Roundup: Media's Take

Scott Bittle & Jean Johnson: Three Flawed Ideas that Could Mean a Cold Homecoming from Copenhagen

[Scott Bittle, co-author of Who Turned Out the Lights: Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis, is executive editor of PublicAgenda.org, where he has prepared citizen guides on more than twenty major issues. Jean Johnson, co-author of Who Turned Out the Lights: Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis, is co-founder of PublicAgenda.org.] International conferences have one thing in common with vacations: they're great while you're there, but coming home to workaday reality can be painful.

Abe Greenwald: Obama Goes Neocon in Norway

[Abe Greenwald is policy adviser and online editor with the Foreign Policy Initiative in Washington.] During his Nobel Peace Prize–acceptance speech today, Barack Obama said, “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world.” He cited the historical example of Adolf Hitler and the present-day example of al-Qaeda. This rounds out a year that has seen a succession of real-world object lessons that bear out the claims of the intellectual tendency known as neoconservatism: Iran has re

Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason: Afghanistan Is Obama's Vietnam

[Thomas H. Johnson is research professor of the Department in National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. M. Chris Mason, a retired Foreign Service officer who served in 2005 as political officer for the provincial reconstruction team in Paktika, is senior fellow at the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies and at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington.] As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, truth is ridiculed, then

John Prados: Beware Presidents' Use of History

[John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author of "How the Cold War Ended: Debating and Doing History" (Potomac Books, forthcoming).] We are told that history plays as tragedy and repeats as farce. But perhaps that is changing. In the summer of 2007 President George W. Bush invoked the Vietnam analogy to justify an equally or more tragic war in Iraq. And in the West Point speech announcing his new strategy for Afghanistan,

Zoe Alsop: Uganda's Anti-Gay Bill: Inspired by the U.S.

[Zoe Alsop is a correspondent for Time in Kampala, Uganda] The late-November afternoon sun bore down on the park in downtown Kampala, and all along the benches, Ugandan office workers took their siestas. There could have been no less likely setting for criminal conspiracies to topple an East African state. Still, the doctor's voice dropped a notch when an office worker in a brown suit settled in close by. The medic shifted a battered fedora over his eyes. "I am the gay doctor," the

Michael Laprarie: The Wrong Side of History

Rick has already touched on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's hateful Monday speech, in which he likened those who oppose the government take-over of health care to those who opposed the end of slavery, women's suffrage, and civil rights. Really Senator, as if each of those things was a $1 trillion + government boondoggle with no real assurance of granting all Americans freedom or equal rights? Obviously the Democrats know that they have lost their edge in this fight, because only a desperate

Rami G. Khouri: The refugees, still essential to peace

[Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by THE DAILY STAR.] I have attended hundreds of meetings, conferences and symposia on Arab-Israeli peacemaking all my adult life during the past 40 years, and I am able to report that there is good news and bad news. The good news is that Israelis and Arabs wish to achieve a negotiated, peaceful end to their conflict. The bad news is that this inclination to negotiate peace and coexistence is not being translated into a lasting agreeme

Ellen Cantarow: Living by the Gate From Hell: A Portrait of Nonviolent Resistance in One Palestinian Village

[Ellen Cantarow, a Boston-based journalist, first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. Her work has been published in the Village Voice, Grand Street, and Mother Jones, among other publications, and was anthologized by the South End Press. More recently, her writing has appeared at Counterpunch, ZNet, and Alternet. This essay is part of a series on Palestinian non-violent resistance,"Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape." ] Much is heard of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian co

Andy Worthington: Chaos and Confusion: The Return of the Military Commissions

[Andy Worthington is a journalist and the author of "The Guantanamo Files" (Pluto Press), the first book to tell the stories of all the prisoners in Guantanamo. He maintains a blog here.] For anyone who has studied Guantánamo's military commissions closely over the last eight years, it was obvious that their revival last week, in a supposedly new and improved form, was bound to be a disaster. First dragged out of obscurity in November 2001 by Dick Cheney and h

Walter Shapiro: Obama's Afghanistan Decision and the Art of the Tick-Tock

[Walter Shapiro, a PoliticsDaily.com columnist, has covered the last eight presidential campaigns as a columnist and political reporter. Along the way, he has worked for two newspapers (USA Today and the Washington Post), two news weeklies (Time and Newsweek), two monthlies (Esquire and the Washington Monthly) and two online magazines (Salon and Slate).] No group can possibly be as smug as presidential advisers after a major national security decision has been announced.

