Roundup: Media's Take

Philip Bowrin: Lebensraum and China

Philip Bowrin is a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and columnist for the International Herald Tribune.

Jeff Jacoby: The Ghosts of Jimmy Carter

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.

Michael Dobbs: Would JFK Favor a 'Red Line' with Iran?

Michael Dobbs is a prize-winning foreign correspondent and author. Currently serving as a Goldfarb fellow at the Committee on Conscience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dobbs is following legal proceedings in The Hague.Earlier this week, I received a call from the Washington Post's political fact checker, Glenn Kessler, asking about a Benjamin Netanyahu quote relating to the Cuban missile crisis. The Israeli prime minister was citing President Kennedy's handling of the Soviet missile threat from Cuba to bolster his demands for a clear "red line" before Iran. Netanyahu would like the Obama administration to tell the Iranians that the United States will take military action if they seem likely to acquire sufficient weapons-grade plutonium to make a nuclear bomb."President Kennedy put a red line before the Soviets in the Cuban missile crisis," Netanyahu told CNN on September 16. "He was criticized for it, but it actually pushed the world back from conflict and maybe purchased decades of peace."

Jeffrey Lewis: The Fifty-Megaton Elephant in the Room

Jeffrey Lewis is director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies....If you know one thing about nuclear weapons, it is probably the eminently sensible moral from the movie WarGames: Regarding thermonuclear war, "the only winning move is not to play." Well, that's Hollywood. As recently declassified documents on the Carter administration's nuclear strategy make clear, the illusion of the winning move has been a reliable part of U.S. thinking about nuclear weapons. As long as the United States holds out the prospect of fighting and winning a nuclear war against China, the dialogue is going nowhere....

David Donovan: U.S. Forgetting Vietnam's Lessons

David Donovan is the pen name of scientist Terry T Turner, of the University of Virginia. He served in the US army from 1967 to 1970, and saw frontline action in Vietnam. He has written a number of books about his experiences there.

Michael Pevzner: The Death of Another Ambassador

Michael Pevzner was a program officer in Moscow with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Thomas Sowell: The Fallacy of Redistribution

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Pratik Chougule: To Avoid Iraq Redux, US Should Support Syrian Opposition

Pratik Chougule served at the State Department in the George W. Bush Administration.

David Davenport: Incumbency Amid A Sagging Economy ... Why Obama Is Hoover, Not Roosevelt

David Davenport is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Jordan Weissmann: U.S. Income Inequality: It's Worse Today Than It Was in 1774

Jordan Weissmann is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He has written for a number of publications, including The Washington Post and The National Law Journal.Here's a finding that would have made for great occupy sign last year: American income inequality may be more severe today than it was way back in 1774 -- even if you factor in slavery.That stat's not actually as crazy (or demoralizing) as it sounds, but it might upend some of the old wisdom about our country's economic heritage. The conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Scraping together data from an array of historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than anywhere else in the world that we have record of. Suffice to say, times have changed....

Doug Bandow: Washington's Mideast Follies

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.

Jen Marlowe: Terror and Teargas on the Streets of Bahrain

Jen Marlowe is an author, documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. Her latest book (written with Sami Al Jundi) is The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey From Prisoner to Peacemaker and her most recent film is One Family in Gaza. She is the founder of donkeysaddle projects. You can follow her on Twitter at @donkeysaddleorg.Jihan Kazerooni and I drove past scores of armed riot police on Budaiya highway as her iPhone buzzed non-stop: phone calls, Skype calls and, incessantly, Twitter. I had wondered what the phrase “Twitter revolution” really meant when I heard it used in connection with Iran in 2009 and Egypt in 2011. Here, in the small Gulf Kingdom of Bahrain, I was beginning to grasp the concept.

Marc Ambinder: Romney's Theory of Provocative Weakness

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large, and writes The Compass blog

Rebecca Solnit: Occupy Wall Street’s First Anniversary

Rebecca Solnit was an antinuclear activist in the 1980s and 1990s, as her 1994 book Savage Dreams recounts. The author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, she is currently speaking about disaster, civil society, and utopia in programs with the Free University of New York, the San Francisco Public Library’s One City One Book program, and Cal Humanities.

