Roundup: Media's Take

Robert D. Kaplan: Forget Clausewitz: Nations now fight clans driven by pride, vengeance and martial religiosity

[Mr. Kaplan is a national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly and the author of "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground."] ... In "Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias," Richard H. Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew, both of Tufts's Fletcher School, have produced a wise and cogent briefing book about who our enemies are and how to anticipate their field tactics. The problem, they state early on, is that the Pentagon--the product of a rational, science-b

David Horowitz: Fellow Travelers

At the outset of Iran’s proxy war to obliterate the state of Israel, the editors of the Nation – the oldest and most influential magazine of the American Left – published a lead feature condemning Israel as a terrorist state and blaming the war itself on Israel’s “oppressive occupation” of Arab lands. Written by a Palestinian Arab, Marwan Bishara, the article – “Israel On The Offensive” – claimed that Israel had “exploited” the kidnapping of its soldiers as a pretext for an aggressive war agains

Glenn Frankel: In search of the truth about the Israel lobby's influence on Washington

[Glenn Frankel is a staff writer for the Magazine and The Post's former Jerusalem bureau chief. ] All David Ben-Gurion wanted was 15 minutes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's time. Israel's founding father, one of the indomitable political leaders of the 20th century, came to Washington in December 1941 yearning to present the case for a Jewish state directly to the American president. He took a two-room suite at the old Ambassador Hotel at 14th and K for $1,000 a month an

Noemie Emery : Truman's heirs are Republicans now

[Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Her latest book, Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families (Wiley) will be published this fall.] At the time he left office in January 1953, so toxic that most of his party had shunned him, no one could imagine that Harry S. Truman, common-man heir to a great wartime president, would one day be claimed by both major parties, each of them longing to be just like him. For years, Republicans dreamed

Samar Assad: A History of Israeli-Palestinian Prisoner Exchanges

[Samar Assad is the Executive Director of The Palestine Center. This information brief may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the Center.] Arrangements for prisoner exchanges between Arab governments and Israel date back to 1948. During the early 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel exchanged prisoners, the most famous of which is known as the "Jibril Deal" in May 1985. Through third-party negotiations, Israel and Hizballah c

Charles Krauthammer: Why Israel Is Being Attacked

Next June will mark the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War. For four decades we have been told that the cause of the anger, violence and terror against Israel is its occupation of the territories seized in that war. End the occupation and the "cycle of violence" ceases. The problem with this claim was that before Israel came into possession of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six-Day War, every Arab state had rejected Israel's right to exist and declared Israel's pre-1967 bo

David Hirst: Overnight Lebanon has been plunged into a role it endured for 25 years

The Lebanese people, habitues as few people are of the lethal, violent and unexpected, yesterday awoke to the kind of news they thought they had put behind them. Their brand-new airport, the pride of their postwar reconstruction, had been bombarded by Israeli war planes along with a host of other infrastructure projects, bringing death and devastation on a more than Gazan scale. For some it inevitably brought to mind a bleak winter day in 1968 when, out of the blue, helicopter-borne

Marwan Bishara: Israel on the Offensive

The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has exploited the capture of Army Corporal Gilad Shalit to restore the country's diminished deterrence against militant Palestinian factions, to break the elected Hamas government and to impose its unilateral territorial solution on the West Bank. But when the dust finally settles, Israel's offensive against the besieged territories--and now Lebanon--will have left the region with more destruction and death and the Israeli government with the

Edward Rothstein: Democracy's Best Friend or Antidemocratic Elitist?

Could any tyrant have plotted a more patient, thorough and ruthless path to power? Leo Strauss, the political philosopher who died in 1973, might have seemed just a harmless German-Jewish émigré, teaching Plato and Machiavelli at the University of Chicago. But according to recent critics, he was actually preparing an intellectual putsch, which would take place 30 years after his death and culminate in the war in Iraq. His students and followers, these critics say, learned their less

WSJ Editorial: Kim Jong Il's negotiating history, and ours

North Korea's Kim Jong Il joined our Independence Day celebrations this week by firing several medium-range missiles and one long-range Taepodong-2 missile, the latter capable of reaching Seattle had it not blown up a few seconds into its flight. The "Dear Leader" now threatens to conduct more tests. What does he want? The conventional view is that he wants direct talks with the U.S. leading to security guarantees, normalization of ties and an end to Pyongyang's economic

Max Boot: Did Bush's Democracy Plan Go Poof?

