Roundup: Media's Take

Juliette Kayyem: Never Say 'Never Again'

Juliette Kayyem served as homeland security advisor to Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and, most recently, as assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs in the Obama administration. After over 11 years responding to a world where "stuff happens," she is now a columnist for the Boston Globe and teaches at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. There will be no politicians at the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. They are no longer invited. Organizers of the memorial have now decided that they want to make the solemn events more intimate. The decision also reflects the continuing struggle between New York City, New York state, and New Jersey over the memorial, the museum, control of the site, and, as a consequence, the memory of 9/11. Last year, on this same day, the political grandstanding got so outlandish that it led to a showdown between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg over the choice of readings. But, whatever the motivation, the United States may be ready for a change on how to remember 9/11 too. It is time to make it personal again, to make it less an event or even a call to action. The burden of tragedy is private, but the 9/11 families lost possession of a day that was ultimately theirs.

Dore Gold: Nuclear Weapons from Saddam to Iran ... An Israeli Viewpoint

Ambassador Dore Gold is a world renowned expert on Middle Eastern affairs. While Israel is naturally focused on the implications of Iran completing its drive toward nuclear weapons, there is another case of one of its bitterest enemies, who tried to accomplish the same goal once before: Saddam Hussein of Iraq. As a result of the 2003 Iraq War, the U.S. Army captured thousands of hours of recordings of highly-classified meetings of the Iraqi leadership on the subject of how they viewed the purpose of nuclear weapons in the future, as well as how they envisioned their use in the context of a war against Israel. The U.S. Army made the Iraqi tapes and documents available for analysts, who have begun to publish books and academic articles on their content. Last year, two analysts, Hal Brands and David Palkki, published a study they prepared on the Iraqi records for the U.S. National Defense University (NDU). What they found was that Saddam Hussein had personally spoken about the importance of nuclear weapons as a key component of Iraqi strategy from 1978 until the Israeli strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. Saddam's earlier obsession with nuclear weapons appears to have stopped for at least seven or eight years after the attack, according to the documents, until the late the 1980s when he began to speak about the subject again.

Kurt Eichenwald: The Deafness Before the Storm

Kurt Eichenwald, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a former reporter for The New York Times, is the author of “500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars.”IT was perhaps the most famous presidential briefing in history.On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal....

Lt. Gen. Wallace C. "Chip” Gregson Jr. and Joseph A. Bosco: China Territorial Disputes: A Warning in the History of Imperial Japan

Lt. Gen. Wallace C. "Chip” Gregson Jr., retired, is senior director of China and the Pacific at the Center for the National Interest. He served as commander US Marine Corps Forces Pacific, and as assistant secretary of defense for Asia-Pacific security affairs from 2009-2011.Joseph A. Bosco served in the office of the secretary of Defense as China country desk officer and previously taught graduate seminars on China-US relations at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is now a national security consultant.Some China scholars have begun to accuse Beijing of “salami tactics” in seeking to seize gradual control of the South China Sea. The term evokes disturbing echoes of Nazi Germany’s incremental aggression until it was ready for all-out war.Applying World War II terminology to China’s current behavior may seem overblown, but it is apt. In fact, China’s actions also resemble those of another bad actor of that tragic period: Imperial Japan.The emerging Japan of the 1920s and ’30s, like today’s China, was steeped in historic resentment of the West’s forcible imposition of commercial and cultural influence. Even as Western interaction hugely benefited Japan’s economy then and China’s now, both countries set about building military capabilities commensurate with their new economic prowess.

Patrick J. Buchanan: What a Failed Presidency Looks Like ... Will 2012 Be 1980 Redux?

Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of TAC and the author of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?Both the 20th and 21st centuries have seen failed presidencies. William Howard Taft lost in 1912, though he might have retained office had not his old friend and former leader Theodore Roosevelt run as a third party Bull Moose candidate and won more votes than Taft. Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work. Had the popular Cal Coolidge sought a second full term in 1928 instead of declaring, “I do not choose to run,” he would have been in the White House when the crash came and cast by history in the role assigned to Hoover. But, as one wag said, Silent Cal’s career seems to have been a product of repeated celestial interventions...

