Roundup: Media's Take

Edward Rees: The Case Against a No-Fly Zone in Libya

[Edward Rees is senior adviser to Peace Dividend Trust. He previously worked with the Peacekeeping Best Practises Section (PBPS) of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) at the UN Headquarters in New York and as Political Officer to the UN Secretary General's Special Envoy in Timor-Leste.] ...NFZs are not a frequently used tool in the international community's array of potential response mechanisms to internal violence. This is because they only address a symptom of confl

Eamonn Fingleton: The Myth of Japan's 'Lost Decades'

[Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Dominance.] ...Certainly anyone who visits Japan these days is struck by the obvious affluence even among average citizens. The cars on the roads, for instance, are generally much larger and better equipped than in the 1980s (indeed state of the art navigation devices, for instance, are more or less standard on many models). Overseas vacation travel has more than doubled since

James Traub: The End of the Arab Dream

[James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of, most recently, The Freedom Agenda. "Terms of Engagement," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.] If Muammar al-Qaddafi falls, as seems increasingly likely, he will land with the rending crash of an immense, rigid object, like the statue of Saddam Hussein pulled down in Baghdad's Firdos Square. This is not because, despite his own delusions, Qaddafi mattered to the world remotely a

Kenneth M. Pollack: Winds of Change in the Middle East

[Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of "A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East."] On Feb. 11, 1979, Islamic revolutionaries took power in Tehran. On Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorists launched their attacks on New York and Washington, killing nearly 3,000 Americans. On Feb. 11, 2011, Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt.

Grégoire Mallard: How the Arab World Can Prevent Another Qaddafi: Share a Regional Bill of Rights

[Grégoire Mallard is an assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern University.] The world has watched and cheered at the peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. But observers in the West have expressed fears that future autocrats might steal their victories. And citizens in Tunisia and Egypt can still be legitimately concerned about the possibility of an Iranian scenario. Will a populist government ignore the rule of law, steal future elections, and develop an adventurous n

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Why Wisconsin Matters

[E.J. Dionne Jr. is a columnist for the WaPo.] This is not the first time that Wisconsin has been at the center of national agitation over the role of unions. The earlier battle was staged in Sheboygan at Kohler, the legendary manufacturer of kitchen, bath and furniture products. The Kohler employees had voted to join the United Auto Workers union, and a strike that began in April 1954 was not settled until the early 1960s. In taking on the unions - as his

Robert Samuelson: Is Organized Labor Obsolete?

[Robert Samuelson is an op-ed columnist for the WaPo.] What we are witnessing in Wisconsin and elsewhere is the death knell of Big Labor. Once upon a time, most Americans could identify the head of the AFL-CIO. He was George Meany, the cigar-chomping ex-plumber who ran the union federation from 1955 to 1979. He was one of the nation's great power brokers, much quoted and wooed by presidents. It's doubtful that as many Americans can name Meany's present successor. (Answer: Richard Tr

Robert Barro: Unions vs. the Right to Work

[Mr. Barro is a professor of economics at Harvard and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.] How ironic that Wisconsin has become ground zero for the battle between taxpayers and public- employee labor unions. Wisconsin was the first state to allow collective bargaining for government workers (in 1959), following a tradition where it was the first to introduce a personal income tax (in 1911, before the introduction of the current form of individual income tax

Bruce Anderson: What Seif Gaddafi taught me about realpolitik

[Bruce Anderson is a political commentator.] When I met Seif al-Islam Gaddafi a couple of years ago, I formed a number of impressions. First, he was pretty able. Second, he was a complicated character. Although he took himself seriously and obviously intended to be the next ruler of Libya, he was not happy in his own skin. This was hardly surprising. An upbringing at the hands of his fruitcake of a father is not likely to ease anyone into a comfortable sense of self. At

Ahmed Chalabi: The Libyan Uprising: Lessons From Iraq

[Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi legislator.] As we watch Libyan despot Moammar Gadhafi lash out at his subjects with all the murderous force at his disposal, those of us in Iraq are reminded of another uprising and another dictator who butchered thousands to preserve his reign of terror. In 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War, the Iraqi people heeded President George H.W. Bush's call to rid themselves of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The regular Iraqi army had either disapp

