Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Klare: The Hunger Wars in Our Future

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left (Metropolitan Books).The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but we already know that its consequences will be severe. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains.

Patrick Smyth: Guilt Is Blinding the World on Rwanda

Patrick Smyth is Foreign Editor at The Irish Times.Some what like Germany’s refusal to criticise Israeli excesses, international criticism of Rwanda, and its president, Paul Kagame, has been muted in recent years because of what might be termed “holocaust guilt”. The failure of western countries to intervene to prevent the 1994 genocidal massacre of 800,000 of the country’s people has left Washington and London, the country’s main aid suppliers, notably silent about rebel leader and now president, Kagame’s increasing internal authoritarianism and the evidence of Rwanda’s support for a bloody militia, M23, creating mayhem in the Kivus in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). That guilt, and Kagame’s genuine success in rebuilding the country, its economy now booming, led to his being feted as Africa’s new hope by some western leaders, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair most notoriously. But his tide has turned...

Shashank Joshi: Afghanistan's Long Shadow over Syria

Shashank Joshi is a research fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.

Doug Saunders: A Bloody History Repeating Itself in Syria?

Doug Saunders is a Canadian-British author and journalist.Moscow is sending three warships to back the regime. Washington has made it known that the CIA is aiding the rebels. Talks aimed at a peace deal or surrender have broken down. And the United Nations Security Council is deadlocked by Russian and Chinese vetoes, raising the spectre of a long and ugly conflict. That is Syria today, but it also happens to sound a lot like Kosovo in 1999. Then, as now, a bloody guerrilla struggle against the increasingly violent actions of a strongman leader became a symbolically loaded conflict of wills between the United States and Russia, and as a result the United Nations was unable to play any useful role. After former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan resigned in frustration on Thursday as the UN-appointed negotiator between Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and opposition rebels, the comparisons to the Kosovo conflict became even more acute...

Frank Rich: Declinist panic. Hysterical nostalgia. America may not be over, but it is certainly in thrall to the idea

#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } The wave of nostalgia for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry and for the vanished halcyon America it supposedly enshrined says more about the frazzled state of America in 2012 and our congenital historical amnesia than it does about the reality of America in 1960. The eulogists’ sentimental juxtapositions of then and now were foreordained. If there’s one battle cry that unites our divided populace, it’s that the country has gone to hell and that almost any modern era, with the possible exception of the Great Depression, is superior in civic grace, selfless patriotism, and can-do capitalistic spunk to our present nadir. For nearly four years now—since the crash of ’08 and the accompanying ascent of Barack Obama—America has been in full decline panic. Books by public intellectuals, pundits, and politicians heralding our imminent collapse have been one of the few reliable growth industries in hard times.

Timothy William Waters: Abandon ‘Genocide’ and Call Evils by Their Ancient Names

Timothy William Waters, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, worked at the ICTY on Slobodan Milosevic’s trial. Rarely does one read such hopeful news: In late June, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia acquitted former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic of genocide. That might sound like a bad thing: Karadzic, who once warned Bosnia’s Muslims that war would lead them down the road to hell, surely deserved to be sentenced for the acts of which he was just acquitted – murder, siege and slaughter almost beyond naming. But for genocide? Better not. In fact, we would be better off getting rid of genocide as a crime altogether. The legal concept of genocide is so incoherent, so harmful to the purposes that international law serves, that it would be better if we had never invented it. Karadzic’s acquittal – precisely because he is still on trial on other counts related to the same atrocities – is an opportunity to move toward the sensible goal of retiring it. This was not just any acquittal.

David Harsanyi: Mr. President, You’re No Bill Clinton

David Harsanyi is a senior reporter at Human Events. Former President Bill Clinton is slated to deliver a prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention. No doubt, he’s going to give one hell of a talk. The man is on his game, enjoying the highest favorable ratings he’s seen since 1993; a robust 66 percent of Americans think highly of the former president. It’s a politically astute choice by Barack Obama, as "there isn’t anybody on the planet who has a greater perspective on not just the last four years, but the last two decades, than Bill Clinton," David Axelrod explained to The New York Times. "He can really articulate the choice that is before people." He sure can. Or, rather, he sure could, if he felt like it. Problem is that if Clinton actually used his perspective, he’d be giving a rousing convention speech on the benefits of free trade and free markets at the Republican convention.

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson: Uncultured ... Mitt Romney's Economic History

Daron Acemoglu is the Elizabeth and James Killian professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and James A. Robinson is the David Florence professor of government at Harvard University. "Culture makes all the difference," Mitt Romney told an intimate gathering of Israeli businessmen at Jerusalem's posh King David Hotel. "And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things." The U.S. Republican presidential hopeful, whose own net worth is estimated at roughly $250 million, went on to compare Israelis' economically comfortable existence with the more straitened circumstances in Palestinian areas.