Clifford D. May: Herbert Hoover’s Lessons

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

David Ignatius: Syria’s Eerie Parallel to 1980s Afghanistan

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs for The Washington Post.The United States and its allies are moving in Syria toward a program of covert support for the rebels that, for better or worse, looks very much like what America and its friends did in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The parallels are spooky. In Syria, as in Afghanistan, CIA officers are operating at the borders (in this case, mostly in Jordan and Turkey), helping Sunni insurgents improve their command and control and engaging in other activities. Weapons are coming from third parties (in Afghanistan, they came mostly from China and Egypt; in Syria, they’re mainly bought on the black market). And finally, a major financier for both insurgencies has been Saudi Arabia. There’s even a colorful figure who links the two campaigns: Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who as Saudi ambassador to Washington in the 1980s worked to finance and support the CIA in Afghanistan and who now, as chief of Saudi intelligence, is encouraging operations in Syria. What does this historical comparison suggest?..

Lindsey Hilsum: Islam's History Faces Threat from Within

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor of Channel 4. She appearing at the Mountains to the Sea Festival at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, at noon next Sunday. Her book Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution has been longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

Michael Kinsley: Republican Platform's Abortion Plank Has A Long History

Michael Kinsley, a former editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, is a Bloomberg View columnist.It's puzzling that people are shocked that, on abortion, the Republican platform contains no exceptions for rape or incest or to protect the health of a woman. "The question of abortion is one of the most difficult and controversial of our time." That sweet reason is from the 1976 Republican platform, three years after Roe vs. Wade, which ruled that a woman's right to abortion is protected by the Constitution. The platform went on in the same moral-relativist vein. "There are those in our Party who favor complete support for the Supreme Court decision," and those who want that decision "changed by a constitutional amendment." Just to leave no one out, it went on to note that "others have yet to take a position" while others still fall somewhere in between. It called for "public dialogue on abortion," and then, in a surprising and unexplained reversal, endorsed a "constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children."..

Peter Ferrara: The Che Convention in Charlotte

Peter Ferrara is Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow for the National Center for Policy Analysis. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is the author of America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (HarperCollins).The Democrats open their national convention this week under dark storm clouds of left-wing extremism. This is not your father's Democrat party. George McGovern would be a right winger at this convention. The party meets to renominate Barack Obama, the most left-wing nominee and President in U.S. history, a self-identified Marxist with a long professional record of associating with Marxist and left-wing extremist individuals and organizations, if you read his autobiographies. If you disagree, or know someone who disagrees, the answer is read what the man himself has written about himself. I won't repeat that history of associations here because it is old news and would take way too much space to do it justice. It is a matter of public record, and not a matter over which reasonable people can differ...

Bruce Fein: Afghanistan ... Obama's Vietnam

Bruce Fein was a senior policy adviser to the Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign and is author of American Empire Before The Fall.

James Clad and Robert Manning: What Roosevelt Would Do in South China Sea

The writers are a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.Planting flags on islets, declaring cities where there are too few residents to fill a restaurant, and huffing and puffing over uninhabited rocks are acts more suited to a Gilbert and Sullivan farce than to nations in the 21st century. Absurdities aside, the tensions in the South China Sea could shape the balance of power in Asia and put at risk the $18tn east Asian economy. However, a century-old diplomatic idea used by a former US president offers a solution to the crisis. At present, things appear to be at an impasse. Legally, the overlapping territorial claims defy resolution – either through bilateral steps or through the Law of the Sea treaty. This treaty, to which China has acceded, rejects lodging “historically based” claims, which are precisely the type Beijing periodically asserts. With the legal problems exacerbated by nationalist sentiment, practicable solutions are even harder to achieve. Yet tensions need not slide inexorably into entrenched hostility, or worse. We propose a way out that would allow step-by-step commercialisation while setting aside disputes over sovereignty...

Robert G. Rabil: Arab Uprisings Boost Israel's Enemies

Robert G. Rabil served as a chief of emergency for the Red Cross in Lebanon during the country's civil war. He is associate professor of political science and the LLS Distinguished Professor of Current Events at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Syria, United States and the War on Terror in the Middle East and most recently Religion, National Identity and Confessional Politics in Lebanon: The Challenge of Islamism.Arab uprisings have greatly affected the political landscape of the Middle East. Gone is the era when autocratic or totalitarian rulers unilaterally decided their approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. New and surviving political actors are now sensitive to their public's sentiments toward the Palestinian question, which runs deep in the collective consciousness of the Arabs. The Arab uprisings have foregrounded the Palestinian cause in the region’s politics, but it has remained secondary to immediate Arab concerns about the Syrian crisis and its implications for the region. In Washington, this has fed an impression that the fall of the Syrian regime would disrupt the Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah-Hamas axis—on Israel, the thinking goes, their hands would be tied.