Daniele Archibugi: Wilson, Trotsky, Assange: lessons from the history of diplomatic transparency

[Daniele Archibugi is a director at the Italian National Research Council (CNR), and professor of innovation, governance and public policy at Birkbeck College.] On the 7th of November 1917, just after the revolution, Lev Trotsky took office at the Russian Foreign Ministry and started reading the correspondence between his predecessors and the ministers of the other countries. The new People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs discovered many secret treaties with old Europe's powers aime

Alexander Chancellor: History Should Come Down Hard on Tony Blair for Embracing Gaddafi

[Alexander Chancellor is a Guardian columnist.] In the light of subsequent events, Neville Chamberlain's effort to appease Adolf Hitler is usually portrayed as one of the most shameful episodes in modern British history. But surely Tony Blair's love-in with Colonel Gaddafi was worse. Chamberlain never pretended to like Hitler. He certainly never embraced him. His aim was to prevent war by reaching an accommodation with a man whose full infamy he did not appreciate. He was naive to b

NYT Editorial: Stolen History

Last month, the National Archives banned an amateur historian who did what should have been unthinkable: He doctored the date on a valuable Lincoln document. Now the archives has found that it has a more widespread problem, with underhanded “scholars” and sneak thieves making off with American treasures to sell on the black market to history buffs.... Among the items known to be missing are Lincoln telegrams from the Civil War, patents for Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and the Wright bro

Paul Krugman: Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.

[Paul Krugman is an economist at Princeton and a columnist for the NYT.] Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would

Jackson Diehl: Amid the Mideast protests, Where is Saudi Arabia?

[Jackson Diehl is a columnist for the WaPo.] Two months into the Arab revolution, one very fat lady has yet to sing. But the turn of Saudi Arabia - home to one-fifth of the world's oil reserves, and the United States' most important remaining Arab ally - may be coming soon.... King Hamad probably has broken some bad news to King Abdullah: I no longer have the option of ending this by force. It won't work - and the Americans won't let me. That leaves the Saudi ruler with

Jerry Bowyer: Democracy, The God That Failed

[Mr. Bowyer is the author of "The Free Market Capitalists Survival Guide," published by HarperCollins, and a columnist for Forbes.com.] Recently I was a guest on Neil Cavuto’s show on the Fox Business Channel. Before I spoke, Neil’s guest was Congressman Gary Ackerman from New York. The Democratic congressman waxed eloquent about our need to support the goals of the Egyptian protesters and to urge Mubarak’s ouster as quickly as possible. Cavuto asked the giddy congressman

Scott Ott: Madison on Wisconsin: What Would the Founder Think?

[Scott Ott is co-host of Trifecta on PJTV.com, editor of ScrappleFace.com, the world's leading family-friendly news satire source, and author of the book Laughing at Obama: Volume I.] James Madison would recoil in horror at the scene now playing out in his namesake town in Wisconsin. But the great republican Constitution-maker’s revulsion would not be brought on by the sight of mobs in the street or under the dome, nor even at a glimpse of Democrat senators in full retreat, seeking

Jonathan S. Tobin: The Analogy Between 1989 and 2011: The First Bush and Obama

[Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary magazine.] The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum has a wonderfully insightful op-ed in today’s paper in which she rightly points out that the proper analogy to the series of revolts breaking out across the Arab world is in the events of 1848, not 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a historic moment in which tyrannies fell, but today’s events have much more of the feel of the great revolts that ended Europe’s age of reaction 163

Mark W. Hendrickson: Tea Party Democrats

[Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is a faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.] I have good news and bad news: The good news is that the political ideals and values of some prominent Democrats are so right-wing that they make most Tea Party leaders seem like liberals in comparison. The bad news is that all those right-wing Democrats belong to an earlier century. On Presidents Day, 2011, as we reflect on

"Chet Arthur": A Madisonian Case for Rubio in 2012

["Chet Arthur" is a nom de cyber for a former Reagan administration official.] When James Madison described an "extended republic" in his famous Federalist No. 10, he rejected the received wisdom of his day. Most educated Americans then agreed with Montesquieu and many other political theorists that a republic could only exist in a small city-state. No, argued Madison, the actual history of those little republics makes the case for an extended republic because th