Roundup: Media's Take

Wilmer J. Leon III: Necessity Isn't Always Just

[Dr. Wilmer Leon is the producer/host of the nationally broadcast call-in talk radio program"On With Leon" and a Teaching Associate in the Department of Political Science at Howard University in Washington, DC.] As Americans usher in a new year and new decade, they find themselves confronted with old problems: war and terror. The epicenter of these problems has shifted from Iraq to Central Asia - Afghanistan/Pakistan.... Political uncertainty continues to control the Afghan pa

Philip Rucker: Haiti Holds a Special Place in the Clintons' Hearts

In the strange circle of life, it all comes back to Haiti. When Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham in 1975, a friend gave them a trip to Haiti. Since that honeymoon vacation, the Caribbean island nation has held a life-long allure for the couple, a place they found at once desperate and enchanting, pulling at their emotions throughout his presidency and in her maiden year as secretary of state. With the world's attention now trained on the devastated Haitian capital, r

Patrick Cockburn: America is failing Haiti – again

[Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent.] The US-run aid effort for Haiti is beginning to look chillingly similar to the criminally slow and disorganised US government support for New Orleans after it was devastated by hurricane Katrina in 2005. Five years ago President Bush was famously mute and detached when the levees broke in Louisiana. By way of contrast, P

Michael Singh: Why there can't be a Nixon-to-China moment in Tehran

[Michael Singh is the Ira Weiner fellow at The Washington Institute and former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council (NSC).] As engagement with Iran gained political momentum in the United States during the 2008 presidential campaign, some of its advocates were quick to cite the analogy of Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China in portraying outreach to Tehran as a similarly bold policy stroke. The experience of the past year, which has seen Iran's le

Ian Thomson: Haiti: Enslaved by Its Dark History

[Ian Thomson’s 'Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti’ is published by Vintage] By any standards, Haiti represents a very great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. In January 1804 – a key date in the history of a bedevilled country – the African slaves overthrew their French masters and declared the world’s first black republic. Haiti became an emblem of slavery’s longed-for abolition. And the slave leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, was hailed by William Wordsworth, among othe

Deborah Blum: Civilization on a Fault Line

[Deborah Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of the forthcoming “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”] I used to be a science writer for a California newspaper, where I learned to think of the ground beneath my feet as something alive. It crawled and shivered, stretched and quaked. It was the thin, wrinkled skin of an A.D.D. planet, whose muscles and bones constantly twitched benea

Jo Nubian: For Ayiti (Haiti)

[Jo Nubian is candidate for a Master of Arts degree in Literature at Texas Southern University, where she writes and researches various African American literary movements. Her thesis focuses on Womanism in the biography and works of Zora Neale Hurston.] My heart has many compartments, sacred spaces for sacred people, and one of those spaces belongs to the people of Haiti. I don’t love Haiti because I pity her, let me be clear about this so that there is no misunderstanding. Haiti

Ronald P. Sokol: Guilt by Birth

[Ronald P. Sokol is a lawyer in Aix-en-Provence, France. He taught at the University of Virginia Law School and is the author of “Justice after Darwin.”] Following the averted disaster of the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day, his administration announced that citizens of 14 nations flying to the United States would be subject to intense screening at airports worldwide.... Since World War II, nations have come to accept that human rights law prohibits the use of cer

James Fallows: How America Can Rise Again

[James Fallows is National Correspondent for The Atlantic.] Since coming back to the United States after three years away in China, I have been asking experts around the country whether America is finally going to hell. The question is partly a joke. One look at the comforts and abundance of American life—even during a recession, even with all the people who are suffering or left out—can make it seem silly to ask about anything except the secrets of the country’s success. Here is the sort of

Richard Bernstein: Intelligence Has Its Limitations

It’s not surprising that everybody from President Barack Obama on down has expressed consternation over the intelligence failure that enabled the underwear bomber to get on an airplane and try to blow it up. And yet, the truth is that we’ve known for at least 48 years that intelligence alone is never going to stop attacks on the United States. The event was the publication of Roberta Wohlstetter’s groundbreaking study of the most massive intelligence breakdown to that date in Americ

