Roundup: Media's Take

WSJ Editorial: Gunter Grass, Tin Moralist

Nobel laureate Günter Grass, author of the postwar classic "The Tin Drum" and self-styled conscience of Germany, is a darling of the anti-American and anti-globalization set. He is also a former member of Hitler's Waffen SS. This previously unknown biographical tidbit emerged Saturday, 61 years after the fact. In an interview with the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to promote his forthcoming autobiography, Mr. Grass offered that he volunteered for a U-boat uni

Jeff Shear: The 40 Years War

[Jeff Shear is the author of Keys to the Kingdom, an investigation into a weapons deal with Japan, published by Doubleday in 1994. His writing and reporting have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone. He was staff correspondent for the National Journal, regularly reporting from the White House and Congress, and co-authored The Buying of the Congress, by Avon Books.] Now that a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel is in effect, contrasting it wi

Ross Douthout: What Year Is It? 1938? 1972? Or 1914?

[Mr. Douthat is an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly.] Foreign-policy debates are usually easy to follow: Liberals battle conservatives, realists feud with idealists, doves vie with hawks. But well into the second Bush term, traditional categories are in a state of collapse. On issue after issue, the Republicans and Democrats are divided against themselves, and every pundit seems determined to play George Kennan and found an intellectual party of one. We suffer from a surfeit

David Halberstam: Romney's unlearned lesson

[David Halberstam is the author of ``The Best and the Brightest." His 21st book, ``The Coldest Winter," about the entry of Chinese troops into the Korean War, will be published in the fall of 2007.] HOW LUCKY we are to have the governor of the state instructing the junior senator on the issue of Iraq, and making the case for the Al Qaeda-Baghdad connection, the very case the president and all his men tried to make so disingenuously a few years ago. How generous of him to s

George Monbiot: The failure of the attack on Lebanon has left the Israeli people less secure, but it has done nothing to dent the generals' power

... s it possible, as some have claimed, that Israel is pursuing a territorial claim? The Israeli columnist Tanya Reinhart reminds us that David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, believed that its borders should be "natural": the Jordan river in the east, the Suez canal and Sharm el-Sheikh in the south-west and south, and the Litani river (20 miles inside Lebanon) in the north. In his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, the historian Avi Shlaim des

Roger Pulvers: KIlling isn't the name of the game

[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). His website is: http://www17.ocn.ne.jp/~h-uesugi/secondpage.htm] 'Military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. . . . The target is a purely military one."

Charles Krauthammer: Democrats as Myopic Doves, Again

... Consider an analogy that the anti-war types hold dear: Iraq as Vietnam. I reject the premise, but let's assume it for the purpose of following the political consequences of anti-war movements. The anti-Vietnam War movement had its political successes. They were, as in Connecticut last Tuesday, mostly internecine. One Democratic presidency was destroyed (Lyndon Johnson), as was the presidential candidacy of his would-be successor, Hubert Humphrey. Like Iraq, Vietnam was b

Conn Hallinan: How the Irish Can Save the Middle East

[Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and a lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.] History is the story we tell ourselves in the present about the past. But how we punctuate the story—where we put the periods, the commas, and the ellipses—depends not on everything that happened, but on who is telling the story, where we stand in the narrative, and what outcome w

Sara Robinson: Defining the Authoritarian Personality

... In keeping with the dominant themes of this blog, which include the patterns and prognosis of far-right movements, I'd like to begin my tenure with a short series on John Dean's newest book. "Conservatives Without Conscience." Dean has been everywhere right, left, and center in recent weeks flogging the book, so I'm probably safe assuming most of you are well-acquainted with his basic arguments. ... We need to stop this. We have gone on too long assuming that our right

M.J.Rosenberg: The Ills of Diplomacy Can be Cured by More Diplomacy (Middle East)

[MJ Rosenberg is the Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum. In this position, MJ heads IPF's Washington, D.C. office and writes IPF Friday, a weekly opinion column on the Arab-Israeli conflict which is widely circulated throughout the United States and the Middle East. In addition, MJ has published numerous op-eds, in the national and Jewish press. MJ spent eighteen years with the United States government, fourteen on Capitol Hill as an aide to Representatives Jonathan Bingham (D-N

