Roundup: Media's Take

Chris McGreal: Rwanda's Genocide and the Bloody Legacy of Anglo-American Guilt

Chris McGreal is the Guardian's Washington correspondent. The United States is allowing one tragic foreign policy failure to compound another. Eighteen years ago, President Bill Clinton watched passively as the Hutu extremist regime in Rwanda oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. His administration refused even to utter the word genocide for fear it would oblige the US to intervene. Clinton wasn't alone. One of the leaders of the Tutsi rebels fighting the genocidal regime told me at the time that during his attempts to persuade the UK government to intervene at the UN, he concluded that British officials regarded the Tutsi victims as little more than ants.

Doug Bandow: Time to End the Cuba Embargo

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire. The U.S. government has waged economic war against the Castro regime for half a century. The policy may have been worth a try during the Cold War, but the embargo has failed to liberate the Cuban people. It is time to end sanctions against Havana. Decades ago the Castro brothers lead a revolt against a nasty authoritarian, Fulgencio Batista. After coming to power in 1959, they created a police state, targeted U.S. commerce, nationalized American assets, and allied with the Soviet Union. Although Cuba was but a small island nation, the Cold War magnified its perceived importance. Washington reduced Cuban sugar import quotas in July 1960. Subsequently U.S. exports were limited, diplomatic ties were severed, travel was restricted, Cuban imports were banned, Havana’s American assets were frozen, and almost all travel to Cuba was banned. Washington also pressed its allies to impose sanctions. These various measures had no evident effect, other than to intensify Cuba’s reliance on the Soviet Union. Yet the collapse of the latter nation had no impact on U.S. policy...

Paul Berman: How Europe Earned Its Nobel Peace Prize

Paul Berman is a senior editor at The New Republic. On December 10, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will bestow its Peace Prize upon the European Union, and the wisdom of the committee’s action ought to be obvious to every last creature on Earth. The European Union consists of 27 states containing roughly 500 million citizens, not all of whom are worthy recipients of the prize, given the Nazis in Greece, fascists in Hungary, Islamist gunmen in France, anti-immigrant demagogues and bigots in general almost everywhere, child molesters, and investors in Spanish real estate bubbles, not to mention the political leaders incapable of approving a sufficiently robust economic stimulus, and so forth, unto the uptick lately in Catalan nationalism. Most of those 500 million Europeans deserve their award, though. Alfred Nobel, the unfortunate inventor of dynamite, died before he was able to articulate the logic for his prize, but no explanation was necessary. The history of Europe during the last four 400 years has been punctuated by one attempt after another to avoid a recurrence of the mother-tragedy of all European tragedies, which was the Thirty Years War back in the seventeenth century, together with the sundry other religious wars of the time.

Peter Bergen: Torture Did Not Net Bin Laden

Peter Bergen is a CNN national security analyst and author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad" and "The Longest War: America's Enduring Conflict with al-Qaeda," books that this story draws upon. (CNN) -- "Zero Dark Thirty" is a likely shoo-in, deservedly, for Oscar nominations for best director (Kathryn Bigelow) and best screenplay (Mark Boal) and perhaps a slew of other categories....Leaving aside its obvious merits as a film, how well does Zero Dark Thirty tell the complex tale of the decade-long hunt for bin Laden after 9/11? It's a valid question to ask since, after all, Bigelow told The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins, "What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film," and Boal told the Los Angeles Times, "I wanted to approach the story as a screenwriter but do the homework as a reporter."

Rich Rubino: The Odd Position of Vice President

Rich Rubino is the author of The Political Bible of Little Known Facts in American Politics and the Managing Editor of the political blog www.Politi-Geek.com. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Communications from Assumption College, and a Master’s Degree in Broadcast Journalism from Emerson College. He currently works as the Social Media Coordinator for Support Popular Vote, a group working to change the way electoral votes are allocated within the Electoral College. Rubino writes a blog for Support Popular Vote: www.popularvoteblog.com. Previously, he has interviewed presidential candidates at the New Hampshire Primary and has served as an on-air panelist in New Hampshire providing political analysis on election night. He has also worked as a policy advisor on a gubernatorial campaign and on a Congressional campaign in Massachusetts. He has recently appeared on MSNBC, FOX News, Al-Jazeera and in The Huffington Post and The Detroit News.

David Vine: How U.S. Taxpayers Are Paying the Pentagon to Occupy the Planet

David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other places. He is currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 U.S. military bases located outside the United States. To read a detailed description of the calculations described in this article and view a chart of the costs of the U.S. military presence abroad, visit www.davidvine.net.“Are you monitoring the construction?” asked the middle-aged man on a bike accompanied by his dog.“Ah, sì,” I replied in my barely passable Italian.“Bene,” he answered. Good.

Jonathan Cohn: The Legal Crusade to Undermine Obamacare—and Rewrite History

Jonathan Cohn is Senior Editor of The New Republic and author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price.

Thomas Del Beccaro: Keynes Would Not Raise Taxes Today

Thomas Del Beccaro is the Chairman of the California Republican Party.

Irena L. Sargsyan: Picking the Wrong Winners ... From Chalabi to the Syrian National Council

Irena L. Sargsyan is a research analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at The Brookings Institution.

Charles R. Morris: We Were Pirates, Too ... Why America Was the China of the 19th Century

Charles R. Morris is author of The Tycoons, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, winner of the Loeb award as the "Best Business Book of 2008." This article is drawn from his recent book The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution.

Tanya Lokshina: Back to the (Soviet) Future

Tanya Lokshina is senior researcher and deputy Moscow office director at Human Rights Watch.

Guillermo Ortiz: Lessons from Latin America for Greece

The writer is chairman of GrupoFinancieroBanorte, and formerly governor of Banco de México and Mexican minister of finance.

John Nichols: Is Paul Ryan Making Americans More Favorably Inclined Toward Socialism?

John Nichols is the author of The “S” Word:A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism (Verso)....A new Gallup Poll finds that socialism is now viewed positively by 39 percent of Americans, up from 36 percent in 2010. Among self-described liberals, socialism enjoyed a 62 percent positive rating, while 53 percent of Democrats and independent voters who lean Democratic gave socialism a thumb’s up....Shocking?Not really.Socialism has deep America roots—going back to when Tom Paine used his final pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, to outline a social-democratic model for establishing a just and equitable society. Socialist communes and political movements flourished in the United States during the first decades of the republic’s history, and the advocates for those movements found a home in the radical experiment that came to be known as the “Republican” Party....

Gordon N. Bardos: Nation Building Fails in the Balkans

Gordon N. Bardos is a Balkan politics and security specialist based in New York.

Robert Satloff: The End of the Forty-Year Peace Between Israel and Arab States

Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Doyle McManus: The Lessons Obama Can Draw from 'Lincoln'

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.In the rest of the country, it may be just another movie, but in Washington, Steven Spielberg's"Lincoln" has become a political Rorschach test.It seems as if every pundit in the capital has gone to see the masterful biopic about our 16th president, and — surprise — they all found something to support their views about contemporary politics.The analogies are hard to resist. The movie is set in the first months after Lincoln won a second term, facing an unruly lame-duck Congress. Over the objections of risk-averse aides, the president decides to seek passage of a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, and proves willing to cut almost any corner to gain his objective.

Larry Kudlow: Herbert Hoover Obama? Not the Legacy the President is After

Larry Kudlow, NRO’s economics editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web log, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.Once again, President Obama dodged the key fiscal-cliff issues at a campaign rally/press conference Wednesday morning. Campaign-style, he argued that the middle-class tax cuts (below $250,000) must be renewed in order to prevent a $2,200 average tax hike from hitting middle-class folks. He added that a middle-class tax hike would cost consumers $200 billion in spending power.Okay, fine. But no one wants to raise middle-class taxes. That’s not the issue. And even if those numbers are right, they dodge one of the key points in the dialogue between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. Namely, what to do about top income-tax rates, which include capital gains, dividends, and inheritance taxes?

James R. Holmes: Thucydides, Japan and America

James R. Holmes is a defence analyst for The Diplomat and an associate professor of strategy at the US Naval War College where he specializes in US, Chinese and Indian maritime strategy and US diplomatic and military history. University of Georgia undergraduates used to look at me quizzically when I told them you can learn ninety percent of what you need to know about diplomacy and war by studying a war fought two millennia ago, in a postage-stamp-size theater, between alliances armed with—as my colleagues in Newport like to joke—spears and rowboats. Yet it’s true. War and politics are human endeavors. The dynamics of human interaction endure from age to age. The remainderis mere technological change.

Matthew Omolesky: An Island Adrift ... Britain and the Future of Euroskepticism

Matthew Omolesky specialized in European affairs at the Whitehead School of Diplomacy's graduate program, and received his juris doctor from The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. 

Jonathan Kay: Palestinians Exhume Past, Ignore the Future

Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.