Roundup: Media's Take

Nicholas D. Kristof: The Religious Wars

[Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week.] Just a few years ago, it seemed curious that an omniscient, omnipotent God wouldn’t smite tormentors like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. They all published best-selling books excoriating religion and practically inviting lightning bolts. Traditionally, religious wars were fought with swords and sieges;

Max Hastings: A cowardly Navy, a cautious SAS and Britain's humiliation by a pirate rabble

On February 16, 1940, the destroyer Cossack, acting on Churchill's personal orders, steamed headlong into neutral Norwegian territorial waters in defiance of international law, boarded the German freighter Altmark and freed 299 captive British merchant seamen. Legend held that the first the prisoners knew of their deliverance was a shout down a hatchway from a sailor on deck: 'The Navy's here!' The episode passed into folklore, exemplifying the Royal Navy's centuries-old tradition o

John Reid: Remember Mumbai

[John Reid, a former British secretary of defense and home secretary, is chairman of the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies at University College, London.] The first anniversary this week of the Mumbai atrocities serves as a timely reminder of the real and present threat from terrorism and its global nature. Over the three days of attacks from Nov. 26 to 29 last year, it is estimated that more than 170 civilians and security personnel were murdered, including

Maureen Dowd: Thanks for the Memories (on the WH's Greg Craig)

[Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for The New York Times Magazine.] At his Cabinet meeting Monday afternoon, President Obama took a moment to give thanks to his

George Will: Obama ... The First 'Pacific President'?

[George Will is a contributing editor for Newsweek, writing a biweekly backpage column.] Barack Obama's irresistible, or at least unresisted, propensity for self-aggrandizement bubbled up yet again during his recent trip to the Far East when he proclaimed himself "America's first Pacific president." Hearing this, Asians may have muttered about inscrutable Occidentals. Obama's exercise in rhetorical grandiosity, while hardly his first, was exquisitely meaningless.

Sergei Guriev and Aleh Tsyvinsky: Russia Regresses into Stalinist Past

[Sergei Guriev is the Morgan Stanley Professor of Economics and rector of the New Economic School. Aleh Tsyvinsky is a professor at Yale University and the New Economic School. This comment appeared in Vedomosti.] After President Dmitry Medvedev’s state-of-the-nation address, we were planning to write about whether it is possible to carry out modernization in Russia without political liberalization. But last week’s tragic death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a pretrial detention faci

Rebecca Solnit: Learning How to Count to 350, Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989

[Rebecca Solnit is the author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and co-author with her brother David of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, a short anthology looking at how that watershed event has been misrepresented and reproducing some of the original documents. She's signed beyondtalk.net’s pledge to take action on climate change and she'll be out in the streets again this November 30th.] Next month, at the climate c

Steve Benen: The RNC's Purity Test

[Steve Benen is "blogger in chief" of the popular Washington Monthly online blog, Political Animal. His background includes publishing The Carpetbagger Report, and writing for a variety of publications, including Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect, the Huffington Post, and The Guardian.] After the party's unpleasant experience in New York's 23rd, Republicans hope to exclude moderates from their upcoming slate of candidates. But the commitment leads to an awkward qu

Melanie Kirkpatrick: Happy Franksgiving

[—Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.] Last I checked, Thanksgiving is still scheduled to take place tomorrow. The economic news may be gloomy, but unlike President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, President Barack Obama has not tinkered with the date of the holiday. In 1939, FDR decided to move Thanksgiving Day forward by a week. Rather than take place on its traditional date, the last Thursday of November, he de

Saswato R. Das: A Permanent Outpost on the Moon?

[Saswato R. Das is a science and technology writer in New York.] The discovery of a significant amount of water on the Moon, announced recently by NASA, has fired up space enthusiasts and would-be lunar colonists. Building a permanent base on the Moon suddenly seems a lot less daunting... ... But more than anything else, what last week’s discovery underscores is that our instruments are finally coming of age: we are witnessing another golden era of astronomy, when our i

Bennett Ramberg: The Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan Through CIA Eyes: Lessons for the United States Today

[Bennett Ramberg (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins, J.D. UCLA), is a nationally recognized expert on nuclear weapons proliferation, terrorism and international politics. Over the years, he has been a foreign policy analyst and/or consultant to the Department of State (Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs), U.S. Senate, Nuclear Control Institute, Henry Stimson Center, Global Green and Committee to Bridge the Gap.] As President Obama grapples with sending additional forces to Afghanistan he would

Dr. John Nagl: Let's Win the Wars We're In

[Dr. John Nagl is the President of the Center for a New American Security. He is also a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Visiting Professor in the War Studies Department at Kings College of London, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.] Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. -General Douglas MacArthur[1]

Mazin al-Mutabaqani: A Saudi View of Orientalism

Mazin S. Motabbagani (or, in accurate transcription, al-Mutabaqani) is assistant professor of Orientalism at King Saud University in Riyadh, and head of the Occidental Studies Unit in the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, also in Riyadh. Born a Jordanian by origin in 1950, he submitted his doctoral thesis in 1993 to the faculty of Islamic propagation at Riyadh's Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University where he also taught. Motabbagani's thesis, like most of his later academic

Marty Peretz: The Accelerating Decline Of Europe

[Marty Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.] There were two high points in the career of Tony Blair. One was 2003 when Hugh Grant played the British prime minister in Love Actually. The second was in 2006 when Michael Sheen played him in The Queen who was herself portrayed by Helen Mirren. Frankly, it's been downhill ever since. Of course, he had been the longest serving Labour prime minister in history. But he was also a victim of the Iraq war which he had supported

Ray McGovern: McChrystal Testing the Limits

[Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years, and is on the Steering Group of VIPS.] It is not too late for President Barack Obama to follow the example of Harry Truman, who fired Gen. Douglas McArthur in 1951 for insubordination. Then, as now, the stakes were high. Then it was Korea; now it is Afghanistan. No more slaps on the wrist for Gen. Stanley McChrys

Michael Rubin: Review of The Next Founders, Voices of Democracy in the Middle East

[Michael Rubin, a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School.] On January 21, 2005, George W. Bush looked out over the crowds gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol for his second inaugural and declared, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal o

Tunku Varadarajan: Obama's Forgotten Friends

[Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School. (Follow him on Twitter here.)] On Tuesday evening, the world’s most consequential turbaned man, Manmohan Singh, will glide through White House security and take his place at a dinner table beside Barack and Michelle Obama. He is the prime minister of India, a country that could, i

Murray Sperber: The Berkeley Protest: Fresh Anger in the Footsteps

[Murray Sperber is a visiting professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley and an emeritus professor of English and American studies at Indiana University at Bloomington.] The sound was familiar, but I had not heard it in many years: police helicopters, hovering overhead. When I left my office on the University of California's Berkeley campus last week and looked up, I could see them clearly. I last saw police helicopters fly

Allan Gerson: Lessons From Nuremberg

[Allan Gerson, a former deputy-assistant attorney general and counselor for international affairs in the Reagan administration, is involved in the representation of 9/11 families in their lawsuit against various Saudi financial institutions.] The Obama administration’s remarkable decision to hold the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other masterminds of 9/11 in a civil court in New York, rather than use the conventional military tribunal structure, rests on one fundamental pillar

Bret Stephens: The Carter Ricochet Effect

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs, which runs every Tuesday in the U.S. and is also published in the European and Asian editions of the paper. He is a deputy editorial page editor, responsible for the editorial pages of the Asian and European editions of the paper, the columnists on foreign affairs, and the Far Eastern Economic Review.] An idealistic president takes office promising an era of American moral renewal at home and abroa