Georgian politician and diplomat. She was foreign minister of Georgia from 2004 to 2005.] Six years ago, on 25 January 2004, Mikheil Saakashvili took the oath of office as president of Georgia for the first time. Then it was a day of hope and high expectations. At last our country would have a president truly committed to democracy, an end to corruption and peaceful reunification. And for some time those hopes looked justified. One