IF YOU WANT TO chart the downsizing of President Bush's democracy-promotion agenda, look at the difference in his handling of Egypt between his first and second terms. Back in 2002, when Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leading liberal dissident, was rotting in an Egyptian prison, the White House reacted with outrage. After the U.S. threatened to withhold $130 million in aid, Ibrahim was freed by an Egyptian court. This year, "president-for-life" Hosni Mubarak has impr

Christopher Hitchens: Vietnam was appalling, Iraq's ideal

THE argument presented on this page by the Australian conservative Owen Harries about how the Vietnam War was worthwhile and the Iraq war is not is, for my dialectical purposes, almost perfect ("Different battles, different response", July 5). For one thing, it underlines what I have always maintained, which is that advocacy of the liberation of Iraq is a radical cause that deserves to be opposed (and is opposed) by all the forces of reaction in Iraq and internationally. For ano

Martin F. Nolan: A secrecy obsession can ruin the powerful

On June 1, 1972, White House Counsel Charles Colson wrote a memo to President Richard Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, saying, "I hate the (New York) Times as much as anyone else and would like to be in the first wave of Army shock troops going in during the second term to tear down the printing presses." Colson and Haldeman hated the Times because the newspaper had more credibility than Nixon did. "The press is the enemy," Nixon said many times, according

Theo Lippman Jr.: Attacks on press recall Agnew's ire

When President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several members of Congress recently fired broadsides at The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and, to a degree, The Wall Street Journal for publishing detailed accounts of a somewhat secret counterterrorism program, it was the mightiest political salvo at the press since Maryland's Spiro T. Agnew threatened the big three television networks and newspaper-dominated mixed media corporations. "On November 13, 1969, Vice Pre

Jane Mayer: The Hidden Power ... The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror

On December 18th, Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, joined other prominent Washington figures at FedEx Field, the Redskins’ stadium, in a skybox belonging to the team’s owner. During the game, between the Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys, Powell spoke of a recent report in the Times which revealed that President Bush, in his pursuit of terrorists, had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without first obtaining a warrant from the Foreign In

Michael Parenti: The Stolen Election of 2004

[Michael Parenti's recent books include The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.] The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election. This has been well documented by such investigators as Re

Sandy Tolan: The Palestinian Catastrophe, Then and Now

[Sandy Tolan is the author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2006). He directs the Project on International Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, where he was an I.F. Stone Fellow. He has produced dozens of documentaries for National Public Radio, reported from the Middle East since 1994, and from more than two dozen countries over the last 25 years. He has also served as an oral history consultant

Aziz Huq : What Geneva Means To Hamdan

[Aziz Huq directs the Liberty and National Project at the Brennan Center for Justice. He is co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in Times of Terror (New Press, 2007), and recipient of a 2006 Carnegie Scholars Fellowship.] The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Hamdan that military commissions erected at Guantánamo are inconsistent with our military law and the Geneva Conventions has already prompted fierce—and flawed—debate. One key question, especially relevan

Tony Horwitz: Immigration — and the Curse of the Black Legend

[Tony Horwitz, the author of "Confederates in the Attic" and "Blue Latitudes," is writing a book on the early exploration of North America.] COURSING through the immigration debate is the unexamined faith that American history rests on English bedrock, or Plymouth Rock to be specific. Jamestown also gets a nod, particularly in the run-up to its 400th birthday, but John Smith was English, too (he even coined the name New England). So amid the din ove

John B. Judis : The Madness of George W. Bush

In First Meditation René Descartes asks himself how he would know that "the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams." How can we really know, Descartes asks, whether what we see is real or a hallucination? Descartes finally evokes God to connect himself to the outside world, but subsequent philosophers, including George Berkeley and David Hume, doubted whether the connection could be made with any certai