Roundup: Media's Take

Nicholas Lemann: The doubtful rise of Internet journalism

... To live up to its billing, Internet journalism has t meet high standards both conceptually and practically the medium has to be revolutionary, and the journalis has to be good. The quality of Internet journalism i bound to improve over time, especially if more of th virtues of traditional journalism migrate to th Internet. But, although the medium has grea capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speed up the discourse, it is not quite as different from wha has gone before

Hendrik Hertzberg: It's the Democratic Party, Not the Democrat Party

What is the name of a certain political party in the United States—not the one which controls the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government but the other one, which doesn’t? The question is small one, to be sure: a minor irritation, a wee gnat compared to such red-clawed, sharp-toothed horrors as the health-care mess and the budget deficit, to say nothing of Iraq and Lebanon. But it has been around longer tha any of them, and, annoyingly, it won’t go away L

John B. Judis: Bush's Failed Israeli Strategy

Since the early 1980s, if not before, American administrations have been torn between two very different approaches to U.S.-Israel relations. The first, which dates back to the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, conceives of the United States as an "honest broker" between the Israelis and their Arab adversaries. The second, which dates from the Reagan years, conceives of Israel as a "strategic ally" of the United States amidst the Arab Middle East. Presidents and their po

Judith Coburn: How Not to Vietnamize Iraq

[Judith Coburn covered the war in Indochina from 1970-73 for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Village Voice, and Pacifica Radio. She is working on a memoir about Vietnam and the 1960s.] Through a scrim of red, dry-season dust, the sign appeared like an apparition hanging low over the no-man's land of the South Vietnamese-Lao border: "Warning! No US Personnel Beyond This Point." Its big, white expanse was already festooned with grunt graffiti, both American and Vietname

David Ignatius: Mideast Lessons From 1973

Groping for a way to understand the ruinous mess in the Middle East, I find myself looking backward to an earlier ruinous mess, the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. That long-ago war, like the current one in Lebanon, began with an Arab sneak attack -- a potentially devastating Egyptian thrust across the Suez Canal, cruelly launched on Israel's holiest day. The Israelis initially fumbled against a surprisingly ferocious Arab assault, and then recovered thanks to aggressive military op

Benjamin Wittes: Borking Predates Bork

[Benjamin Wittes, a Washington Post editorial writer, is author of the forthcoming "Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times" (Rowman and Littlefield).] "Can it be different?" Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. mused. "Of course it can be different. If there are serious questions about qualifications, senators should explore those. If there are serious questions about ethics, senators should explore those. If there are disputes about ap

Max Boot: Nowhere is the dismal record of peace processes clearer than in Israel's case

I HAPPENED TO BE in London last week when the Independent newspaper ran a front-page petition calling for "a cease-fire now," signed by a cross-section of the smoked-salmon socialist set — various retired ambassadors, human rights lawyers and creative geniuses such as Peter Gabriel and Harold Pinter. Which conflict were they trying to end? Not the one in Iraq, where fighting among sectarian militias is killing 100 people a day. Nor the one in Darfur, which continues to claim countless

David Gelernter: Why do so many American Jews hate the president who stands by Israel?

[David Gelernter, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.] FOR YEARS I have watched the Palestinians do absurdly self-destructive things, and have never understood them until now. But watching the Bush administration stoutly defend Israel this week against the background of an American Jewish population that vocally (often sneeringly) dislikes him and his administration, and consistently votes by massive majorities for

Deborah Blum: A Pox on Stem Cell Research

[Deborah Blum is the author of the forthcoming “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death.”] N vetoing legislation that would have supported medical research using embryonic stem cells, President Bush described his decision as moral rather than scientific, an act of conscience opposed to the taking of the “innocent human life” represented by embryonic stem cells. The potential of using these cells to develop life-saving medical cures, Mr. B

