Roundup: Media's Take

Adam Cohen: While Nixon Campaigned, the F.B.I. Watched John Lennon

... The F.B.I.’s surveillance of [John] Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics. At the time of the John Sinclair rally, there was talk that Lennon would join a national concert tour aimed at encouraging young people to get involved in the politics — and at defeating

Max Boot: The Stubbornly Hopeful President

THE BODY COUNT continues to mount in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military situation continues to deteriorate. On the home front, Democrats appear resurgent, and Republicans are bracing themselves for losses in November. If I were George W. Bush, I would have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. But if he is plagued by despair or doubt, he gave no sign of it in an Oval Office meeting last week with seven conservative columnists. Leaning forward in an a

Bret Stephens: Pope Provocateur

Five days: That's how long it took Pope Benedict XVI to express regret for all the offense caused by his speech last week at the University of Regensburg, in his native Bavaria. But maybe his apology -- on Sunday, he said he was "deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages in my address" -- was as sly as the speech itself. That speech deserves to be read in its totality, and not simply as the spark that set fire to churches across the West Bank becau

Steven Scholl: Why Martin Amis is wrong about the triumph of Islamists

[Steven Scholl is a writer and film maker living in Ashland, Oregon. He also leads tours to the Middle East with his company Imagine Adventures.] 'In his Sept 10 op-ed piece for The Observer, Martin Amis provides what is becoming the stump speech for secularists who are sick of religion and the suffering it generates and who find Islam especially dangerous to civilization. I share some of Amis’s concerns but find his analysis of Islam and Islamism rather mixed up. Like so many other

Peter Beinart: Just Who Is Our Enemy?

If you don't know who you're fighting, you can't beat them. In World War II, the enemy was clear: the Axis powers. In the cold war, the enemy was fuzzier. George Kennan, architect of President Truman's early containment policies, believed we were fighting one country: the Soviet Union. But Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state, believed the Soviets controlled communist movements in every country. This contradiction came back to haunt Truman's successors, who assumed that, because the Viet Co

John Yoo: How the Presidency Regained Its Balance

[John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and the author of “War by Other Means.”] FIVE years after 9/11, President Bush has taken his counterterrorism case to the American people. That’s because he has had to. This summer, a plurality of the Supreme Court found, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Congress must explicitly approve military commissions to try suspected terrorists. So Mr. Bush has

Fareed Zakaria: Mao & Stalin, Osama & Saddam

I'm glad George W. Bush is using the bully pulpit to clarify the war on terror. Many of Bush's basic ideas—such as the need for reform in the Arab world—are sensible; it's their simplistic and botched execution, coupled with a mindless unilateralism, that have derailed his foreign policy. But in the past week the president, seeking to shore up domestic support for his policies, has been redefining the nature of the enemy. In doing so he is making a huge conceptual mistake, one that could haunt A

Stan Winer: South Africa's New Fascism

[South African writer Stan Winer is author of the book Between the Lies: Rise of the media-military-industrial complex, published in London by Southern Universities Press, 2004. Buy this book from www.amazon.co.uk or download a free PDF of the full text at http://www.coldtype.net/archives.html.] One thing the 'old' and the 'new' South Africa have in common is a capacity for inventing h

Robert F. Turner: Executive Power in Wartime

[Robert F. Turner cofounded the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1981 and is a former three-term chairman of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.] The scope of executive power has become a key and controversial matter since September 11, 2001. It is central, for instance, to assessing the legality of warrantless wiretaps by the National Security Agency of communications between America and susp

Harlan Cleveland: Coalitions Are Popular if They’re for Real

[Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, a Princeton graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. In government he has been a high official of the Marshall Plan, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In academia he has served as dean of two graduate schools of public affairs (the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the

Roger Pulvers: War's heroes and villains ... Two sides of the same coin

[Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. His latest book is a collection of 12 secular bible stories,"The Honey and the Fires," from ABC Books (Australia). Click here for his website.] For two days, on Aug. 18 and 19, 1966, Australian soldiers fought a battle at the village of Long Tan in South Vietnam. Though vastly outnumbered, they held their gr

Ruth Brooks: Fear-mongering conservatives are on their perennial crusade to purge universities of liberal professors

WITH SEPTEMBER upon us, it's time to reflect on that perennially popular back-to-school activity, Bash the Professors. According to David Horowitz's book, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," American universities are dominated by "a shocking and perverse culture of academics who are poisoning the minds of today's college students with … hatred of America … and support for America's terrorist enemies." His crusade against "radical

Leon Wieseltier: What would Niebuhr do?

[Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.] Democratic realism, progressive realism, ethical realism--the pageant of the paradoxes goes on. The adjectives betray a bad conscience about the noun, they cleanse the noun of its brutality, and raise it up, so that it may be possible to be edifying without being stupid. The war in Iraq, and its plenitude of unanticipated consequences, has raised a suspicion that idealism might be stupid; and there is no denying the hallu

Christopher Brauchli: Iraq and Iran learned the lessons of deception we taught in the 1980s

[Christopher Brauchli is a lawyer in Boulder, Colorado. He can be reached at: Brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. Visit his website: http://hraos.com/] They were very good students. That is why they remembered the techniques that we taught them back in the 1980s. During the 1980s Iran and Iraq were engaged in a war that the United States hoped would go on for a very long time. That is because e

Alan Maass: The hysteria about Islamic Fascism

[Alan Maass is the editor of the Socialist Worker. He can be reached at: alanmaass@sbcglobal.net] THE CHIEFTAINS of the never-ending "war on terror" are peddling a newly updated enemy: "Islamic fascism." After British officials claimed in August to have foiled an al-Qaeda plot to blow up transatlantic air flights, George Bush said the arrests were "a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Isla

Adel Guindy: The Islamization of Egypt

[Adel Guindy is a writer on Middle East issues based in France. ] This article discusses the recent strengthening of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist movements in Egypt. It then looks at the resulting regression in modernization and Westernization efforts in the country. The article also focuses on the adverse effects these changes have had on Egyptian Copts. The success of the Muslim Brotherhood to gain a fifth of the parliamentary seats in the latest ele

Paul Rogat Loeb: The Fugitive Girl Act

[Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, winner of the 2005 Nautilus Award for the best book on social change, and Soul of a Citizen See www.paulloeb.org. To get his articles roughly once a month, email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.] Do you remember the Fugitive Slave Act? It criminalized not only slaves who'd escaped to non-slave states, but also anyone who he

Daniel Sneider: The U.S.-Korea Tie ... Myth and Reality

[The writer, a former foreign correspondent, is associate director for research at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He is working on a diplomatic history of the American alliances with South Korea and Japan during the Cold War.] The U.S. visit this week by South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun offers yet another opportunity to bemoan the crisis of confidence in our alliance. Anti-American views, particularly among the young, remain widespread in South Korea. On an

Jamison Foser: ABC apologists defend flawed miniseries as fake but true

ABC's heavily promoted miniseries, The Path to 9/11, billed as being"based solely and completely on the 9/11 Commission Report" has now proven to be a fraudulent attack on former President Bill Clinton and whitewash of President Bush's record.Filmmakers have acknowledged basing the film in part on a book by a Bush administration PR official.They acknowledge

James Castagnera: 9-11 and the Search for Meaning

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia attorney and author, who writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large.”] Human beings need meaning. We seek it in events and mark it with anniversaries. This summer was especially meaningful for me. Events included the wedding of our son and the high school graduation of our daughter. With her now off to college, we’re empty-nesters for the first time in 22 years. As if that wasn’t enough, the summer marked my 25th year out of la