Roundup: Media's Take

Johanna Markind: Lincoln's Potential Presidency

[Johanna Markind is an attorney specializing in criminal law and a part-time journalist specializing in religion.] I wonder sometimes about Lincoln's other presidency. You know, what he hoped to accomplish during his presidency, before the South seceded. His 1860 platform called for free homestead legislation, internal improvements - especially a transcontinental railroad, also river and harbor improvements, daily mail service, a protective tariff, a prohibition on ch

Andrew Cohen: The Supreme Court: An 'Irresponsible House of Lords'?

[Andrew Cohen has served as chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News and won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators.] I am belatedly reading Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt, an absorbing book about the later years of one of the nation's greatest presidents, a dynamo of a man who roamed the Earth and the American political landscape one hundred years ago. Theodore Roosevelt was a "progressive Republican," which today seems mo

Kanan Makiya: ‘Wrought By Neglect, Not War’

[Kanan Makiya is Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University] I returned to Baghdad the week after Saddam’s monument in Firdos Square fell. The last time I had seen the city in which I was born and raised was 1968, the year the Baath Party came to power. That fateful summer I studied sculpture with Muhammad Ghani. There in his Baghdad studio he had sat so patiently with me, showing me how a piece of wood could be made to respond to dif

Fareed Zakaria: In the Middle East Protests, A Seismic Shift

[Fareed Zakaria is editor at large at Time Magazine.] ...For the first time in perhaps a millennium, the Arab people are taking charge of their own affairs. Since the 11th century, after conquests by Mongol, Persian and Turkish armies, Arab lands have been controlled by foreign powers. Most of these lands were ruled by the Ottoman Empire for centuries. By the late 18th century, as Ottoman power waned, the era of European expansion began, and for the next 150 years the Middle East fe

Jacob Heilbrunn: Neocons and the Revolution

[Jacob Heilbrunn is senior editor at the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.] In August 1997, I visited the retired diplomat at her spacious corner office at the American Enterprise Institute. "I guess they thought it was worth publishing," she spluttered. What had got her so steamed was my allusion to a recent philippic Robert Kagan had published in Commentary called "Democracies and Double Standards."

Yoav Fromer: The Nation-State in Egypt

[Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for the Israeli daily Maariv.] While thousands of angry Egyptians swarmed into Cario’s Tahrir Square late last month and began the 18-day standoff that would eventually force the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, several dozen of their countrymen had other things on their mind. Instead of protesting for their freedoms, these Egyptians were protecting something of equal if not even more value to them: their heri

Judith W. Leavitt and Lewis A. Leavitt: Madison, Wisconsin: Ground Zero for a New Class War

[Judith W. Leavitt is Ruth Bleier Professor and Rupple Bascom Chair Professor emerita in the history of medicine at University of Wisconsin. Lewis A. Leavitt is professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin.] WHAT HAS been happening for the last week in the Wisconsin state capital represents the first salvo in a new confrontation between working people and the business elite; it is an all out attack on unions and collective bargaining rights hard-won over the past

Steve Kornacki: How David Koch Tried to Derail the Reagan Revolution

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] Toward the end of what seems to be (but maybe isn't!) a secretly recorded phone conversation with a blogger pretending to be David Koch, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker talks of gathering his Cabinet several weeks ago, pulling out a picture of Ronald Reagan, and likening the push to deny public sector workers collective bargaining rights to the Gipper's 1981 decision to fire striking air traffic controllers. It was, the governor

Michael J. Totten: Libya’s Legacy

[Michael J. Totten is an independent foreign correspondent and foreign policy analyst. His first book, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel, will be published in April.] Not since Saddam Hussein’s regime was demolished in 2003 has an Arab head of state run a more ruthlessly repressive terror state than Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak were small-government libertaria

William Kristol: Arab Spring Is Obama's Moment

[William Kristol is a monthly columnist for The Post and a contributor to its political opinion blog, PostPartisan.] It is of course possible, and probably likely, that the Arab Spring of 2011 will fail, as other springs in the Middle East and elsewhere have never come to fruition. There would still be a case, for reasons of honor and duty, for the United States to try to help, to do the right thing, to stand with the opponents of tyranny, even if one thought them likel

David Hughes: How Britain danced to Gaddafi's tune

[David Hughes is the Daily Telegraph's chief leader writer.] How must they be feeling this morning in the Blair home in London's swank Connaught Square, in Lord Mandelson's elegant townhouse overlooking Regent's Park, in the Brown household in North Queensferry? If New Labour's one-time ruling trinity had any sense of shame (a big "if"), they would be looking at the blood-drenched events in Libya and feeling sick to their stomachs. The popular unrest that has

Geoffrey Robertson: This evil despot must be brought to justice

[Geoffrey Robertson QC is a member of the United Nations Justice Council and author of 'Crimes Against Humanity'.] Colonel Gaddafi is the worst man left in the world. His bloodstained record of terrorism, torture and mass murder deserves punishment many times over and a people liberated from the moronic tenets of his Green Book might, if they get the chance, string him up in revenge. But the days of hanging dictators from lampposts are over. International justice must take the place

Peter Hallward: Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking

[Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, and his book on The Will of the People is forthcoming in 2012.] In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir was already bemoaning our tendency to "think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to submitting to it". By the late 70s such regret, repackaged as celebration, had become the stuff of a growing consensus. By

Bill McKibben: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Darkens the Skies

[Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, co-founder of 350.org, and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.]In Beijing, they celebrate when they have a “blue sky day,” when, that is, the haze clears long enough so that you can actually see the sun.  Many days, you can’t even make out the next block.Washington

Michael Lind: Liberalism and the Post-Union Future

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] The struggle in Wisconsin over the future of collective bargaining by public employees is the most dramatic battle in a war being waged on many fronts over the future of public sector unionism. In other states and cities, the issue is whether states whose revenues have collaps

Kevin Drum: Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About

[Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones.]IN 2008, A LIBERAL Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is

Daniel Korski and Ben Judah: The West's Middle East pillars of sand

[Daniel Korski is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Ben Judah is a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.] Two centuries ago, Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of the modern Middle East. Now, almost 90 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism, and eight years after the Iraq war began, the revolutionary protests in Cairo suggest that another shift may well be under way.

Ahmed Rashid: How Obama Lost Karzai

[Ahmed Rashid is the author of Descent into Chaos and a recently updated edition of Taliban.] A few weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an exiled Afghan leader I had known for nearly 20 years paid a visit to my home in Lahore. His name was Hamid Karzai, and his problem, he told me, was that he was rapidly losing faith in the West's concern for his country. Karzai was the scion of a prominent Pashtun family in southern Afghanistan, one with a deep-rooted enmity f

Henry Srebrnik: Arab Awakening Arrives in Libya

[Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political studies at UPEI.] By any measure, the North African state of Libya is one of the more bizarre countries in the world. For the past 42 years, it has been governed by the mercurial and eccentric Moammar Gadhafi. The longest-serving ruler in the Middle East, Qaddafi has until now ruled this oil-rich desert state with little in the way of opposition. However, the revolts sweeping the Arab world – including those in hi

David Rothkopf: The End Cannot Come Too Soon for Qaddafi & Son

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.] I can't help but wonder if the British Government, which showed so much empathy for Libyans for whom the end was near in the past, will be willing to embrace the Qaddafi family much as they did their agent of murder in the Pan Am 103 bombing. The departures of Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak as a result of the wave of unrest that has