Roundup: Media's Take

Seumas Milne: The seeds of Latin America's rebirth were sown in Cuba

[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.] On 9 October 1967, Che Guevara faced a shaking sergeant Mario Teran, ordered to murder him by the Bolivian president and CIA, and declared: "Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man." The climax of Stephen Soderbergh's two-part epic, Che, in real life this final act of heroic defiance marked the defeat of multiple attempts to spread the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America. But 40 yea

Max Boot: Obama's naive claim

“America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.” So said our new president in his interview Tuesday with Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language satellite news channel. At first the words washed over me. Then I did some simple math. Let’s see… 20 or 30 years ago… that would be 1989 or 19

Fouad Ajami: Obama Tells Arabia's Despots They're Safe

[Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.] "To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," President Barack Obama said in his inaugural. But in truth, the new way forward is a return to realpolitik and business as usual in America's encounter with that Greater Middle

John B. Judis: The misunderstood John Maynard Keynes

...[T]he tendency only to turn to Keynes for technical advice in bad times doesn't really do justice to his worldview. Keynes's ideas were not just a prescription for an ailing economy; they were a complete theory of capitalism, one meant to be relevant in both good times and bad.... ... As Robert Skidelsky makes clear in his masterful threevolume biography, Keynes was a "new Liberal"--but with Bloomsbury's aesthetic idealism and disdain for vulgar capitalism thrown in. &q

Norman Solomon: Forty-Four Years Later, LBJ's Ghost Hovers Over the 44th President

[Norman Solomon, the author of "War Made Easy," is a national co-chair of Healthcare NOT Warfare. The other co-chairs of the campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America, are Donna Smith (featured in "Sicko"), Marilyn Clement (national coordinator of Healthcare-NOW) and Representative John Conyers, chief sponsor of H.R. 676.] A few days after the inauguration, in a piece celebrating the arrival of the Obama administration, New York Times columnist Bob H

Ralph Peters: Will Afghanistan be President Obama's Vietnam?

[Ralph Peters is a New York Post columnist.] A NEW president with a strong domestic agenda and a career-long lack of interest in foreign policy inherits a distant war and feels he has to demonstrate his toughness: That was LBJ and Vietnam. Will Afghanistan be President Obama's Vietnam, with Pakistan as Cambodia on steroids? Such comparisons have already been made, but miss the mark. The core reason we failed in Vietnam was our largesse: We poured in so mu

Sandy Tolan: Five Questions for George Mitchell

[Sandy Tolan is the author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, and associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.] The deep irony of the Israeli-Palestinian"peace process" first struck me in 1996 as I was driving through the West Bank from Hebro

Reid Buckley: America needs a better Right than the GOP can provide

[Reid Buckley is an author and the founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking.] Way back in the early 1950s, when I was in my twenties, a favorite pastime was to take the first sentence of that day's lead editorial in the New York Times and, putting the newspaper aside, deduce the rest of the commentary. If I was unable to draw that deduction from the first sentence, I went to the second sentence. If I failed again, I betook myself outside and chopped half a cord of wood in ex

Deepak Tripathi: The BBC’s Day of Shame

[Deepak Tripathi is a former BBC journalist who spent 23 years in the corporation. His works can be found on http://deepaktripathi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at: DandATripathi@gmail.com.] The BBC finds itself in a serious controversy every few years, but this is the mother of all. The essence of the latest storm is this. A few days ago, the Disasters Emergency Committee of the

Michael Tomasky: The age of Obama promises the rebirth of US liberalism

[Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America; read his blog at Guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky] When in college, I flirted a bit with conservatism. I was mostly doing it to shock my father, and I quickly discovered that my heart really wasn't in it. But it was a useful experience, because it spurred dear dad to initiate some conversations with me. In essence, what he impressed upon me was the need to see the world through eyes other than my own. Try to examine events f

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Bad news ... we're back to 1931. Good news ... it's not 1933 yet

[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is the international business editor of the Daily Telegraph.] This may beat Germany (-7pc) Japan (-12pc) and Korea (-22pc) over the fourth quarter. But that merely underlines the dangers ahead as the collapse of global trade chokes the mini-boom in US exports, setting off another stage of the crisis. The US is losing 500,000 jobs a month. Brazil lost 650,000 in December. Beijing says 10m Chinese have lost their jobs since the crunch began. Japa

James Mann: At the White House, What’s Old May Be New

[James Mann is an author in residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.”] THE new Obama foreign policy team is on the job. Its senior members have been confirmed, and many worked in government the last time the Democrats occupied the White House. So we have a rough idea where things are headed, right? Back to the ideas and approaches we saw in the Clinton administration ...

Jacob Weisberg: Obama's Big-Picture Problem

[Author Bio: Weisberg is editor in chief of the Slate Group and author of "The Bush Tragedy."] An Inaugural Address is a new president's best opportunity to put forward a vision of government. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson proposed an expansion of the federal role to counter economic and racial injustice. "In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty," he declared. In 1981, Ronald Reagan called for a rollback of Johnson's Great Society: &quo

Fareed Zakaria: There's More To Fear Than Fear

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address is now known for only one sentence: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." But the audience at the time paid little attention to that line and the newspapers buried it in their reports the next day. As Jonathan Alter recounts in his book "The Defining Moment," the words that got the greatest applause were something more specific. "I shall ask Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis,"

Kinue Tokudome: Waterboarding ... The Meaning for Japan

"If you look at the history of the use of that technique used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the inquisition, used by the Japanese and prosecuted by us as war crimes, we prosecuted our own soldiers in Vietnam, I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture." 

Paul Abrams: Obama, Bush and the Unlearned Lesson of Watergate

[Paul Abrams received doctorate degrees in medicine and in law, and a B.A.summa cum laude in Political Science & Economics, all from Yale University. He is a board-certified oncologist and was editor of the Yale Law Journal.] As President Obama considers whether to expose and/or prosecute illegal, unethical or unconstitutional actions by the Bush Administration, it is understandable that he will follow his own inaugural admonition that he (we) will be judged by what we build, no

Charles Krauthammer: Obama's Inaugural Surprise

... Candidate Obama had promised the moon. In soaring cadences, he described a world laid waste by Bush, a world that President Obama would redeem -- bringing boundless hope and universal health, receding oceans and a healing planet. But now that Obama was president, the redeemer was withholding, the tone newly sober, even dour. The world was still in Bushian ruin, marked by "fear ... conflict ... discord ... petty grievances and false promises ... recriminations and worn-out d

Ben Macintyre: Welcome back, Tom Paine, unsung American hero

A drunken and dishevelled English journalist, a rebel once condemned as a Godless rabble-rouser, played a starring role in the inauguration of Barack Obama this week. This strange man had been, in his time, a pirate, a maker of ladies' corsets, a schoolteacher, a failed tobacconist and a jailbird. He first set foot in America at the age of 37, and died 200 years ago this year, poor, cantankerous and all but unmourned. Thomas Paine was not mentioned by name in Mr Obama's speech. But

Jay Janson: Mr. President, They Did Not Die For Us When Killing Vietnamese in Khe Sahn, Vietnam

[Jay Janson: Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.] Dear President Obama, In your inaugural address you said, "For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sahn" Mr. President, beg to correct. They did not die for us, or anyone else, while they were killing Vi

Karl Rove: Bush Was Right When It Mattered Most

[Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007.] Its call sign has always been Air Force One. But on Tuesday, it was Special Air Mission 28000, as former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura returned home to Texas on a plane full of family, friends, former staff and memories of eight years in the White House. The former president and his wife thanked each passenger, showing the thoughtfulnes