Roundup: Media's Take

Peter Wallison: Today's world would be far worse if Saddam were still in power

[Mr. Wallison is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; he was White House counsel in the Reagan administration. ] Given the problems and U.S. casualties in Iraq, polls show a large majority of the American people believe the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Yet if we imagine what the world would look like today if Saddam Hussein had not been deposed, it seems clear that almost no outcome in Iraq would be as adverse to the interests of the United States as today's worl

William Kristol: Why Americans should be happy

[Mr. Kristol is the editor of the Weekly Standard.] About three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, think the country is on the wrong track. About two-thirds of the public disapprove of the job performance of President Bush, and an even higher number disdain Congress. The media are excited about the prospect of a wealthy businessman running for President as an independent who could tap into broad public disgruntlement with the partisan politicians in Washington.

David Aaronovitch: Anti-Zionists should grow up

[David Aaronovitch is a regular columnist for The Times. He won the George Orwell prize for political journalism in 2001 and was the What the Papers Say Columnist of the Year for 2003.] It has long been one of the perverse talents of British middle-class activists to be able to devise campaigns which, instead of drawing attention to real grievances, divert attention away from them. I spent a lot of my early adulthood in observation of this phenomenon and recognise the inevitable mom

Jacob Laksin: Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews

When James Earl Carter left office in 1981, after suffering a decisive defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, the popular verdict held that he was a decent man, if a dismal president. At home, Carter had shown a persistent inability to address domestic concerns like double-digit inflation and soaring interest rates, attributing them and other problems to an American “malaise.” Abroad, he struggled with a number of foreign-policy embarrassments, most notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanist

Peggy Noonan: 2 national languages?

... The question of whether America should have an "official language," of whether English should be formally declared our "national language," is bubbling, and will be back, in Congress, the next few sessions. When you look at papers outlining the facts of the debate, things break down into dryness very quickly. Should "issues of language diversity" be resolved by imposing "linguistic uniformity"? This is like asking if the robots should spea

Cokie Roberts: Dinner-Party Diplomacy

With barely more than a year and a half left in his term, George W. Bush has finally pulled out a centuries-old weapon in the political arsenal of Washington power players: the dinner party. As politicians of both parties emerge from evenings at the White House impressed with their host (and themselves), they ask the same question: What took the President so long? Here's an affable man with an engaging wife; you'd think he would have used the power of the invitation years ago. Intimate gathering

Michael Rose: How a Revolution Saved an Empire

[Michael Rose, a retired British Army general, commanded the United Nations forces in the former Yugoslavia from 1994 to 1995.] AS Lord Cornwallis’s defeated army marched out of Yorktown, Va., in October 1781, its band is said to have played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” It seemed appropriate: Cornwallis, King George III and his ministers were convinced that this defeat and the withdrawal of British troops from the 13 colonies would result not only in anarchy in Amer

Louis Menand: Are the wrong people voting?

... The average voter is not held in much esteem by economists and political scientists, and [Bryan] Caplan [in his new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics” (Princeton; $29.95)] rehearses some of the reasons for this. The argument of his book, though, is that economists and political scientists have misunderstood the problem. They think that most voters are ignorant about political issues; Caplan thinks that most voters are wrong about the issues

Jim Castagnera: Women Warriors in the War on Terror

[Jim Castagnera of Havertown is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.] As of June 25th, 80 U.S. servicewomen have died in the Iraq War. While this is only about two percent of all American military fatalities in the war to date, this figure exceeds the total number of U.S. servicewomen killed in Korea, Vietnam and the First Gulf War combined… this according to the Public Broadcasting System.

Norman Solomon: A Bloody Media Mirror

[The new documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” based on Norman Solomon’s book of the same title, has just been released on DVD. For information about the full-length movie, produced by the Media Education Foundation and narrated by Sean Penn, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.] Many of America’s most prominent journalists want us to forget what they were saying and writing more than four years ago to boost the invasion of

Brendan Miniter: Even Gen. Washington didn't win every battle

[Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com] In 1776 Lt. Col. Thomas Knowlton seemed to be precisely the kind of military officer the American military needed to win the Revolution. He was a veteran of the French and Indian War two decades earlier. He proved to be a supreme leader of men in combat outside Boston. And he was tapped by Gen. George Washington to start a new elite military unit--Knowlton's Rangers--that was capable of operating behind enemy lines.

Jack Beatty: Sisyphean History of Campaign Finance Reform

[Jack Beatty is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly and the editor of Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America, which was named one of the top ten books of 2001 by Business Week] In 1907 Congress banned corporate contributions to political campaigns; on June 25, 2007, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court gave a green light to such contributions. "After today," Justice David Souter wrote in his dissent to last week’s decision, Federal Election Commission v. Wi

David Horowitz: Why We Went to War in Iraq (and why Al Gore's wrong)

When he was in office and responsible for protecting us, Al Gore was absent from the war on terror. As Vice President, he was part of an administration that failed to respond to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993; that cut and ran when al-Qaeda ambushed US Army Rangers in Mogadishu; that called for regime change in Iraq when Saddam expelled the UN weapons inspectors but then failed to remove Saddam or to get him to allow the UN inspectors back in; that failed to respond to the mu

Max Boot: GOP should stay the surge

SEN. RICHARD LUGAR's comments on Iraq came like a clap of thunder in the sultry summer skies of Washington. The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declared in a widely covered speech last week that he doesn't think "the current 'surge' strategy will succeed" and that we should therefore "downsize the U.S. military's role in Iraq." Other Republicans also have expressed frustration and impatience with the war effort, warning that they may start to defe

Kenneth D. Ackerman: Another J. Edgar Hoover?

[Kenneth D. Ackerman is author of "Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties."] WHAT created J. Edgar Hoover? He reigned with an iron fist as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation fo

Jim Castagnera: Remembering “Brown v. Board of Education”

[Jim Castagnera is the associate provost/associate counsel at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.] Last week the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decisions in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1. Yes, I said decisions, plural. No fewer than four separate opinions were filed in this 5-4 decision in which the bare majority struck down attempts by school-district defendants to assign students o

Sidney Blumenthal: The imperial vice presidency

When Huey P. Long left the governorship of Louisiana in 1932 to become a U.S. senator, he filled the position with a childhood friend named Oscar Kelly Allen, known as O.K., who gave the OK to whatever the Kingfish wished. The story is still told, perhaps apocryphal, that one day a leaf wafted through an open window and landed on O.K.'s desk and, without hesitation, he signed it. Two months after 9/11, on the day of the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov. 13, 2001, Vice President Dick

Ha-Joon Chang: How free trade hurts poor countries

[Ha-Joon Chang's book Bad Samaritans—Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World is published by Random House on 5th July.] Almost all rich countries got wealthy by protecting infant industries and limiting foreign investment. But these countries are now denying poor ones the same chance to grow by forcing free-trade rules on them before they are strong enough Once upon a time, the leading car-maker of a developing country exported its first passe

Patricia Cohen: An Unexpected Odd Couple ... Free Markets and Freedom

When President Bush declared last week that political openness naturally accompanied economic openness, his counterparts in Beijing and Moscow were not the only ones to object. Liberal and conservative intellectuals, even once ardent supporters, have backed away from the century-old theory that democracy and capitalism, like Paris Hilton and paparazzi, need each other to survive. From China, where astounding economic growth persists despite Communist Party rule, to Russia, where Pre

Thomas Powers: What Tenet Knew

[Thomas Powers is the author most recently of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda. He would like to thank the American Academy in Berlin, where this essay, in the latest New York Review of Books, was written.] [This essay, which considers At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by George Tenet with Bill Harlow (HarperCo