Roundup: Media's Take

Shmuel Bar: America’s Fading Middle East Influence

[Shmuel Bar is director of studies at the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel.] The middle east has gone through eras of projection of power by external powers, and it has adapted to the balance of power between them. This was the case during the age of colonialism (predominance of Britain and France), the Cold War (competition between the U.S. and the ussr), and the period of American predominance since the end of the Cold War. For the last two decades, the region

Peter Preston: Omagh and the limits of the politics of peace

[Peter Preston is a columnist for the Guardian and the Observer.] It's a "wicked and cowardly act", says the British prime minister. "And a pointless act of terrorism," echoes his new Dublin counterpart. These guys, whoever they may be, are "betraying their community", says Martin McGuinness. Absolutely, echoes his new sort-of Stormont boss, Peter Robinson, "they're Neanderthals". One dead policeman, blown up by a car bomb outside his Omagh ho

Shibley Telhami: The Striking Arab Openness to Intervention

[Shibley Telhami is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution.] For a region that has been obsessed with Western imperialism, and to a degree still is, one of the most striking aspects of the current Western-led international intervention in Libya has been the absence of major opposition to it in the Arab world. In fact, the only world leader who is misreading the curr

James Carroll: The roots of anti-Muslim bigotry

[James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.] Last week, Senator Dick Durbin convened a special Senate hearing to look into anti-Muslim prejudice in America, a move that some took to be a counter to Representative Peter King’s earlier congressional hearing about “the extent of radicalization’’ of American Muslims. There is evidence that Muslims in the United States are disproportionately discriminated against (according to Justice Department figures, 14 percent of religio

Mike Jackson: Military action alone will not save Libya

[General Sir Mike Jackson is a former chief of the general staff of the British Army.] Intervention continues to be a prominent dimension of the post-cold war world. Since the early 1990s, Britain and other countries have made the choice to be involved in, among others, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya. For some, these represent latter-day military adventurism. For others, the operations are “all about oil”, or “a clash of civilisations”. But none of those

Yan Xuetong: How Assertive Should a Great Power Be?

[Yan Xuetong is professor of political science and dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is the author of “Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power.] BEIJING — Since the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Chinese analysts have been debating whether China should take on more international responsibility. Two opposite schools of thought have emerged within China. On the one hand, a growing chorus of critics question

Patrick J. Buchanan: Obama Goes to War

[Buchanan has been a senior adviser to three presidents, twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomiantion, and the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.] In ordering air and naval strikes on a country that neither threatened nor attacked the United States, did President Obama commit an impeachable act? So it would seem. For the framers of the Constitution were precise. The power to declare war is entrusted solely to Congress. From Ki

Chip Ward: How the “Peaceful Atom” Became a Serial Killer

[Chip Ward was a founder of HEAL Utah, a grassroots group that has led the opposition to the disposal of nuclear waste in Utah and the construction of a new reactor next to Green River.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and

Jonathan S. Tobin: Academic Politics, not Academic Freedom, at Issue in Michigan FOIA Requests

[Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary magazine.] The Freedom of Information Act requests made by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy about professors at the University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State Universities is drawing predictable screams of horror from those who think these probes are intended to silence critics of Republicans who have advocated for changes in collective bargaining by public employee unions. The New York Times quotes Greg Scholtz,

Jonathan S. Tobin: Krugman’s Fantasy: Liberals Are Being Persecuted on Campus

[Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary magazine.] The New York Times’s Paul Krugman has won a Nobel Prize for Economics but anyone reading his column today, which alleges that liberals are being persecuted on American college campuses, must think that his next award will be for science fiction. Krugman writes about William Cronon, a liberal professor at the University of Wisconsin who is getting some heat from people who didn’t care for his using his academic perch as

Richard Vedder: The Academic War in Wisconsin

[Richard Vedder is director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and professor of economics at Ohio University.] ...Writing last Friday for the Times, Krugman lamented the efforts of a Republican party operative to get a hold of the e-mail records of U. of Wisconsin professor William Cronon. Cronon has been highly critical of the Wisconsin governor’s initiatives, including restricting public employee collective bargaining. Krugman gratuitously added that “we can