Mark N. Katz: It's Time to Act in Syria

Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University, and is the author of Leaving without Losing: The War on Terror after Iraq and Afghanistan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).The conflict in Syria now appears to be in stalemate; the Assad regime is unable to repress its opponents, but the Syrian opposition is also unable to overthrow the Assad regime. The conflict, then, rages on with no end in sight.After experiencing the enormous costs and meager rewards of intervening in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is understandable why the U.S. and many of its allies are wary of intervening now in Syria. Nor does their successful intervention in Libya last year incline them to do so in Syria now, since a) the Libyan operation took much longer and was much costlier than they anticipated, and b) toppling Assad appears likely to be a far more formidable task than toppling Qaddafi.

Daniel Henninger: The Obama Democrats

Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.It is no accident that the Chicago teachers union would walk off the job, seeking a 29%, two-year wage settlement, days after the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C. The Chicago teachers union and the podium speakers in Charlotte are part of the seamless political fabric that has been created by Barack Obama and the modern Democratic Party. They've got goals, and what they want from the people of Chicago or America is compliance.The speakers in Charlotte fastened the party to a theme: We're all in it together. This claim is false. The modern Democratic Party, the party of Obama, is about permanent division and permanent opposition. You'd never have guessed they were speaking on behalf of an incumbent and historic presidency. One speaker after another ranted that the America system remains fundamentally unfair.

Ty McCormick: Why the Embassy Attacks Aren't 1979 All Over Again

Ty McCormick is an assistant editor at Foreign Policy. 

Karl Rove: Airbrushed History and Dusted-Off Promises

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.Both Democratic euphoria and Republican angst over President Obama's convention bounce were short-lived. The bounce is modest and likely to diminish. What remains is Mr. Obama's convention address, which reveals weaknesses in his message for the campaign's final months. In his speech in Charlotte, N.C., last Thursday, Mr. Obama said, "I won't pretend the path I'm offering is quick or easy. I never have." In truth, he did. Mr. Obama and his economic team claimed in a Jan. 9, 2009, report that if his stimulus bill were passed, joblessness would peak at 8% in eight months and decline to roughly 5.6% by today. Instead, unemployment has been at 8% or higher for 43 months. Remember the administration's "Recovery Summer" PR offensives? In April 2010, Mr. Obama said, "We are beginning to turn the corner." Then in June 2010, he said "our economy is getting stronger by the day." Vice President Joe Biden predicted job gains of 500,000 a month. In August 2010, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner penned an op-ed entitled "Welcome to the Recovery." So why was the president insisting last week that two terms were required to affect an economic recovery?..

Dominique Moisi: Spanish Civil War's Lessons for Syria

Dominique Moisi is the founder of the French Institute of International Affairs (IFRI) and a professor at Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).With every passing week, the Syrian conflict increasingly resembles the Spanish Civil War. The images of warplanes bombing civilians and destroying cities have turned Aleppo into a latter-day version of Guernica, immortalized in Picasso’s masterpiece. But the real similarities between the two conflicts are to be found in the behavior of the international community’s main actors, which have again taken opposite sides. On one side stand Russia and Iran, cynically determined to buttress President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. On the other side stand the established democracies, hesitant and ambivalent in their support of the rebels. In 1930’s Spain, of course, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy fully supported General Francisco Franco’s rebellion, while the democracies reluctantly offered scant help to the Spanish Republic. There are even deeper similarities. Many argued at the time that support for republican Spain meant helping the far more dangerous anarchists and Communists at a time when the Soviet threat in Europe was growing. In that sense, yesterday’s Reds have become today’s “fundamentalist Muslims.”..

Peter Beinart: Romney Response to Egypt Embassy Attack Makes It Easy for Obama

Peter Beinart is editor in chief of Open Zion, a blog about Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future at The Daily Beast. He is the author of The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books).[W]hy did Romney issue [his] parade of idiocies? Because he’s trying to paint Obama as someone who won’t stand up for America....For decades, this kind of thing worked. In 1972, Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, chastised George McGovern for saying, “I would go to Hanoi and beg if I thought that would release the boys [held hostage as prisoners of war] one day earlier.” At the 1984 Republican Convention, Jeane Kirkpatrick famously said that Democrats “blame America first.”