Roundup: Media's Take

David Flumenbaum: Mao Takes Manhattan: Empire State Building Goes Red and Yellow for China

[David Flumenbaum is Managing Blog Editor for The Huffington Post] To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China under Communist rule and Mao's 1949 revolution, the Chinese will hold a military parade in Beijing on Thursday of unparalleled size -- 5,000 soldiers, 43,000 fireworks and a display of 52 new weapons -- followed by a civilian parade of 100,000 marchers and 60 floats, many chanting new nationalistic mantras coined by the Chinese government for the occ

Lincoln Mitchell: Why 2010 Will Not Be 1994

[Lincoln Mitchell is Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics, Columbia University.] In the last few weeks, Republicans have put a new twist on their campaign of never ending fear. Now the Republicans are trying to scare Democrats into thinking that 2010 will be another 1994, meaning that the Democratic Party is poised for a sweeping defeat which will vindicate the Republican Party and show that they were right about Obama, Pelosi and Reid all along.

Henry A. Giroux: The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists

[Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada.] Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, echoing the feelings of many progressives, recently wrote in The New York Times about how dismayed he was over the success right-wing ideologues have had not only in undercutting Obama's health care bill, but also in mobilizing enormous public support against almost any reform aimed at rolling back the economic, politi

Barry Friedman: Why the Supreme Court is irrelevant.

[Barry Friedman is the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. His book, the will of the people: how public opinion has influenced the supreme court and shaped the meaning of the constitution, is being published this month.] The most-watched case of the Supreme Court's last term, which ended in June, invited the justices to hold unconstitutional a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The law required certain jurisdictions--largely in the Old Sout

Andrew Leonard: Krugman weighs in on Brooks: "Reagan did it"

[Andrew Leonard is senior technology writer for Salon.com.] A few hours after I posted my cranky disagreement with David Brooks' theory of American moral decay yesterday, a reader wrote in to point out that I might have missed the bigger picture: "Brooks situates the original inflection point at 1980," he wrote. "Worth noting who took office as President then and started escalating the public deficits..." Others made the same point in the comments. A

Glenn Greenwald: How similar are the cases against Iran and Iraq?

[Glenn Greenwald is a Salon contributor and was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York.] Scott Shane has an article in today's New York Times examining whether the government and media's behavior now with regard to Iran is similar to what happened in 2002 and 2003 concerning Iraq. I'm quoted in the articl

David Bromwich: William Safire: Wars Made Out of Words

[David Bromwich is Professor of Literature at Yale University.] There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance." What Mencken said of Coolidge can be reversed in the case of Safire. There were plenty of thrills, and after the thrills, the field was littered with casualties. And he had tons of ideas. He was keen to share them as soon as he thought them up. The career that took him from public relations to

Zhang Wei-Wei: Eight Ideas Behind China's Success

[Zhang Wei-Wei is a professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and visiting professor at Tsinghua and Fudan Universities in China. He was a senior English interpreter for Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders in the mid-1980s.] BEIJING — Beijing is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic on Thursday, and the fanfare will undoubtedly irk those whose ideological inclinations do not tolerate a “Communist country” being so self-righteous.

Gordon Chang: Sixty Years of Chinese Communism

[Mr. Chang is the author of "The Coming Collapse of China" (Random House, 2001).] There are, it is sometimes said, "a million truths in China." As the Communist Party celebrates the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic today, there are only three worth keeping in mind. First, the Chinese state will try to project strength. There will be fearsome weapons and 200,000 soldiers and performers in a grand procession in the center of Be

Roger Cohen: Germany Unbound

[Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting Foreign Editor on September 11, 2001, and Foreign Editor six months later. In 2009 he was named a columnist of The New York Times.] BERLIN — After two decades, a unified Germany is coming into focus, like some lumbering creature emerging from the mist. Its election result no longer merits a Page 1 story in The New York Times, but it’s still the European behe

Steve Coll: Gorbachev Was Right About Afghanistan

[Steve Coll is president of New America Foundation, and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.] We’re all prisoners of our own experiences. Richard Holbrooke, the Obama Administration’s diplomatic point man on Afghanistan, and the subject of my colleague George Packer’s terrific Profile last week, arrives at the current dilemmas influenced by Vietnam and Bosnia. General David Petraeus, Obama’s commander for the Middle East and Central Asian region, and General Stan McChrystal, h

James Ottavio Castagnera: Afghanistan: History Repeats Itself

[Jim Castagnera is a university attorney and author of 'Al Qaeda Goes to College' [Praeger 2009].] The generals are demanding more troops and the president appears prepared to oblige. For a sixty-something American male, this sounds ominously like Vietnam, Westmoreland, and LBJ. For historians versed in Afghanistan’s bloody modern history, the echoes sound louder and deeper. Britain fought three Afghan wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries, all aimed primarily at

John Feffer: Afghanistan: NATO's Graveyard?

[John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. His past essays, including those for Tomdispatch.com, can be read at his website.] Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, NATO is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics h

Sobhi Ghandour: No radical change in American policy

[Sobhi Ghandour is head of the Al Hewar Centre in Washington, D.C.] US President Barack Obama has been in office for eight months, but there have been no major changes in American foreign policy, apart from the decision to cancel the missile shield planned for Eastern Europe. The absence of any other significant changes in US policy has been a great disappointment, especially in this region, which was pinning much hope on the new administration with regard to the Arab-I

Patrick Martin: A hostile takeover of Zionism

[Patrick Martin is a Canadian journalist who is the Jerusalem-based Middle East bureau chief for The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper.] Israel's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has come a long way. No longer are they the inward-looking anti-Zionists who only cared that the government provide them with money for their separate schools, welfare and exemptions from military service. These days, many of the Haredim – the word means “those who tremble” in awe of God” – h

Michael Ledeen: We've Been Talking to Iran for 30 Years

[Mr. Ledeen, a scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, is the author, most recently, of "Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West," out next month from St. Martin's Press.] The Obama administration's talks with Iran—set to take place tomorrow in Geneva—are accompanied by an almost universally accepted misconception: that previous American administrations refused to negotiate with Iranian leaders. The truth, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gate

Bret Stephens: The Neocons Make a Comeback

[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.] The other day I was asked by a writer for a mainstream French newspaper to say something about the "return" of the neoconservatives. His thesis seemed to be that the shambles of Barack Obama's foreign policy had, after only nine months, made what was thought to be the most discredi

Mary L. Dudziak: To Whom is a Drone Loyal?

In my west coast copy of the New York Times today, two stories are side-by-side: one on disagreements within the Obama Administration about Afghanistan, and one titled “U.S. Drone Strikes Office of Sunni Party In Iraq’s North.” These stories are related, for the politics of war, necessarily at issue in presidential decision making about Afghanistan, are affected by the technologies of warfare. Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermi

Tom Barry: Former Border Patrol Chief Silvestre Reyes Now a Major Player in New Military, Intelligence, and Homeland Security Complex

[Tom Barry is a senior foreign policy analyst with the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. He blogs at: http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/. Tom Barry is a senior foreign policy analyst with the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. He blogs at: http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/. ]Part I: Building the Paso del Norte Security System—from Academics to Economics The rising power and inf

Thomas Friedman: Crossing the Line

I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing. I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned h