Roundup: Media's Take

Gershom Gorenberg: Israel's Tragedy Foretold

[Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements."] WITH Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: the settlement enterprise has lost the support of the country's mainstream voters. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front-runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Mr. O

Steven Aftergood: The incomprehensible espionage act of 1917 --- and why it matters

The Espionage Act is "in many respects incomprehensible," wrote Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. in a definitive law review article three decades ago which explored the potential use of the Act to prosecute leaks to the media. The espionage statutes are "so sweeping as to be absurd," they argued (previously noted in Secrecy News, 10/19/05). "If these statutes mean what they seem to say and are constitutional, public speech in this country

Arianna Huffington: Rummy Flunks History

Earlier this week, I blogged about the Bush administration's increasingly absurd efforts to spin the war in Iraq, including Don Rumsfeld's attempt to lay the blame for the White House's Iraq troubles at the feet of America's history teachers:"I think the biggest problem we've got in the country is people don't study history anymore. People who go to school in high schools and coll

Howard Husock: How to put the New Deal behind us

[Mr. Husock is director of the Manhattan Institute's Social Entrepreneurship Initiative and a research fellow at Harvard University's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.] No matter whose priorities prevail in this year's budget debate, it is a certainty that the federal government will continue to devote billions to activities known as "social services." ... But should this role be considered beyond debate? It is a question worth pondering today because

Fred Block: What Dems Need to Do

The daily headlines suggest that a toxic combination of arrogance, corruption and incompetence is weakening the Republican Party's hold on national political power. As the Democrats struggle to capitalize on this opportunity, progressives should remember what happens when one side wins an election without defeating the opponent's main ideas. Back in 1992 Bill Clinton campaigned successfully for President with promises to "put people first" and provide health insurance for

William E. Odom: Iraq through the prism of Vietnam

The Vietnam War experience can’t tell us anything about the war in Iraq – or so it is said. If you believe that, trying looking through this lens, and you may change your mind. The Vietnam War had three phases. The War in Iraq has already completed an analogous first phase, is approaching the end of the second phase, and shows signs of entering the third. Phase One in Vietnam lasted from 1961 until the Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in March 1965, authori

WSJ Editorial: The dictator's trial reveals a telling historical parallel

In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, and Adolf Hitler ordered Heydrich's successor to "wade through blood" to find the killers. Nearly 2,000 innocent civilians were murdered by the Nazis without turning up the culprits. So the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood. On the evening of June 10, German troops

Max Boot: Guess What? We're Winning

[Max Boot is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of Modern History is due out in the fall of 2006 from Gotham Books.] To listen to the critics, you would think that the Iraq war was the biggest blunder in U.S. history and George W. Bush the worst president ever. Comparisons with Vietnam have already become a cliché, but that's not going far enough for the respected Israeli military hi

Michael T. Klare: The Coming Resource Wars

[Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil, both available in paperback from Owl Books.] It's official: the era of resource wars is upon us. In a major London address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that global climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy. Climate change, he indicated

Gunnar Heinsohn: Babies Win Wars

[Mr. Heinsohn is professor of sociology at Bremen University and founder and president of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut.] Dying nations are usually defined as those with fertility rates of 1.5 or lower. By that measure, 30 European countries are either dying today or -- like France -- seeing their cultures and populations transformed by growing ethnic and religious minorities. Europe is shrinking just as the population in Islamic, African and Asian countries is exploding.

Jim Sleeper: An open letter to John Fund, our intrepid, two-footed truth teller on the Hashemi-at-Yale case

Dear John Fund, You called me at home Saturday, March 4, seeking information or a comment on the enrollment of the former Talibani spin doctor Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a non-degree student at Yale. You told me, as you tell readers in this, your second column in a row on the subject, that you are shocked, shocked that no one in authority at Yale would say anything about it to you. When I asked if you'd tried Charles Hill, a neoconservative Diplomat in Residence there, a Vulcan o

Fred Branfman: On Torture and Being "Good Americans"

[Fred Branfman is a writer and long-time political activist. His email address is fredbranfman@aol.com and his website is www.trulyalive.org. He is writing a book entitled Facing Death at Any Age.] As a teenager, I could not understand how the German people could claim to be "good Germans," unaware of what the Nazis had done in their names. I could understand if these ordinary German people h

Jim Hoagland: The 30 Year War in Iraq

Iraq has endured civil war for 30 years. It has not suited Western policymakers or the media to call it that, nor to face up to the implications of the appalling sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing that this long conflict has generated. That must now change. What peace there was in Iraq before the American invasion was the peace of the graveyard. Saddam Hussein's forces launched the genocidal campaign against the Kurds in 1987. The Shiite south was the target of mass murder and

Sidney Blumenthal: A deluded king and his court lickspittles

Republicans representative of their permanent establishment have recently and quietly sent emissaries to President Bush, like diplomats to a foreign ruler isolated in his forbidden city, to probe whether he could be persuaded to become politically flexible. These ambassadors were not connected to the elder Bush or his closest associate, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who was purged last year from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and scorned by the current p

Max Boot: Up close, Iraq gets blurry

ARE WE WINNING or losing in Iraq? Liberals and conservatives safe at home have no trouble formulating glib answers to that fundamental question. The former can always point to setbacks, the latter to successes. The picture becomes blurrier, the future murkier when you spend time in Iraq, as I did last week. After traveling from Qatar to Baghdad on a C-17 transport aircraft, I jumped off a Blackhawk helicopter on Feb. 22 at Forward Operating Base Warhorse near the city of Baqubah, 30

Matthew Pearl: Lawrence Summers's fall began 140 years ago

[Matthew Pearl is the author of "The Dante Club" and the forthcoming novel "The Poe Shadow.] BEFORE Lawrence Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard on Tuesday, the last upheaval of equal magnitude at the university was 140 years ago. That older drama was perhaps the most consequential episode in the history of American higher education; one that not only created the institution where a Larry Summers could flourish as a graduate student and professor

Steven R. Weisman: What Civil War Could Look Like

... "A civil war in Iraq would be a kind of earthquake affecting the whole Middle East," said Terje Roed-Larsen, the special United Nations envoy for Lebanon and previously for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It would deepen existing cleavages and create new cleavages in a part of the world that is already extremely fragile and extremely dangerous. I'm not predicting this will happen, but it is a plausible worst-case scenario." A first question for the United

John Kifner: Images of Muhammad, Gone for Good

DEEP in the bowels of this newspaper's old morgue — that beloved pre-electronic resource where compulsive clippers and filers stored the records — is a folder with a photograph of a Persian miniature painting depicting the Angel Gabriel appearing to the Prophet Muhammad. It was used to illustrate an article about Islam in 1974. Taped on the back is a copy of an editor's note published two days later that said, "Since it is an affront to Moslems to depict such likenesses, The Ti

John Kifner: When a Country Cracks ... History Lessons

... The sequence of [last week's] events [in Iraq] evoked past crises involving conflict between entrenched ethnic or religious groups — the fodder for civil war. They have a rhythm of their own. Often tensions seem to build to an unbearable level, then suddenly ease. Sometimes something so awful happens that it is a turning point. That was the case during the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. At the beginning of February 1994, a mortar fell on an outdoor market where Bosnians bought used

Michael Rubin: In Iraq, Iranian practice outsmarts American principle

[Mr. Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of Middle East Quarterly.] ...Step-by-step, Iranian authorities are replicating in Iraq the strategy which allowed Hezbollah to take over southern Lebanon in the 1980s. The playbook -- military, economic and information operation -- is almost identical. Hezbollah's story begins in 1982. As the Israeli army evicted the PLO from Lebanon, Ayatollah Khomeini dispatched his elite Revolutionary Guard