Roundup: Media's Take

Norman Solomon: The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public

[Norman Solomon is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com] This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned -- the media’s insi

Jacob Heilbrunn: Darth Cheney

[Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.] Poor President Obama. He campaigned to put an end to the Bush-Cheney era. Instead, he may be about to relive it. Attorney General Eric Holder says he has no choice but to investigate the conduct of CIA officials who interrogated so-called HVDs—high-value detainees—and has appointed John Durham as the Justice Department prosecutor. Actually, Holder does have a choice and he’s taken the wrong path. The likelih

“There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification

Monica Prasad, Northwestern University Andrew J. Perrin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Kieran Bezila, Northwestern University Steve G. Hoffman, University at Buffalo, State University of New York (SUNY) Kate Kindleberger, Northwestern University Kim Manturuk, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Ashleigh Smith Powers, Millsaps College One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resi

Dean Baker: Kennedy's Quick Win for Social Security

[Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy. He also has a blog on the American Prospect, "Beat the Press", where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.] I first met Ted Kennedy in the fall of 1995. The context was truly bizarre. Alan Greenspan had testified to the Senate Finance Committee in the fall of 1994 that the

Irwin Stelzer: Lockerbie bomber ... A grievous blow to the Special Relationship

[Irwin Stelzer is an economist who is the U.S. economic and business columinst for The Sunday Times (UK), The Courier-Mail and a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard.] Eleven and a half days. That's how much prison time the American commentator Charles Krauthammer reckons Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi served for each of the 270 people he murdered when he planted the bomb that blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the skies. Alex Salmond is wrong when he says that Scotland's relatio

Rachel Ehrenfeld & Millard Burr: Death of a Libel Tourist

[Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book, Funding Evil, and Millard Burr’s Alms for Jihad were banned in the U.K. after Mahfouz’s libel tourism hobby was rewarded, as many times before, by Justice Eady ruling against them in London’s High Court.] Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz died in Jeddah last Saturday. The 60-year-old former owner of the Saudi National Commercial Bank and banker for the Royal family also owned a charity, the Muwafaq (blessed relief) Foundation that funded al-Qaeda and Ham

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: Does the World Still Need the Swiss?

[Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. is a journalist, editorial writer and member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.] Harry Lime gave a shout-out to the cuckoo clock but he might have mentioned Switzerland’s other contribution to global culture, the secret numbered bank account, fortified by a 1934 law that made it a crime to betray an account holder. We do mean "contribution." By accident or design, customers at the time included German Jews hiding their money f

Boris Nemtsov: War Clouds in the Caucasus

[Mr. Nemtsov was deputy prime minister of Russia (1997-1998) and is a leader of the Solidarity opposition movement.] One of the biggest myths perpetrated by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine is that during his 10-year rule over Russia, the former president and current prime minister succeeded in “pacifying” the North Caucasus. Nothing could be further from the truth. What we are witnessing today is the start of the third Caucasus war in 15 years, following the two Chechen wars of

Paul Krugman: How big is $9 trillion?

... Right now, federal debt is about 50% of GDP. So even if we do run these deficits, federal debt as a share of GDP will be substantially less than it was at the end of World War II. It will also be substantially less than, say, debt in several European countries in the mid to late 1990s. (There are some technical issues in comparing these various numbers — gross debt versus net (mainly about Social Security) and overall government debt versus federal, but they don’t change the basic picture.)

Arianna Huffington: Lessons in Leadership: Why Obama Needs to Brush Up on His FDR

[Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of twelve books...graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics...] Watching the gun-toting, Nazi-sign-holding town hall crazies, the talk radio charlatans, and the Palin-infected politicos, my first instinct has been to rally around President Obama and defend his handling of the health care debate against this Cuckoo's Nest menagerie.

Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason: Saigon 2009

[Thomas H. Johnson is a research professor of the Department of National Security Affairs and director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. M. Chris Mason is a retired Foreign Service officer who served in 2005 as political officer for the PRT in Paktika and presently is a senior fellow at the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies and at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, D.C.] For those who

Josh Xiong: Afghanistan is Not Vietnam

[Josh Xiong is a third year University of Toronto undergraduate specializing in International Relations and Economics. He is Opinion Editor of the Toronto Globalist, a student-run international affairs magazine, and author of the blog Neocon Blues, which can be found at joshxiong.com.] This Foreign Policy [Johnson and Mason's 'Saigon 2009'] essay suffers from the misguided human tendency to read too much into the historical past... ... What Johnson and Mason leave out i

Adam L. Silverman: Religion and Politics in Iraq: What Type of Sectarianism Really Exists?

[Adam L. Silverman, PhD is a Social Science Advisor with the US Army’s Human Terrain System and was previously deployed in Iraq from April through October 2008 as the Field Social Scientist and Socio-Cultural Advisor for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division assigned to Human Terrain Team Iraq 6 (HTT IZ6). The views expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army’s Human Terrain System, the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, the 2BCT/1AD, and/or

Wendy Williams: History's shadow over Obama's Vineyard vacation

[Wendy Williams lives on Cape Cod in Mashpee, said to be the nation's first Indian Plantation, on land that once belonged to the Wampanoag tribe.] On Martha's Vineyard island, in the wealthy town of Chilmark where Barack Obama is vacationing this week, sits a strange, rather ancient stone wall hidden in the protected woodlands. It ends at a large boulder – Waskosim's Rock – perched atop a hill. The wall, known locally as "the Middle Line," is a kind of New Wo

Paul Wolfowitz: Obama Is No Realist

[Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former president of the World Bank, was U.S. deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005.] "We're All Realists Now." No. Pragmatists maybe, but not "realists." Barack Obama's election as U.S. president delighted many people, especially the self-described foreign-policy "realists" who accused his predecessor, George W. Bush, of denying reality in favor

Martin Peretz: Lockerbie ... A Sabotage of Justice

[Martin Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.] This was a matter of American interest. More than that: it was actually an American matter. And the contempt that Great Britain, particularly Scotland, and Libya have shown the United States in it is a fact with which we must conjure, lest this drama in four parts otherwise define, delimit and demean our very position in world affairs. This is a choice that neither Russia nor China ever seem to face. That is, they never sta

Matthew Vadum: Obama's Plan to Desecrate 9/11

[Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank that studies the politics of philanthropy.] The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry. This effort to reshape the American psyche has nothing to do with healing the nation and everyth

Quentin Letts: British weariness with terrorism

[Quentin Letts is political sketch writer and theater critic for London's Daily Mail newspaper. A former New York bureau chief for the London Times, he is the author of Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain, a series of vituperative torpedoes aimed at Britain's political and cultural elite. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.] The only surprising thing about Britain's release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi is that certain big shots in the U.S. were surprised. FBI d

Newsweek Editorial: Did Britain Wreck the World?

[Sources: Sean Hanretta and Priya Satia, Assistant Professors, Department of History Stanford University; Research By Jesse Ellison] By Jove, it certainly seems that way. Most of today's festering conflicts can be traced to colonial-era meddling, either through partition—slicing and dicing the planet as they saw fit—or, worse, indiscriminately corralling unrelated ethnic groups into a single, quarrelsome country. To wit: SRI LANKA During their 150-year rule, th

Brent Baker: Will Networks Note Sheehan's Anti-Obama Protest?

When Cindy Sheehan arrives on Martha’s Vineyard tomorrow (Tuesday), to protest against President Barack Obama, will the news media be as drawn to her as they were in the summer of 2005 when she was condemning George W. Bush? Last week, ABC anchor Charles Gibson declared “enough already” when asked on Chicago’s WLS Radio about Sheehan’s plan to travel to Obama’s island vacation spot to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When she camped near Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch four ye