William Pfaff: Presidential Posturing Isn't Getting the U.S Anywhere

[William Pfaff is a globally respected political commentator and author on international relations, contemporary history and U.S. policy. He is published in five countries and his column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services.] President Barack Obama is said to feel he is in trouble politically because his enemies in Congress and among the Washington journalists who decide what the “mood” of Washington is on any given day say he is not tough enough. This is the kind of mind reading

Frederick Kagan and Christopher Harnisch: How to Apply 'Smart Power' in Yemen

[Mr. Kagan is resident scholar and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Harnisch is a researcher and the head of the Gulf of Aden Team at the Critical Threats Project.] President Barack Obama has made it clear that he does not intend to send American ground forces into Yemen, and rightly so. But American policy toward Yemen, even after the Christmas terrorist attempt, remains focused on limited counterterrorist approaches that failed in

Gwynne Dyer: In the Name of Allah

In the late 1980s, when I was in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, a friend suggested that I drive out into the desert near Jubail to see the oldest extant Christian church in the world. And there it was, surrounded by a chain-link fence to keep casual visitors and foreign archaeologists out. Experts who saw the site before it was closed said that the church was built by Nestorian Christians, and was probably used from the 4th to the 9th century. Its existence embar

Samuel Helfont: The Case of Yusuf al-Qaradawi

[Samuel Helfont is an FPRI Adjunct Scholar. The following E-Note is based on his recently published book, Yusuf al-Qaradawi: Islam and Modernity (Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv Univ., 2009), which is available at http://www.dayan.org/newbook.htm. Helfont is a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow in Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. He is also an Iraq war veteran and continues to serve as an int

Thomas Rid: Cracks in the Jihad

“Get ready for all Muslims to join the holy war against you,” the jihadi leader Abd el-Kader warned his Western enemies. The year was 1839, and nine years into France’s occupation of Algeria the resistance had grown self-confident. Only weeks earlier, Arab fighters had wiped out a convoy of 30 French soldiers en route from Boufarik to Oued-el-Alèg. Insurgent attacks on the slow-moving French columns were steadily increasing, and the army’s fortified blockhouses in the Atlas Mountains were under

Michael J. Totten: What Baghdad Can Learn from Beirut

[Michael J. Totten is an independent foreign correspondent based in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He also publishes at www.michaeltotten.com.] I recently made my seventh trip to Iraq to try to answer an important question: Will the country explode after American soldiers withdraw? But the answer may lie 600 miles to the west—in Beirut, where I traveled from Baghdad. Th

Edmund J. Hull: Al Qaeda's Shadowland

[Edmund J. Hull was the United States ambassador to Yemen from 2001 to 2004.] Americans are scrambling to understand Yemen, where Al Qaeda has recently surged and the Christmas Day plot against Northwest Flight 253 was hatched. It’s not easy. Yemen has 5,000 years of history, complicated politics and daunting economic challenges. But we’ve made it more difficult to understand by allowing several myths to cloud our vision. Challenging these misconceptions is a first step toward comprehending a

K. M. Mehrdad: Iran and Its Revolutions

In the past weeks, the most sacred symbols of Iran's '79 Revolution -- namely its flag and its founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini -- have come under direct attack. Given that the regime views these acts as warranting death, the demonstrators' ultimate goal can be no less than a regime change. Since 1979, Iran has endured a brutal theocracy, renowned for corruption, abuse of women and minorities, and second only to China in the number of people it executes. Despite record-high oil r

Ivan Eland: Cheney vs. Eisenhower?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been railing against President Barack Obama for being weak-kneed on terrorism and failing to interdict the BVD bomber’s recent attempt to blow up a plane. Cheney seems to want us to put aside his own administration’s abysmal record on the subject—ignoring warnings and failing to prevent the most deadly foreign attack on U.S. soil in American history, failing to prevent the similar shoe bomber’s attempt to bring down an aircraft, and using 9/11 to launch inva

Michael L. Galaty: Afghanistan is not Vietnam - but it is a lot like 1940s Albania

[Michael L. Galaty is a professor of anthropology at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. He spent eight years in northern Albania conducting research for the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the US Embassy in Tirana.] Contrary to recent popular comparisons, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. But it is a lot like Albania. About 70 years ago, Albania – a small, mountainous co