Noemie Emery: Why There Will Never Be Another FDR

...[T]he problem [with the New Deal] was that what most of the country thought of as the ceiling, the progressive faction continued to see as the floor. They talked of the New Deal’s “unfinished business” and kept on seeking a hero to take care of it, believing that history moves to the left and that progressive eras are followed by times of consolidation, which in turn are followed by times of still further action, in which the country will move left again. Lyndon Johnson tried to fulfill this hope, but his excesses set off a whole new dynamic, consisting of liberal overreach, a conservative backlash against it, and then a moment of more-or-less moderation — to be followed, once memories faded, by liberal excess again. This was back-and-forth alternation, instead of progress in a single direction interrupted with pauses. Johnson’s Great Society ran into a wall in the 1966 midterms, and then spawned a run of Republican presidents....

Masha Gessen: The Russian Day of Knowledge is a Link to the Soviet Past

Masha Gessen is a journalist in Moscow. She is the author of “The Man Without a Face,” a biography of Vladimir Putin....The first day of September, often referred to as The Day of Knowledge, is the day when classes begin in schools across [Russia]. The morning usually starts with a school assembly during which 11th-graders (the oldest students) take the first-graders by the hand and lead them into the school while ringing a ceremonial bell.That is a rite of passage that has painlessly made the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era. Other rituals have proved trickier. According to one tradition, a local World War II veteran has to address the assembly; 67 years after the end of the war, few able-bodied veterans remain, but local authorities scramble to find them and deliver them to both public and private institutions.Back in the day, Communist Party representatives used to address the assemblies as well. Now some schools have replaced them with Russian Orthodox priests who lead the groups in prayer in clear violation of the Constitution, which guarantees separation of church and state. I know of only one case in which a parent took the school to task — he succeeded in stopping the prayer services....

Ross Douthat: Franklin Delano Romney

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times.THE last time the United States held a presidential election amid the mass unemployment left in a financial crisis’s wake, the challenger offered only a partial glimpse of what he would actually do in office. Mostly, he played the opportunist, attacking the incumbent party for spending too much and helping too little, for being indifferent to human suffering and for failing to balance the budget, for overtaxing and undertaxing and everywhere in between. He claimed to be offering a bold contrast of visions, but mostly he just relied on the unemployment rate to do his work for him.

Joe Nocera: They’re Not What They Used to Be

Joe Nocera is a columnist for the New York Times....There is a reason journalists began flocking to conventions once upon a time. Up until 1960, they were the exact opposite of what they are now. Rather than an exercise in public relations, they were essentially a huge fight, with cajoling and horse-trading and balloting that could go on into the wee hours. Conventions, not primaries, were the process by which the parties selected their nominees for president and vice president.Here was Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, winning the nomination on the fourth ballot in a tense all-night session. Here was his opponent in 1940, Wendell Willkie, winning the Republican nomination in dramatic fashion on the sixth ballot. Here was Adlai Stevenson in 1956 deciding to let the convention choose between two senators, John F. Kennedy and Estes Kefauver, as his vice-presidential candidate. “It kept going back and forth,” recalls Charlie Peters, the founding editor of The Washington Monthly. “It was very exciting.”

Frank Bruni: The VP Hex

Frank Bruni is a columnist for the New York Times....The office of the vice presidency seems to addle many occupants, and that goes back centuries before Cheney. In Aaron Burr’s final year as the country’s third vice president, he killed Alexander Hamilton, his political rival, in a duel.Thomas Marshall, who served under Woodrow Wilson, was utterly sidelined during the many months after a stroke left the president bedridden. The first lady ran the show. He felt so understandably marginalized in his job that he said: “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea. The other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again.”F.D.R.’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, famously characterized the job as not being worth “a warm bucket” of urine, which was euphemized in the retelling as “spit.” Hubert Humphrey saw his favor among liberals shredded by his loyalty to L.B.J., who got us deeper and deeper into Vietnam....

Noemie Emery: Farewell to All That ... There Will Never Be Another FDR

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard and writes a weekly column for the Washington Examiner.

Charles Krauthammer: The ‘Deterrence Works’ Fantasy

Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that “deterrence works.” It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn’t work over North Vietnam. It’s like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn’t in the London blitz. The idea that some military technique “works” is meaningless. It depends on the time, the circumstances, the nature of the adversaries. The longbow worked for Henry V. At El Alamein, however, Montgomery chose tanks. Yet a significant school of American “realists” remains absolutist on deterrence and is increasingly annoyed with those troublesome Israelis who are sowing fear, rattling world markets, and risking regional war by threatening a preemptive strike to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Don’t they understand that their fears are grossly exaggerated? After all, didn’t deterrence work during 40 years of the Cold War?..