Roundup: Media's Take

Jack Miles: A Divorce the Church Should Smile Upon

[Jack Miles is a senior fellow for religious affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and a scholar in residence with the Getty Research Institute.] THE decision of the global Anglican Communion to threaten the Episcopal Church, its American affiliate, with expulsion is about much more than the headline issue of homosexuality. Yes, the impending divorce has been precipitated by the decision of the Episcopal Church to consecrate a gay bishop and to allow individual co

Humberto Fontova: Castro and Our Wallets

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel; Hollywod's Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club Main Selection.] A legislative scheme is gaining steam in Washington, greatly aided by lobbyists for Archer Daniels Midland, to "make it easier" for Cuba to "buy" from U.S. vendors. Despite all the scribbling and gabble about the "U.S. embargo of Cuba," or "blockade" as termed by The Congressional Black Caucus and Castro lobbyists (but I

Peter Beinart: How I got the Iraq war wrong

Why, exactly, did you support this war?" asked my wife the other day. A fitting question for my last TRB, since people have been asking it of me and this magazine since we made that disastrous decision more than four years ago. For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did. When I first saw Makiya--the Iraqi exile who has devoted his life to chronicling Saddam Hussein's crimes--I recognized the type: gentle, disheveled, distracted, obsessed. He re

Daniel Henninger: Why the New York Times buried Maj. Bruce Crandall's Medal of Honor on page 15

Amid the mad jumble that makes the news in our time, the White House on Monday held a ceremony for a Medal of Honor recipient. His name is Bruce Crandall. Mr. Crandall is 74 now, and earned his medal as a major, flying a Huey helicopter in 1965 in the Vietnam War.... ruce Crandall's Medal of Honor, at an emotional remove of 42 years, offers a chance to ponder just where the military stands now in the nation's life. The particulars of Lt. Col. Crandall's act of heroism, and what othe

Charlie Cook: Throw history out the window ... Past patterns may not apply in 2008 presidential campaign

Just as baseball fans tend to be hooked on statistics -- and the more arcane the better -- political aficionados often look to historical precedents and analogous situations for clues of future events, whether truly applicable or not. All in all, it's not a bad thing, as long as one does not become a prisoner of history. But this presidential campaign might be so different that many past patterns will not apply or might be terribly misleading. Over the last 90 years,

David Luban: The ICJ should have been harder on Serbia

[David Luban is professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown University Law Center.] This week, the International Court of Justice released a disappointingly wishy-washy ruling on whether Serbia bears responsibility, as a state, for genocide in Bosnia during the Bosnian war. Hannah Arendt famously complained 45 years ago, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, that international law had yet to come to grips with the notion of a criminal state. This week's ICJ decision raises the question

Lawrence Repeta: Politicians, Teachers and the Japanese Constitution ... Flag, Freedom and the State

[Lawrence Repeta is a professor at Omiya Law School in Japan and a member of the Washington State Bar Association (U.S.). The focus of his advocacy and research is transparency in government. He is a founding director of Information Clearinghouse Japan, an NGO devoted to promoting open government in Japan. He is the author of Yami wo Utsu—Secrecy and the Future of America, a compilation of profiles and interviews with reporters, activists and others who have used the Freedom of Information Act t

Mark Moyar: Over There ... America's Unsung Military Heroes

[Mark Moyar, a journalist at the NY Sun, is the author of Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965.] Neil Sheehan began his Pulitzer-Prize winning book "A Bright Shining Lie" by pronouncing the Vietnam War "a war without heroes." In the rest of the book, the Americans in Vietnam largely came across as fools, liars, criminals, or a combination thereof, with the exception of Mr. Sheehan and his fellow journalists, who were depicted as brave unmaskers of inepti

Max Boot: Unless allies spend more on defense, the U.S. will continue to act unilaterally out of necessity

TONY BLAIR'S decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from Iraq is understandable. The prime minister had to make a difficult decision about where to allocate Britain's scarce resources, and he decided, reasonably enough, that the top priority was to send reinforcements to Afghanistan, where 5,500 British troops are struggling to hold back a Taliban onslaught. The tragedy is that he had to rob Peter to pay Paul because Britain can't maintain 7,000 troops in Iraq and 7,000 in Afghanistan.