Fred Kaplan: Yes, Condi, You're a Student of History, but that Doesn't Let You Off the Hook

Three weeks ago, as the Israel-Lebanon war was heating up and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was making the first of her halfhearted diplomatic trips to the region, she said the following to reporters on the plane ride: "I'm a student of history, so perhaps I have a little more patience with enormous change in the international system. It's a big shifting of tectonic plates, and I don't expect it to happen in a few days or even in a year." I missed this r

Michael Barone: What Lieberman's loss says about the Democratic Party

Sen. Joseph Lieberman's narrow defeat in Connecticut's Democratic primary on Tuesday tells us something important about his party.... Through most of the 20th century, American exceptionalism has been the creed of both of our major parties. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, for all their sophisticated knowledge of foreign cultures, were exceptionalists just as much as Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Among voters, transnational attitudes were espoused by only a very few, in

Christopher Hitchens: The Eighteenth Brumaire of the Castro Dynasty

If there had been a military coup in any other Latin American or Caribbean country, even a fairly small or obscure one, I think it safe to say that it would have made the front page of the newspapers. But the military coup in Cuba—a nation linked to ours in many vital and historic ways—has not been reported at all. Indeed, in "Castro's Younger Brother Is Focus of Attention Now," by Anthony Depalma and James C. McKinley Jr., on Page 8 of the New York Times of Aug. 3, the very possibilit

Humberto Fontova: Media Embrace Military Dictatorship for Castro Succession

[Mr. Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant.] So what's going on in Cuba? Nobody has seen nor heard from either Fidel or his supposed successor, Raul, in more than a week and all foreign reporters are barred entry to the island. In the meantime, Cuba's military is on combat alert and reservists are called up island-wide. The neighborhood spy and snitch groups (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) are much more vigilant and obnoxious than usual. The goon

Max Boot: The current strategy isn't working. We either need more troops or a lot fewer.

PRESIDENT BUSH admitted in late July that the security situation in Baghdad was "terrible" and announced that he was sending more troops to quell the violence. Because this is what I advocated in a May 24 column, I should be happy with the president's decision. But, alas, as with so many American initiatives in Iraq, it's too little, too late. The security situation in Baghdad has been in free fall since the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra on Feb. 22. In retrospec

Edward Rothstein: Labyrinthine Complexities of Fighting a Terror War

War usually requires absolute clarity about identities. Who are you, and where do you stand? Friend or foe? Combatant or bystander? With whom do you claim allegiance, for whom are you willing to die, and who is responsible for your actions? This is one reason for military uniforms: they establish identity in the midst of war’s dense fog. In uniforms human differences are stripped away. Allegiance is abstracted into uniformity. But the battles now being fought in Lebanon represent a

Martin Peretz: Democrats once again look toward a peace candidate (ugh!)

We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue "peace candidates," and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It's really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of "having arrived" up the spines of his s

James Castagnera: Lessons from the British Empire About Keeping Cool

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column ìAttorney at Large.]If the summer of 2006 is typical of times to come, we need to learn more about maintaining our cool. Summertime 2006 will be remembered as a season of record-setting heat waves.  In the U.S., Nevada broke an 81-year record high; South Dakota tied its 70-year-old record; New Hampshire surpassed the record set in 196

Harvey Wasserman: Tom Friedman's Walter Cronkite Moment

[Harvey Wasserman is co-editor of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, to be published by The New Press on September 15. His HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES and SOLARTOPIA! are at www.harveywasserman.com. ] The reality that the Vietnam War was a hopeless catastrophe definitively penetrated the mass American psyche when CBS Nightly News Anchor Walter Cronkite---the "most trusted man in America"---faced the facts. That was in 1968,

Michael Barone: The New Americans

All this month, members of Congress will be holding hearings around the country on immigration. They'll be hearing undoubtedly from some of the extremists on the issue -- people who suppose that we can easily expel and do without the services of the 12 million or so illegal immigrants in our midst, people who suppose we should just give amnesty to those who are here in a blink of the eye. It's an issue I'm especially interested in, as the paperback edition of my book "The New Americans: How