Roundup: Media's Take

Robert Nedelkoff: The "Other Challenges" Of Garry Wills

[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. From 1997 until March 2009, he worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.] The new issue of the New York Review of Books has a short op-ed, which first appeared as a blogpost

Cinnamon Stillwell: Fort Hood and the Academic Apologists

[Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.] In the wake of the horrific attack at the Fort Hood military base in Texas earlier this month, and the mounting evidence that the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was motivated by Islamist beliefs, the media has turned to Mi

Deepak Tripathi: Afghanistan and Presidential Dilemmas

[Deepak Tripathi, former BBC correspondent in Afghanistan, is the author of two forthcoming books: Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan and Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism (Potomac Books, VA, 2010). He lives near London and his gmail moniker is DandATripathi.] News that the US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, has sent classified messages to Washington in the last few days, advising President Obama not to send more troops to Afgha

Gloria Feldt: The Democrats' Dilemma: Their Own Trojan Horse Kicks Free (on the Stupak-Pitts amendment)

[Gloria Feldt is the author of The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women’s Rights and How to Fight Back, a political commentator, and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She serves on the board of the Women’s Media Center.] Democratic leaders have said that the turn-around on abortion contained in the House health-reform bill will not appear in the final version. The author, a Women’s Media Center board member and former president of Planned Parenth

James Fergusson: Obama is haunted by Gorbachev's ghost

[James Fergusson is the author of A Million Bullets – The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan.] It has become a pub bore's cliché to argue that we will never prevail in Afghanistan because no foreign power ever has: not even the Russians, whose nine-year occupation cost the lives of 14,000 of their soldiers and 35,500 wounded, and which ended in humiliating retreat in 1989. Those Cassandras irritate Western leaders, whose response is to insist that it is different this tim

Ira Chernus: Israel's "Pathology"

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine and American Jews on his blog.] Nobody seems to know just what Barack Obama said to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the two met recently at the White House. In fact, when it comes to Middle East policy, nobody seems to know much of anything about what goes on inside the White House. I've heard more than one Washington insider say that

Dallas Darling: Afghanistan and the "Other" Vietnam War

[Dallas Darling is the author of "Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action," "Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections on Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, and Consumerism in the Context of John's Apocalyptic Vision," and "The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace." He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Da

Frank Joseph Smecker: Health Care, Not Assimilation: American Indians and Alaskan Natives in the Wake of Health Care Reform

[Frank Joseph Smecker is a social worker and writer from Vermont. His work has appeared in The Ecologist, Z Magazine, Counter Punch, Order of the Earth, Toward Freedom, Dissident Voice and many other publications and sites. He is also a blog writer for the Vermont Commons Journal (for Independence from Empire) and the editor for Radical Earth Defense at Thomas Paine's Corner. Feel free to contact him at: frank.smecker-at-gmail.com.] While the health care reform debate continues thro

Alex Koppelman: Sometimes, Giuliani should keep his anti-terror advice to himself

[A staff writer, Alex Koppelman writes and edits Salon's political blog, War Room. He's also written for New York Magazine, has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News and CNN Headline News and is a contributing editor with Smith Magazine.] In this life, there are really only three things that are certain and unavoidable: Death, taxes and the fact that every time 9/11 comes up in the national news, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani will rush to find a microphone. He's cert

Andrew Browne: 600 years after bringing home its armada, will China once again stride the world's stage?

Beijing The wooden treasure ships commanded by Admiral Cheng-ho, a Chinese Ming dynasty eunuch, were among the largest vessels ever built, nautical monsters that by some accounts carried nine masts. Bigger by far than the ships of Christopher Columbus that set out decades later for the New World, they were the flagships of an armada that ventured as far as the east coast of Africa on seven naval expeditions. The first embarked in 1405 bearing some 30,000 men; the seven

NYT Editorial: A Return to American Justice

Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. took a bold and principled step on Friday toward repairing the damage wrought by former President George W. Bush with his decision to discard the nation’s well-established systems of civilian and military justice in the treatment of detainees captured in antiterrorist operations. From that entirely unnecessary policy (the United States had the tools to detain, charge and bring terrorists to justice) flowed a terrible legacy of torture and open-ended

