Roundup: Media's Take

Akhil Bakshi: Orphans of History (Uighurs)

[Akhil Bakshi is a staff writer for Indian Express.com.] Uighurs are unlike any other people in the annals of mankind: they do not trace their origins to neolithic times. They do not claim that antiquity is littered with their linguistic and cultural traces. Or that they have cantered, sabres drawn, the length and breadth of Asia. They have no enviable history, rich in incident, worth recording or writing about. This vacuum in Uighur history has invariably led their Chinese masters

Norman Solomon: Escalation Scam: Troops in Afghanistan

[Norman Solomon, co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com] The president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now. That’s how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually. A few times since last fa

Robert D. Kaplan: Obama Cannot Afford to Get Iran Wrong

President Barack Obama has come under withering criticism from neoconservatives and liberal internationalists for not speaking out more quickly and forcefully in support of the pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran. But now that the initial crisis is past, and Teheran has settled in for a behind-the-scenes struggle among the Shiite clergy, it is apparent that Obama's instinct has been pitch-perfect. The last time an American president was criticized for not coming out forcefully enoug

Scott Horton: Shostakovich in Oxford

[Scott Horton is a Contributing Editor of Harper's Magazine and writes No Comment for its website (Courtesy, Harper's Online).] As Washington’s attention turns to things Russian, the New York Review of Books publishes a selection from a forthcoming volume (Berlin’s Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960) of the correspondence of Isaiah Berlin. (sub. reqd.) The letter describes the June 1958 visit of Dmitri Shostakovich to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. (He had been selected for the

D. D. Guttenplan: Michael Jackson and I.F. Stone

[D. D. Guttenplan is the author of I.F. Stone: American Radical (Farrar, Giroux & Strauss, June 2009). This epic book was begun in 1991 and 18 years later has reached completion in relaying the fascinating life and times of the journalist some people have called the “first blogger”, due to Stone’s integrity and passions. Don’s other book is The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case, and is an award-winning former writer for Newsday. Don was born in Virginia and cur

Brett Stephens: From McNamara to Obama

Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said that "in preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." Robert S. McNamara, who spent many years thinking about the Vietnam War, first as an architect and then as a critic (and getting it wrong on both ends), was a man who believed mainly in plans. McNamara, who died yesterday at 93, will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. Whatever el

David Brooks: In Search of Dignity

[David Brooks's Op-Ed column in The New York Times started in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on"The Newshour with Jim Lehrer."] When George Washington was a young man, he copied out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” Some of the rules in his list dealt with the niceties of going to a dinner party or meeti

Stephen Schlesinger: Washington's Sad History in Latin America

[Stephen Schlesinger is an Adjunct Fellow at the Century Foundation in New York City. He is the former Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York City (1997-2006). Mr. Schlesinger received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Harvard Law School...For twelve years, he served as Governor Mario Cuomo’s speechwriter and foreign policy advisor. ] Barack Obama has quite a presidential legacy to deal with as he plots his course in Latin Americ

Will Inboden: The Sources of Russian Conduct (Same as Ever)

[William Inboden is Senior Vice-President of the Legatum Institute, which publishes the Prosperity Index. Most recently he served as Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the National Security Council at the White House, where he worked on a range of foreign policy issues including the National Security Strategy, democracy and governance, contingency planning, counter-radicalization, and multilateral institutions and initiatives. (Courtesy, The New Foreign Policy.com).] This wee

Steve Benen: Run for president without a day job?

Since Carter and Reagan were able to mount successful presidential campaigns after leaving their governorships behind, many have come to believe the best way to launch a national campaign is to run without a day job.The argument, at first blush, seems to make some sense. If a candidate has no professional or official responsibilities, he or she can be a full-time candidate without distractions or potentially controversial governing decisions. And if rival candidates do have day

Eduardo Porter: Tales of Republicans, Bonobos and Adultery

... It is hard not to be bemused by the contrast between the straight-and-narrow political persona of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and his messy, steamy circumstances. Still, I am somewhat perplexed by the surprise and the outrage over a transgression that has been around forever. We all have heard the Kinsey statistics: half of married men reported having an extramarital affair at some time during their marriage; a quarter of married women had an affair by the time they were

Paul Krugman: The 30's Show

[Krugman is a Noble Prize Winner who blogs about the economy and politics.] O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that? Let’s do the math. Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up w

Johann Hari: The Other 9/11 Has Returned to Stalk Latin America

[Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. In 2007 Amnesty International named him Newspaper Journalist of the Year. In 2008 he became the youngest person ever to win Britain's leading award for political writing, the Orwell Prize.] The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stal

Rick Salutin: Repression in Tehran is a sign of hope

[Rick Salutin was Globe and Mail media columnist from 1991 to 1999 and is now an op-ed columnist.] In the gathering global gloom - economic, political, climatic - try seizing as a sign of hope the gory brutal aftermath to Iran's election. Seriously. I take my cue on this from young Canadian academics of Middle Eastern background who see themselves as Muslims with a secular and liberal democratic bent. They include Nader Hashemi - quoted in Time this week calling it a “t

A. Serwer: Obama, Lincoln, and Gay Rights

[Serwer is a staff writer for The Atlantic.] Sean Wilentz's lengthy book review of several Lincoln biographies isn't up on The New Republic's website yet, [actually it is, my bad] but his criticism of several books on Lincoln--and his general objection to the"two Lincolns" narrative that rejects the fact that Lincoln was anti-slavery to begin with, may offer some insight into President O

Max Boot: How Piracy Was Defeated in the Past and Can Be Again

[MAX BOOT is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today. He is currently writing a history of guerrilla warfare.] The world's attention was riveted in April 2009 when Somali pirates tried to seize the Maersk Alabama, a U.S. cargo vessel delivering relief supplies

Justin Raimondo: History Haunts Honduras

About the crisis in Honduras, let’s get this out of the way from the very beginning: the U.S. government has no right to lecture the Hondurans about the virtues of democracy. It was, after all, Uncle Sam that encouraged, even masterminded, the dominance of the military that colors so many chapters in the history of Honduras. For the president of the United States to get up on his high horse and call for the return of democratic rule is like the Iranians hectoring us about Waco – as they did rece

George F. Will: Will It Be 1972 Forever?

[A Newsweek Contributing Editor since 1976, Will produces a back page column addressing diverse topics from politics to baseball.Will's newspaper column appears twice weekly in 480 newspapers and has been syndicated nationally by The Washington Post Writers Group since 1974...Will was born in Champaign, Illinois in 1941, and educated at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; Magdalene College, Oxford University, and at Princeton, where he received an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics. He has taught

Rhodes Cook: Is the GOP poised for another quick comeback?

[Rhodes Cook is a senior columnist.] The current state of the Republican Party is a good-news, bad-news situation. The good news is that the GOP has gone through several debilitating elections over the last generation and each time has recovered quickly. The bad news is that the conditions may not be as ripe this time for a fast Republican comeback as they were after the elections of 1964, 1976 and 1992. The presidential election of 2008 is the fourth since

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Russia must re-focus with post-imperial eyes

[The writer was US National Security Adviser 1977-1981. He is co-author with Brent Scowcroft of the recently published ‘America and the World’.] President Barack Obama should have three central goals in mind when he meets Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin next week: first, to advance US-Russian co-operation in areas where our interests coincide; second, to emphasise the mutual benefits in handling disagreements between the two countries within inte