Robert Fisk: 27 July 1880. A date Mr Blair should look up

Out of the frying pan, into the historical fire. If only our leaders read history. In 1915, the British swept up from Basra, believing that the Iraqis would reward them with flowers and love, only to find themselves surrounded at Kut al-Amara, cut down by Turkish shellfire and cholera. Now we are reinforcing Nato in that tomb of the British Army, Afghanistan. Hands up any soldiers who know that another of Britain's great military defeats took place in the very sands in which your c

Joshua Spivak: NY should move up its primary

[Joshua Spivak, a lawyer, is a public relations executive.] LEGISLATORS in Albany are discussing the possibility of moving New York’s 2008 presidential primary up a month to Feb. 5, joining states like California, Georgia and New Jersey in their individual attempts to create a new Super Tuesday on the heels of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Although some are criticizing the move as a transparent effort to help New York’s favorite son, Rudolph Giuliani,

Andrew Cockburn: When Rummy Tried to Nuke Russia

[Salon Editor's note: This passage from Andrew Cockburn's book "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy" begins just after the 1988 elections. The once and future secretary of defense had again failed to realize his presidential ambitions. After dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination, he had pinned his remaining hopes on being the running mate of his preferred candidate, Bob Dole. But George Bush the elder, no ally of Rumsfeld, won the Republican nomination an

Timothy Noah: Does Bush Know What Neocon Means?

Near the end of his new book, Rumsfeld: His Rise, His Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy—an unfriendly but persuasive portrait of the former secretary of defense—journalist Andrew Cockburn relates a story about an encounter between Bush père et fils that I put in the category "remarkable if true." It is August 2004, and the president is taking time off from his re-election campaign to visit his parents at their summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Brent Scowcroft, former national security

Chohong Choi: Bush, Saddam & Rommel ... Some Parallels

[Chohong Choi has lived in Hong Kong and New York, and can be reached at: a9591321@graduate.hku.hk. ] “And don't forget that we can't pull out of Iraq now because it would dishonor the troops who haven't died yet.” -- William Blum Remember the famous saying, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it”? “Nonsense,” countered one of my history professors in one of my undergradua

Humberto Fontova: Keep Cuba Isolated

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club "Main Selection."] Political and academic soothsayers insist that change (for the better) looms in Cuba. With Fidel Castro's incapacitation, and his "pragmatic" brother, Raul, at the helm the process is ratcheting forward inexorably, we're told. But for relentless hen-pecking by those insufferable right-wing Cuban-Americans, unconscionable blackmail by their slick pol

Aziz Huq: Lincoln and Washington took a far different view of executive power than Bush does

[Aziz Huq directs the liberty and national security project at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. In addition to representing detainees in military custody, he is co-writing a book on presidential power and national security, to be published in 2007 by the New Press. He is a 2006 recipient of the Carnegie Scholars Fellowship and has published scholarship in the Columbia Law Review, the Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, and the New School's Constellations Journal. He has

Steve Fraser: Was 2006 a Turning-Point Election?

[Steve Fraser is co-founder of the American Empire Project and Editor-at-Large of the journal New Labor Forum. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator, A History of Wall Street in American Life, and most recently co-editor of Ruling America:

Max Boot: The lessons learned from the Balkans in the 1990s call for more troops in Iraq

THE IRAQ DEBATE is starting to resemble the Yugoslavia debate of the early 1990s. Once again we are hearing that crazed foreigners are in the grip of ancient ethnic hatreds and that the U.S. has no cause to get involved in their internecine strife. Ironically, some of those now making this "realist" argument resisted its spurious logic 15 years ago. They were right to do so then, and they would be tragically mistaken were they to succumb to the siren song of nonintervention today.

Carolyn Porco: Nixon's mistake to abandon Apollo

[Carolyn Porco is a planetary scientist, the leader of the Imaging Science Team on the Cassini mission and director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations.] AFTER years of spending our nation’s space budget building an orbiting space station of questionable utility, serviced by an operationally expensive space shuttle of unsafe design, NASA has set a new direction for the future of human spaceflight. Once again, we have our sights on the Moon ... and beyond. We are

Bill McKibben: The Real News about Global Warming

[This piece, which appears in the March 15, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.] [Bill McKibben is a frequent contributor to The New York Review and is scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the D