Jack Shafer: There's No Such Thing as a Bad FOIA Request

[Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.] ...I have no dog in the fight between Cronon and the Republican who filed the records request, other than my long-term support of strong local, state, and federal FOIA laws and rigorous application of them. Yeah, I know, there's a huge element of the political stunt to the filing. But calling it McCarthyesque, as Fallows does, is a complete overreach. Joe would have never done anything so flatfootedly procedural! Likewise, denouncing the req

Andrew Leonard: The GOP War on Labor Moves to Academia

[Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.] In March 1949, a group of Illinois college students traveled to Springfield, Ill., to protest a group of anti-Communist subversion bills introduced by state Sen. Paul Broyles, the chairman of the Seditious Activities Intelligence Commission. Broyles wanted to outlaw the Communist Party, make membership in a Communist "front organization" a felony, and require all public-sector workers -- including public school teachers and univ

John B. Judis: Obama and American Power

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] Presidents and secretaries of state have not always come entirely clean in explaining why they were doing things, especially military actions. They tend to leave out key motives: Think of Ronald Reagan invading Grenada in 1982 to save medical students who unaccountably found themselves in danger; George H.W. Bush conjuring up Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, bu

Steven Metz: An Obama Doctrine? (Or: Why the president's speech reminded me of Donald Rumsfeld.)

[Steven Metz is the author of Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.] When it came to foreign policy and national security, George W. Bush was a "big idea" president. Whether one agreed or disagreed with them, overarching concepts and a defined perspective on history drove his decisions. So far, Barack Obama has not been a big idea president, at least in foreign and national security policy. His instincts have been more those of a lawyer, charting a careful course th

John Yoo and Robert Delahunty: Mission Not Accomplished

[John Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Robert Delahunty is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas's School of Law in Minneapolis. Both served in the U.S. Justice Department under President George W. Bush.] The war in Libya is a good war -- or at least, it should and could be. But it is certainly not a smart war and may well turn into a debacle. Bringing down Col. Muammar al-

Jonathan Freedland: We've avoided a Libyan Srebrenica, so when is the bombing going to stop?

[Jonathan Freedland writes a weekly column for the Guardian.] Barely through the entrance and we're looking for the exit. The Libyan intervention is just 11 days old, but already the clamour is for an end. Polls show almost identical levels of weak support on both sides of the Atlantic, a meagre 45% in Britain and 47% in the US. (At the equivalent stage, 90% of Americans backed the war in Afghanistan, and 70% supported the invasion of Iraq.) Each day brings conflicting signals as to

Scott Martelle: The Collapse of Detroit

[Scott Martelle's "The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial," will be published in May. He lives in Irvine.] Imagine for a moment that every single person living in the city of San Jose, plus another 150,000 or so, just up and left. Vanished. Poof. Gone. Leaving their homes, business buildings and factories behind. That is, in effect, what has happened to the city of Detroit, according to 2010 U.S. Census data released this week. The ci

Steven A. Cook: After the Arab Spring

[Steven A. Cook is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book on Egyptian politics will be published by Oxford University Press in the fall. He blogs at From the Potomac to the Euphrates.] ...Perhaps we are witnessing the "birth pangs of the new Middle East" in the words of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. After all, countries in Europe that experienced revolutions of 1848 went through phases in which counterrevolutionary forces were successfu

Michael Crowley: Obama Doctrine Is Clear, But the Mission Isn't

[Michael Crowley is a senior correspondent for TIME.] Barack Obama's speech on Libya last night was a curious beast--both ambitious and cautious at once. The president surprised Washington by articulating a big idea about American power. But he may have disappointed Americans by dancing around the challenge that remains in Libya. Obama was clear enough, to be sure, about why he chose to intervene in Libya. With his army outside Benghazi, Obama said, Moammar Gaddafi was