Morris D. Davis: Consign Bush's 'Torture Memos' to History

Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis is former chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is now on the faculty of the Howard University School of Law. 

Michael Barone: 2012 Is Very Different from Kerry vs. Bush

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.Does the 2012 campaign look a lot like the 2004 campaign? Many Democrats think so. And there are some resemblances. As in 2004, current polling suggests a close race and shows only about a dozen states in contention. As was the case in 2004, the incumbent has been running negative ads against the challenger, hoping to disqualify him the same way that Bill Clinton disqualified Bob Dole in 1996. Many Democrats think that Barack Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s business career will have the same effect that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads had, they believe, on John Kerry in 2004. But, as William Galston of the Brookings Institution, an alumnus of the Clinton White House, writes in The New Republic, “The evidence in favor of all these propositions is remarkably thin.”..

Gideon Rachman: If You Liked George W. Bush, You’ll Love Mitt Romney

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign-affairs commentator for the Financial Times.A cynic inspecting Mitt Romney’s foreign itinerary of Poland, Israel and Britain might mutter: “Polish vote, Jewish vote, Olympics.” But there is also a genuine philosophy behind Mr Romney’s choice of destinations. The Republican candidate’s main critique of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is that the president has spent too much time courting America’s enemies and dissing its friends. Under the Obama administration, according to this argument, loyalty and long-term friendship with the US is rewarded with the cold shoulder. Anti-American posturing, by contrast, is rewarded with an apology and concessions. So Mr Obama has made elaborate speeches in the Muslim world, but not visited Israel. He has pursued a reset with Russia, but has been accused of cavalier treatment of the Poles and Balts. And he has stressed relationships with rising powers in Asia, while allegedly neglecting old alliances, such as the “special relationship” with Britain. Mr Romney’s foreign itinerary is intended to drive home this argument. It is a pointed tour of old friends and allies...

Paul Hockenos: How Munich Forever Changed the Olympics

Paul Hockenos, a writer based in Berlin, is the author of Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe.

Lee Ruddin: Debunking the “Poodle” Thesis in Anglo-American Relations ... Thatcher as One of Reagan’s Principals

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.Readers of the Guardian may be forgiven for thinking that its editors were now big advocates of the Anglo-American “special relationship” after the newspaper ran a fascinating feature on Emma Sky, ‘the British peacenik who became the key to the US military.’ Granted, its chief political correspondent (Nicholas Watt) derided Mitt Romney on his recent trip to London and scolded the Republican presidential challenger for an advisor’s comment relating to his ‘Anglo-Saxon heritage.’ Yet it sounded almost proud of the fact that a civilian (one opposed to the war in Iraq) advised an American commander (namely General Raymond T. Odierno) on the dusty plains of Mesopotamia and that her ideas were later reflected in General David Petraeus’s successful counter-insurgency doctrine.

Jonathan Rauch: Love Classic Republican Foreign Policy? Vote For Obama

Jonathan Rauch is an opinion columnist for National Journal. Pundits and, for that matter, the Obama campaign were right to ding Mitt Romney’s foreign policy address Tuesday for banging the table instead of putting anything substantive on it. But what could Romney do? Obama has given him almost nothing to work with. Foreign affairs won’t decide the 2012 election, but, if it did, President Obama would win walking away. Replying to Romney’s speech, Robert Gibbs, an Obama adviser, said this: "It’s widely accepted that President Obama has an exceptionally strong record on national security issues, and I think, quite frankly, Mitt Romney is having a hard time making an argument against President Obama on these issues." It pains me, as a supposedly crankily skeptical journalist, to agree with a partisan spin doctor, but here goes: Gibbs is right. I never drank the Obama Kool-Aid in 2008. The then-candidate’s promise of "a new kind of politics," I wrote in National Journal at the time, "borders on chicanery." Replace partisanship with pragmatism? Set aside ideology to take the best solutions from both parties and ease the country out of its mess? Fat chance, I said. Well, for the record, I hereby eat half a crow.

Rami G. Khouri: Syria and Iraq Wrestle With Their Past

Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by The Daily Star. This has been a bad publicity week for the Baath Party that ruled Iraq and Syria for much of the past half-century. Consider the two following lead paragraphs from two news stories from the Associated Press Tuesday.The first was datelined Damascus: "After a bloody, weeklong siege in the Syrian capital, residents who stayed behind are facing hourslong lines for gasoline and bread, stinking piles of garbage in the streets and scenes of destruction unimaginable in a city that had long been spared the worst ravages of the country’s uprising. It’s a gruesome turn for the distinguished Middle Eastern city of Damascus, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and a sign that Syria’s civil war appears doomed to escalate." The second was datelined Baghdad: "A startling spasm of violence shook more than a dozen Iraqi cities Monday, killing over 100 people in coordinated bombings and shootings and wounding twice as many in the country’s deadliest day in more than two years.

