Roundup: Media's Take

Max Boot: It's Not Over Yet

Iraq is slipping deeper into the blood-red waters of civil strife. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. Hizballah is crowing in the wake of Israel's inconclusive attacks. Hamas runs the Palestinian Authority. Iran is drawing closer to acquiring nuclear weapons. Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, continue to taunt the West with messages of defiance, as jihadist cells from London to Lahore plot fresh attacks. Given such grim news five years after 9/11, it is a

Evan Thomas and Andrew Romano: How American Myths (like 9-11) Are Made

The story of workaday men and women rising to greatness is one of America's most cherished myths. As a term, myth is much misunderstood; hearing it, many people take the word to mean "lie," when in fact a myth is a story, a narrative, that explains individual and national realities—how a person or a country came to be, why certain things happen in the course of a life or of history, and what fate may have in store for us. Myths are a peculiar hybrid of truth and falsehood, resentments

James Castagnera: Osama bin Laden Is Our Sci-Fi Nightmare

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column ìAttorney at Large.] The future is now. We live in a Sci-Fi world: supersonic flight and space travel; cloning and organ transplants; computers and artificial intelligence; weapons of mass destruction and stealth bombers. The best evidence of our having entered the realms of fantasy and science fiction is Osama bin Laden. Our Wes

Fareed Zakaria: The year of living fearfully

It's 1938, says the liberal columnist Richard Cohen, evoking images of Hitler's armies massing in the face of an appeasing West. No, no, says Newt Gingrich, the Third World War has already begun. Neoconservatives, who can be counted on to escalate, argue that we're actually in the thick of the Fourth World War. The historian Bernard Lewis warned a few weeks ago that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, could be planning to annihilate Israel (and perhaps even the United States) on Aug. 22 becau

Katha Pollitt: The Trouble with Bush's 'Islamofascism'

[Ms. Pollitt is a columnist for the Nation.] If you control the language, you control the debate. As the Bush Administration's Middle Eastern policy sinks ever deeper into bloody incoherence, the "war on terror" has been getting a quiet linguistic makeover. It's becoming the "war on Islamic fascism." The term has been around for a while -- Nexis takes it back to 1990, when the writer and historian Malise Ruthven used "Islamo-fascism" in the London Indep

Gerald Posner: Why protect the Saudi royal family and Pakistani military?

[Gerald Posner is a journalist and author of Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. He is a member of the board of HNN.] On Wednesday, President Bush admitted officially for the first time that the CIA held some foreign terror suspects abroad. In his remarks, he spoke about Abu Zubaydah, whom I discussed at length in Chapter 19, ''The Interrogation,'' of my 2003 book, Why America Slept. Bush acknowledged some of the information I disclosed, that Zubaydah was wo

Ivan Eland: What If the U.S. and Iranian Presidents Did Debate?

[Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the

Sidney Blumenthal: Cheney Picks a Biographer

With two and a half years remaining in the Bush administration, Dick Cheney has appointed his own official biographer - a choice that illuminates the vice president's deeply held view of truth and history. Cheney's rise from a modest background in Casper, Wyoming to become the most powerful vice president in American history is a story that contains many unresolved and still murky aspects that would demand the most diligent scholarship and acute judgment on the part of a biographer

Fred Glass: How Much Longer Will Unions Survive?

[Fred Glass is an instructor in the Labor and Community Studies Department at San Francisco City College, and the communications director for the California Federation of Teachers. Reach him at cftoakland@igc.org.] ... Under attack by the very federal agencies put in place 70 years ago to ensure free collective bargaining and facing political assaults in several states - including California - AFL-CIO unions have split into two groups, threat

Richard Cohen: 1938 all over again?

