Roundup: Media's Take

Harvey Wasserman: For Obama it's one (term) if by war, two if by peace

[Free Press Senior Editor and "Superpower of Peace" columnist Harvey Wasserman is also senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service. He is author or co-author of a dozen books, including SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 and HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.] As the world awaits Barack Obama's decision on Afghanistan, a lethal myth has spread. It says that standing up to the military will doom him to be a s

Walid Phares: One Wall Falls, Another Rises

[Cutting Edge Terrorism Analyst Walid Phares is the author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.] The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a benchmark that made an impression on me, as it did on millions of people around the world. The sight of thousands of East Germans pouring into West Berlin, particularly the youths who had never experienced freedom before, was a surreal scene not only for the p

David Segal: Naming the '00s

THERE are 46 days left in 2009, which means it is just about time to commence the beloved and enduring parlor game known as “Name That Decade.” You know the rules — coin a pithy, reductive phrase that somehow encapsulates the multitude of events, trends, triumphs and calamities of the past 10 years. If you can also rope in some of the big personalities and consumer obsessions, that’s a bonus. For the ’00s, it seems the trick will be finding a small package sturdy and fl

Richard Halloran: Will Obama Apologize for Hiroshima & Nagasaki?

[Richard Halloran, a free lance writer in Honolulu, was a military correspondent for The New York Times for ten years. He can be reached at oranhall@hawaii.rr.com] Within a couple of hours of landing in Japan on Friday, President Barack Obama walked into a political minefield by implicitly promising someday to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the targets of American atomic bombs in 1945. After meeting with Prime Minister Yukio Ha

Chris Hedges: The New State Solution

[Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He served for eight years as the Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, where he shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, for coverage of terrorism. Hedges also received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.] The collapse of the Palestinian Authority

Hussein Ibish: Plaestine, between a rock and a hard place

[Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with the Common Ground News Service (www.commongroundnews.org).] It is almost impossible to adequately convey the present degree of Palestinian despair but the recent announcement that President Mahmoud Abbas might resign and that the rest of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership may follow – in effect

Adel Safty: New voices for Palestinian conflict

[Adel Safty is Distinguished Professor Adjunct at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His new book, Might over Right, is endorsed by Noam Chomsky.] Although the peace process is at an impasse, two recent debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have started to redefine some of the most fundamental issues of the conflict: the first started in the US and focuses on the nature and appropriateness of the unconditional American support for Israel; the second is t

William Rivers Pitt: The Decision, the Hard Choices for the President in Afghanistan

[William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.] All the presidents in my lifetime share one common characteristic: each one aged rapidly, visibly and dramatically over the cours

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann: Why Obama Nixed Ft. Hood Probe

[Dick Morris served as Bill Clinton's political consultant for twenty years. A regular political commentator on Fox News and other networks, he is the author of six New York Times bestsellers (all with Eileen McGann) and one Washington Post bestseller. Eileen McGann, an attorney and consultant, works with Dick Morris on campaigns around the world.] As he flew to Asia on Saturday, President Obama told the media in Alaska that he opposes a congressional investigation into the Fort Hoo

Glenn Greenwald: "We're too scared to have real trials in our country" is a level of cowardice unmatched in the world

[Glenn Greenwald, previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator, is the author of two New York Times Bestselling books.] ... People in capitals all over the world have hosted trials of high-level terrorist suspects using their normal justice system. They didn't allow fear to drive them to build island-prisons or create special commissions to depart from their rules of justice. Spain held an open trial in Madrid for the individuals accused of that country's 2004 train

Jonathan Schell: The Fifty-Year War

[Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.] I was about to write that there can be no military solution to the war in Afghanistan, only a political one. But I almost fainted with boredom and had to stop. Who, as President Obama lengthily ponders his decisions regarding the war, wants to repeat a point that's been made 11,000 t

Peter Beinart: China's Upper Hand

[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.] To hear the Obama administration tell it, the problem with American foreign policy towards China is that we haven’t been paying enough attention. In the weeks and months leading up to the President’s arrival in Beijing, a bevy of administration officials implied that the Bush administration

Nassrine Azimi: Japan-U.S. Relations: Let There Be Discord

[Nassrine Azimi is senior adviser at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research.] HIROSHIMA — In February 1960, one month after its signature in Washington, the U.S.-Japan treaty of mutual cooperation and security was submitted to the Japanese Parliament for ratification. It unleashed a storm of unprecedented furor across Japan. Massive and at times violent demonstrations erupted in major cities. Fights broke out in the lower house of Parliament, where polic

Michiko Kakutani: Memoir Is Palin's Payback to McCain Campaign

[Michiko Kakutani is a Japanese-American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the New York Times.] “Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the presidential campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000

John Yoo: The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda

[—Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03 and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] 'This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision," President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court. No, it

Bret Stephens: Two Ground Zeroes

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] I have long thought it would be a good idea to bring 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices to lower Manhattan. In my concept, the men would be taken by helicopter to a height of about 1,000 feet over Ground Zero and pushed out the door, so that they, too, could experience what so many of their victims did in the awful final flickering seconds of their lives. And s

Doyle McManus: Obama must rethink rethinking Afghanistan

[Doyle McManus is columnist for the Los Angeles Times.] Barack Obama is in danger of giving deliberation a bad name. The decision about whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan was never going to be easy, but events -- and a collision of egos in Kabul -- have conspired to make it even harder. Obama was right to insist on a full review of whether U.S. interests are better served by expanding the American military footprint in Afghanistan or shrin

Alex Dershowitz: America is on trial as much as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

[Alex Dershowitz is Felix Frankfurter professor of law at the Harvard Law School.] The first great terrorist trial of the 21st century will take place in the shadow of the World Trade Center. The Obama administration has announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, will be subjected to an ordinary criminal trial in the federal court of New York. He will almost certainly be charged with the mass murder of nearly 3,000 individuals, and could possibly f

Mark Steyn: A jihadist hiding in plain sight

[Mark Steyn is a Canadian writer, political commentator and cultural critic. He has written five books, including America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, a New York Times bestseller. He is published in newspapers and magazines, and also appears on radio shows such as those of Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt.] Shortly after 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how no one would ever hijack an American airliner ever again – not because of new security arrangements but because a

John J. Pitney, Jr.: The First Pacific President?

[John J. Pitney, Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. He writes and teaches about elections, political parties, Congress, and the presidency, and has taught a course about President Nixon.] In Tokyo today, President Obama said: “As America’s first Pacific president, I promise you that this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world.” The president was in error. Though