Harlan Cleveland: Postwar Planning ... Too Little, too Late

“The ambitious plans that the president announced to transform American defense proved to be at odds with his bold plan to transform a region.” “The violent chaos that followed Saddam’s defeat was not a matter of not having a plan but of adhering too rigidly to the wrong one.” These nuggets of practical wisdom are among many to be found in Cobra II, the inside story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, published earlier this year. It’s written by Michael R. Gordon, c

Max Boot: Bush Didn't Start the Mideast Fire

REMEMBER HOW idyllic the Middle East was before that crazy cowboy moved into the White House? Oh for the good ol' days when Saddam Hussein would invite Kurdish and Shiite leaders to his palace for a lamb roast followed by a nice game of checkers. When the Iranian mullahs would host Fourth of July festivities in Tehran in honor of the Great Angel. And when Hamas and Hezbollah big shots would balance yarmulkes on their turbans and visit Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to victims of the Holocau

Jonathan Schell: Too Late for Empire

[Jonathan Schell is The Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. He is the author of The Unconquerable World, among many other books.] Anyone who wants to write about the constitutional crisis unfolding in the United States today faces a peculiar problem at the outset. There is a large body of observations that at one and the same time have been made too often and yet not often enough -- too often because

Carlin Romano: Seeing Islam as a culture rooted in war

It sounds like yesterday's newspaper: "Growing lawlessness... led to the formation of citizen organizations for defense and reprisals... . Notable among these were... thugs drawn from the lower reaches of society... . Ready to sell their services to the highest bidder, groups... competed against each other to serve the rival Shiite and Sunni camps in their incessant squabbles..." Yesterday's Financial Times on today's Iraq? No, Efraim Karsh on eighth-ce

ABA Report: History of Signing Statements Shows Bush II Has Gone Further than Predecessors

The First 200 Years The Constitution says nothing about the President issuing any statement when he signs a bill presented to him. If he vetoes the bill, Article 1, §7 requires him to tell Congress what his objections are, so that Congress can reconsider the bill and accommodate him or repass it by a two-thirds vote of both Houses in which case it becomes law without his signature. Nonetheless Presidents have issued statements elaborating on their views of the laws they sign sin

Thomas E. Ricks: In Iraq, Military Forgot the Lessons of Vietnam

[Senior Pentagon Correspondent, Washington Post. Author, "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq."] ... In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. forces worked hard and had some successes. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American

Garrett Epps: Happy 14th Amendment Day!

What's better than a patriotic holiday in July? Pop a brew tonight, then, and let's celebrate our heritage of democracy and equal rights. We owe these freedoms not so much to the events commemorated every July 4, but to those of July 21. On this day in 1868, after a bruising ratification struggle, Congress passed a resolution proclaiming that the 14th Amendment was part of the Constitution. More than the Declaration of Independence, more than the original Constitution, more than eve

Richard Cohen: Hunker Down With History

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself. This i

Michael Walzer: Is Israel's counterattack in line with just war theory?

Israel is now at war with an enemy whose hostility is extreme, explicit, unrestrained, and driven by an ideology of religious hatred. But this is an enemy that does not field an army; that has no institutional structure and no visible chain of command; that does not recognize the legal and moral principle of noncombatant immunity; and that does not, indeed, acknowledge any rules of engagement. How do you--how does anyone--fight an enemy like that? I cannot deal with the strategy and tactics of s

Karen J. Greenberg: The Bush administration's passion for redacted documents

[Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the NYU Center on Law and Security, the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the editor of The Torture Debate in America.] Imagine my disappointment. Two long-awaited Pentagon reports on detainee policy had finally reached public view: the Jacoby Report on Afghanist

Gilbert King: The Two Executions Of Willie Francis

[Gilbert King is writing a book about the Willie Francis case.] ... In November 1946 one of the strangest capital punishment cases in American history came before the Supreme Court and was deadlocked, 4 to 4, until Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was opposed to the death penalty, voted against his conscience and allowed the state of Louisiana to send a 17-year-old black youth named Willie Francis to the electric chair -- for the second time. Francis had been convicted of