Bennett Ramberg: For Iran, Learn from Iraq 1991-94

Bennett Ramberg served as a policy analyst in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the George H.W. Bush administration. By late Tuesday, we could see the restart of the ticking clock that can lead to military action against Tehran’s atomic program. These are the stakes should the second round of the European Union-Iran technical nuclear talks in Istanbul fail to make progress. Breakdown could make impossible any resumption of these stalled plenary negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran. Though sanctions have yet to play out, deadlock makes force increasingly plausible. However, many analysts and government officials in the United States and elsewhere have taken a glum view about the practicality of such a step. Airstrikes, they argue, may set Tehran back only a few months, and instead energize the government’s efforts to get the bomb. Policymakers sound stumped. But they shouldn’t be. If the decision to apply force were made, the international community can prevent an Iranian nuclear rebirth through inspectors who have the authority to destroy remaining nuclear contraband. Farfetched?.. 

Mark Leonard: How Obama Lost Europe

Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think tank. John McCain may have called Barack Obama the biggest celebrity in the world, but the place that has held the U.S. president closest to its collective heart has always been Europe. When he took to the stage in Berlin on July 24, 2008, a crowd of 200,000 Germans abandoned their usual reserve to flood screaming and cheering into the Tiergarten. They came to see an aspiring American president give flesh to all of Europe's fantasies about American leadership: multiethnic and multilateral; pragmatic and peacefully minded; social democratic in his goals and so eloquent in their expression. Obama promised to purge the sins of George W. Bush and give new impetus to the alliance for a new century. "America has no better partner than Europe" he said. The paradox is that while Obama successfully healed the transatlantic rift, he may also be the American president who presided over the end of the West as a political community. Four years on from Berlin, Obama would still trade his approval ratings in any European country with those in his native United States.

Judy Shelton: The Soviet Banking System—and Ours

Ms. Shelton is senior fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the author of Money Meltdown (Free Press, 1994) and The Coming Soviet Crash (Free Press, 1989). Many in America today fear that our nation is going the way of Europe—becoming more socialist and redistributionist as government grows ever larger. But the most disturbing trend may not be the fiscal enlargement of government through excessive spending, but rather the elevated role of monetary policy. Our central bank, the Federal Reserve, uses its enormous influence over banking and financial institutions to channel funds back to government instead of directing them toward productive economic activity. For evaluating the damaging effects of this unhealthy symbiosis between banking and government, the more instructive model is the Soviet Union in its final years before economic collapse. We can draw lessons from the fact that the Soviet Union went bankrupt even as its fiscal budget statements affirmed that government revenues and expenditures were perfectly balanced.

William A. Galston: False Analogy ... Why the 2012 Campaign is Nothing Like 2004

William A. Galston is a contributing editor for The New Republic. The emerging conventional wisdom among many Democrats takes the form of two equations: 2012 = 2004, and Bain = Swift Boats. There’s also a supporting narrative: The negative campaign against John Kerry fatally weakened his candidacy, securing the victory of an incumbent who could not have won based on his own record. And so, the idea goes, a president whose performance the public doesn’t much like can power his way to a narrow, less than pretty win by eviscerating his challenger. But the evidence in favor of all of these propositions is remarkably thin. The basic structure of the 2004 campaign differed fundamentally from the one we’re now enduring. The available evidence suggests that even in the short-term, the attacks on Romney have been measurably less successful than were those on Kerry. And Obama’s supporters seem to have forgotten that the reason Bush prevailed was because enough Americans ended up approving of his record and leadership in the areas they cared about the most. In 2012, there is a single dominant issue—the economy.

Jim Geraghty: 1980 vs. 2012 ... Alas, Romney–Obama Won’t Be A Replay of Reagan–Carter

Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot on NRO.Republicans relish the tempting thought of history repeating itself: an incumbent Democratic president, widely perceived as a disappointment or a failure, heads into an election with seven out of every ten Americans believing the "country is in deep and serious trouble." After dismissing his Republican challenger as an unserious joke, the hubristic incumbent loses the popular vote by a wide margin and the Electoral College by a landslide.And just think, Republicans have been comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter since 2008.While Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is sure to enjoy the comparisons of this year’s presidential election with the one 32 years ago, Republicans shouldn’t fool themselves about the difficulty of the task before them. While it’s possible that Romney could win big, any serious examination of this race should recognize several enormous changes that have taken place in our national political environment in the past three decades, shifts that work against a repeat of Reagan’s rout of Carter....