In his upcoming book about the horrors of the 20th century, "The War of the World," the British historian Niall Ferguson has a chapter called "The Pity of Peace." It is about 1938, when World War II loomed, and Britain -- especially and importantly Britain -- did precious little to stop it. The warnings of Churchill -- "believe me, it may be the last chance . . ." -- were ignored, and the government under Neville Chamberlain obstinately pursued a policy that forever

Andrew Cohen: Koizumi could have shown courage and leadership

[Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University.] The other day Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan made a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine to observe the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. It was a last act of defiance against critics, including former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who asked him not to go. Mr. Koizumi believed it was principled to go to the shrine, which honours 14 war criminals among the c

Brendan Miniter: George Allen's dismaying indifference to Virginia's racial history

Sen. George Allen of Virginia was born in Southern California, is the son of a former football legend, and is a political conservative. He's strong on national defense, favors tax cuts, and, as a former governor, has a record of being tough on crime. He is also a budding GOP presidential candidate who has been considered a top contender for the top job. But while campaigning for re-election to the Senate recently, Mr. Allen stumbled to reveal a weakness that could keep him from a sp

Alan Dershowitz: Norman Finkelstein's Obscenities

The level of “academic” discourse on the Middle-East reached a new low—quite a feat considering some of the old lows—when the notorious Jewish anti-Semite and Holocaust-justice denier Norman Finkelstein wrote a screed suggesting that I be targeted “for assassination” because of my views on Israel. The obscene article was accompanied by an obscene cartoon drawn by “Latuff”, a frequent accomplice of Finkelstein. The cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in rapturous joy while viewing images of de

Business & Media Institute: Journalists have warned of climate change for 100 years, but can’t decide weather we face an ice age or warming

Thanks to the release of Al Gore’s latest effort on global warming – this time in book and movie form – climate change is the hot topic in press rooms around the globe. It isn’t the first time. The media have warned about impending climate doom four different times in the last 100 years. Only they can’t decide if mankind will die from warming or cooling. As the noise from the controversy has increased, it has drowned out any debate. Journalists have taken a

James Castagnera: Ramsey Case Reminiscent of Longstanding Local Murder Mystery

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column Attorney at Large.] Who dunnit? With many murders, the killer is identified from the get-go. In those cases, justice is swift and certain. For instance, a guy named Sullivan was convicted recently of stabbing his wife to death in a mattress store last year not more than ten minutes walk from my front door. He was sentenced to life in

Alan Dershowitz: Hezbollah's Final Solution

The uniqueness of the Holocaust was not the Nazi's determination to kill the Jews of Germany and even of neighboring Poland. Other genocides, such as those by the Cambodians and the Turks, sought to rid particular areas of so called undesirables by killing them. The utter uniqueness of the Holocaust was the Nazi plan to "ingather" all the Jews of the world to the death camp and end the Jewish "race" forever. It almost succeeded. The Nazis ingathered tens of thousands o

Jonah Goldberg: The swastika and the scimitar

THE JEWS everywhere are "the Muslim's bitter enemies," said a prominent Islamic leader. Throughout history, the "irreconcilable enemy of Islam" has conspired and schemed and "oppressed and persecuted 40 million Muslims," he said. In Palestine, the Jews are establishing "a base from which to extend their power over neighboring Islamic countries." And, he proclaimed, "this war, which was unleashed by the world Jewry," provided "Muslims the bes

Nat Hentoff: Bush's Invisible Ink

"The Constitution is not what the President [alone] says it is." —American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine, July 24. When George W. Bush signs a bill from Congress into law, he adds a "signing statement"—more of them than any of his predecessors—that he will not enforce that law if it impedes his inherent constitutional authority as head of "the unitary executive." (Press secretary Tony

Roger Scruton: "Islamofascism"

[Mr. Scruton is the author, most recently, of "A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism," just published by Continuum.] The term "Islamofascism" was introduced by the French writer Maxine Rodinson (1915-2004) to describe the Iranian Revolution of 1978. Rodinson was a Marxist, who described as "fascist" any movement of which he disapproved. But we should be grateful to him for coining a word that enables people on the left to denounce our commo

Peter Beinart: Ned Scare?

Is Ned Lamont today's Carl Maxey? Maxey, an obscure Spokane attorney and anti-Vietnam activist, seized his 15 minutes of fame in 1970 when he challenged Washington state's famously hawkish Henry "Scoop" Jackson in the Democratic Senate primary. Maxey, unlike Lamont, got crushed. But his antiwar allies took over state parties in Washington and across the country. And, two years later, in a stunning upset, they powered George McGovern to the Democratic presidential nomination.