Joshua Kurlantzick: Burma's junta plays us again

[Joshua Kurlantzick is Special Correspondent for The New Republic] From the hills outside Mandalay, Burma’s second city, the vista resembles a postcard of Asian serenity. Monks climb stone steps to a hillside shrine, where local men and women leave offerings of flowers and fruit. But the placid scene conceals one of the most repressive states in the world--a state that the Obama administration has decided may be more worthy of American friendship than American threats.

Alex Koppelman: Does Reid need a "history lesson" for slavery remarks?

[Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for the online magazine Salon.com] The right is still pretty upset about a comparison that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid drew between those now opposing healthcare reform and people who fought against abolition, womens' suffrage and the civil rights movement. But Reid isn't backing down... ... Fund's line of attack was odd, and for more than one reason. For one thing, Reid never said it was Republicans who'd opposed the Civil Rights

Carlin Romano: Of Minarets and Massacres

[Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.] The surprise Swiss vote last month to ban new minarets triggered the expected gnashing of teeth from those who believe Islam, the least tolerant of faiths when administered by autocrats and absolute monarchs, should not only be tolerated, but encouraged. "It is an expression of intolerance, and I detest intolerance," commented Frenc

John Fund : Harry Reid's History Lesson

[John Fund is an American political journalist and columnist for the website of the Wall Street Journal.] Majority Leader Harry Reid tarred opponents of his health care bill yesterday as the equivalent of those who opposed equal rights for women and civil rights for blacks.... ... Historians also faulted Mr. Reid's curious reference to the Senate civil rights debates of the 1960s. After all, it was Southern Democrats who mounted an 83-day filibuster of the 1964 Civil Ri

James Danly: An Army Takes Time to Build

[James Danly served two tours as an officer with the U.S. Army in Iraq. He is currently an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.] I served as a platoon leader in the U.S. Army at the height of the surge in Dora, one of Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods. While deployed there, I learned what is required to build a nation’s security forces. It is a lesson that appears to be largely overlooked in Washington in the ongoing debate over how to proceed in Afgh

William R. Gruver: Why Clausewitz would not be happy with Obama's new Afghanistan strategy

[William R. Gruver is a professor at Bucknell University, where he teaches international relations.] In his legendary 19th century strategic treatise vom Kriege (On War), Carl von Clausewitz articulates several key principles of successful military strategy. President Obama, in his recent decision regarding our Afghanistan strategy, appears to have neglected many of these critical components. “Fog of war” is Clausewitz’s way of describing the opaqueness and resultant un

Harold Meyerson: Obama's FDR moment

[Harold Meyerson is a weekly columnist for The Post.] With a sweeping bow to reality, President Obama unveiled his second economic stimulus program on Tuesday. He didn't call it that, of course, since "stimulus" has become taboo, but the proposals he sketched will considerably amplify the government's efforts to combat the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The key elements of the plan are a series of tax breaks and, conceivably, redirected T

Lawrence Korb: Paying for Our Wars

[Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.] Now that President Obama has decided to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan the question of how to pay for this increased level of operations has arisen. In fact the question of how to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should have been raised shortly after the attacks of 9-11 when the Bush administration decided to overthrow the reg

Geoffrey R. Stone: The Republican Struggle for "Ascendency"

[Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago] They scorned "any idea of moderation" and greeted with contempt any effort "to understand a question from all sides." Their primary goal was "to acquire power" by frustrating those in authority at every turn. If the President "made a reasonable speech," they "took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect." Alth

Patrick Cockburn: US surge will only prolong Afghan war

[Patrick Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for The Independent.] It will be a long and unnecessary war. President Barack Obama is sending 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan to prove that the US can impose its will on the country and crush by military means what is still a relatively small-scale insurrection. The real reasons for escalating the conflict are very different from those declared by Mr Obama. He claims that al-Qa'ida might re-establish itself in Afghanistan