Merle L. Pribbenow: Drugs, Corruption, and Justice in Vietnam and Afghanistan ... A Cautionary Tale

[Merle L. Pribbenow, the author of “Limits to Interrogation: The Man in the Snow White Cell,” Studies in Intelligence, is a retired CIA operations officer and Vietnamese linguist who served in Vietnam from 1970 to 1975. This is his second article for Washington Decoded.] On October 27, 2009, The New York Times published a dramatic article about Karzai Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. The article alleged that the president’s brother is a m

James Taranto: Our 'Constitutional Moment,' The New York newspaperman says our founding document is especially vital today

[Mr. Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.] Seth Lipsky has a knack for seeing the bright side of things. A nearly 20-year veteran of this newspaper, including its editorial page, he cheerfully acknowledges the obvious: This is far from a golden age of free-market conservatism. Of President Obama, he tells me over lunch, "I sense that he has a very leftist, socialist-oriented worldview.&qu

WSJ Editorial: Eric Holder's decision to move a trial on war crimes to American soil is morally confused, dangerous and political to a fault

Coming soon to a civilian courtroom blocks from Ground Zero: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other al Qaeda planners of 9/11. Be sure to get your tickets early, and don't forget to watch out for the truck-bomb barricades and rooftop snipers. Attorney General Eric Holder, who dropped this legal bomb on New York yesterday, called his decision to move their trial on war crimes from a military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay to American soil "the toughest" he has had to make.

Melik Kaylan: Myths of Babylon

[Mr. Kaylan is a columnist for Forbes.] Whatever other mistakes were made in Iraq, it certainly didn't help the cause of peace that the U.S. and its coalition partners were routinely blamed for the destruction of Iraq's heritage—from allowing the National Museum in Baghdad to be overrun by looters, to neglect of sundry archeological sites, including the most revered ancient site of Babylon. Today, after extensive recovery efforts, the National Museum is again open to th

Peggy Noonan: Just the Facts, Mr. President (comparing Obama and JFK)

[Peggy Noonan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal whose work appears weekly in the Journal's Weekend Edition and on OpinionJournal.com.] The president has been taking time thinking about Afghanistan. I cannot see why this is bad. If he's really thinking, he's not dithering—thought can be harder than action, weighing plans as hard as choosing and executing one. A question of such consequence deserves pondering. A president ought to summon and hear counsel before committing or

Melik Kaylan: Myths of Babylon and the reality of Iraq's heritage

[Mr. Kaylan is a columnist for Forbes.] Whatever other mistakes were made in Iraq, it certainly didn't help the cause of peace that the U.S. and its coalition partners were routinely blamed for the destruction of Iraq's heritage—from allowing the National Museum in Baghdad to be overrun by looters, to neglect of sundry archeological sites, including the most revered ancient site of Babylon. Today, after extensive recovery efforts, the National Museum is again open to t

Gordon M. Goldstein: Vietnam, Afghanistan and learning from history

[Gordon M. Goldstein is the author of "Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam".] As President Kennedy pondered the risks of accidental war in the nuclear age -- a nightmare he would confront head on in the Cuban missile crisis -- he asked his senior advisors to read Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August," a narrative tracing the chain of events that led to World War I. Today, President Obama is also reflecting on history'

Marci A. Hamilton: Why the Stupak Amendment to the Healthcare Reform Bill Is Unconstitutional

[Professor Marci A. Hamilton holds the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, where she is the founding Director of the Intellectual Property Law Program. She has been a visiting scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary, the Center of Theological Inquiry, and Emory University School of Law.] The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops registered a major victory this week, when it succeeded in pressuring members of the

Rick Rozoff: 1989-2009: Moving The Berlin Wall To Russia's Borders

[Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/] November 9 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the government of the German Democratic Republic opening crossing points at the wall separating the eastern and western sections of Berlin