Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Gerson: Obama Fails the Lincoln Test

Michael Gerson is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post.During his recent speech to Congress, President Obama gave Republicans this ideological glove to the face: “We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. . . . But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future — a Republican president who mobilized government to build the Transcontinental Railroad, launch the National Academy of Sciences, set up the first land-grant colleges.”It is a familiar rhetorical tactic — an attempt to checkmate your opponent by moving his own king. During Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Republican convention speech, he quoted Franklin Roosevelt on the need to “eliminate unnecessary functions of government.” Countless Republicans have offered up John F. Kennedy on the efficacy of tax cuts.But invoking Lincoln at the seance is always risky. He is not a tame spirit.

Ivo Daalder: Remembering Sept. 12, 2001

Ivo Daalder is U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The shock and horror of 9/11 is burned into all our memories. I was on an aircraft over the Atlantic that day, flying back to Washington from Brussels, when the pilot gave us the awful news and turned the plane back. I well remember the terrible feeling I had, as many people around the world did at that moment — that I could have been on one of those planes, or that I could have been in one of those buildings. None of us was safe anymore. On Sunday, we all remembered that day 10 years ago, when terrorists turned airplanes into weapons of mass destruction. But we should also remember what happened the following day. Sept. 12, 2001, the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s governing body, met in special session. For the first time since NATO’s founding in 1949, the council decided unanimously to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, saying the attack on 9/11 was not just an attack on the United States, but an attack on all the members of NATO...

Jay Cost: He’s No Truman...

Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.A year from now, the presidential election campaign will be in full swing. Obama and the Republican nominee will be touring the country at a feverish pace, trying hard to convince swing voters to go their way. Obviously, we’re still too far out from November 2012 to know what will happen, but we’re close enough to get a sense of the shape of the race.President Obama’s chances next year don’t look good. As of this writing, the InTrade prediction market gives the president about a 50-50 chance, and even Democratic insiders are starting to doubt the top of their ticket. According to National Journal, they’re privately giving the president just a 63 percent chance of victory, which is not a great score considering the partisan source. These relatively gloomy odds are not surprising, as the president faces some historic challenges in his reelection quest. 

Deroy Murdock: Obama vs. Reagan

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.President Zero.The brand-new nickname for Barack ObamAA+ symbolizes America’s total net jobs created in August: Zippo.

Nicholas Burns: After 9/11 Anniversary: The Return of U.S. Diplomacy

Nicholas Burns is professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics, and director of the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He served as under secretary of State for political affairs from 2005 to 2008. Previously, he was US ambassador to NATO.America’s 9/11 commemoration reminds us what an unusual decade it has been for the United States on the world stage.

Bob Woodward: In Cheney’s Memoir, It’s Clear Iraq’s Lessons Didn’t Sink In

Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Post. His assistant, Evelyn M. Duffy, contributed to this column.A key lesson of the 9/11 decade for presidents and other national security decision makers is the importance of rigorously testing intelligence evidence: poking holes in it, setting out contradictions, figuring out what may have been overlooked or left out. It is essential to distinguish between hard facts and what is an assessment or judgment.The so-called slam-dunk case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction illustrates the failure. If anyone should have learned this, it is former president George W. Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney.Yet in his new memoir, “In My Time,” Cheney shows he has not fully absorbed that lesson when he writes about the administration’s response to the 2007 discovery of a nuclear reactor in Syria that the North Koreans had helped build.

Richard Fenning: 9/11 ... The Decade Since Has Been One To Celebrate

Richard Fenning is CEO of Control Risks, a firm advising on political, security and integrity risks. Each generation assumes it lives through tumultuous times. But as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the last decade will surely be remembered as one of extraordinary volatility and insecurity. We now assume that 9/11 not only changed the world, but set in train a global geopolitical rollercoaster ride. The evidence seems compelling. 9/11 propelled al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden from shadowy obscurity to global infamy overnight. The US and its allies went to war in Afghanistan to destroy the group’s capability to stage a repeat performance, before being distracted into regime change in Iraq. Al-Qaida and its affiliates continued to plan attacks. Some succeeded, others were frustrated by massive international counter-terrorism efforts. But we became conditioned to the inevitability of future attacks.

Noam Chomsky: Was There an Alternative? Looking Back on 9/11 a Decade Later

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (Seven Stories Press), an updated version of his classic account, just being published this week with a major new essay -- from which this post was adapted -- considering the 10 years since the 9/11 attacks.We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of September 11, 2001, which, it is commonly held, changed the world. On May 1st, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was assassinated in Pakistan by a team of elite US commandos, Navy SEALs, after he was captured, unarmed and undefended, in Operation Geronimo.

Ross Gittins: Economic history ignored leads to the inevitable

Ross Gittins is the economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.When the Queen asked economists why so few of them had foreseen the global financial crisis, our professor Geoff Harcourt and some other academics petitioned her to say, among other things, that one reason was their profession's loss of interest in economic history.That sad truth was demonstrated convincingly by two American professors, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, in a book which has since become a modern classic, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. It's just out in paperback, published by Princeton University Press.

Ramesh Ponnuru: Obama’s Weakness Leading to Republican Overreach

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review. The opinions expressed are his ownPresident Barack Obama has never looked more vulnerable. His poll numbers keep dropping. The economic news is still grim. And his team’s political sense often seems to be missing.Take the recent report that White House senior staff were heartened by hearing historian Michael Beschloss tell them that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan had each won re-election even though unemployment was high. If Obama’s aides really believe these precedents are auspicious, they are kidding themselves: Both the 1936 and 1984 elections followed very strong economic growth....

Joe Nocera: Newt Gingrich Poisoned American Politics

Joe Nocera is a columnist for the NYT.Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog Democrat who represents the Nashville area, was first elected to Congress in 1982. He was 28, and if it’s not quite right to say he’s been there ever since — he spent eight years in the private sector after losing the race for Al Gore’s Senate seat — he’s still been a congressman most of his adult life.......Cooper is the House’s conscience, a lonely voice for civility in this ugly era. He remembers when compromise was not a dirty word and politicians put country ahead of party. And he’s not afraid to talk about it. “We’ve gone from Brigadoon to Lord of the Flies,” he likes to say....To Cooper, the true villain is not the Tea Party; it’s Newt Gingrich. In the 1980s, when Tip O’Neill was speaker of the House, “Congress was functional,” Cooper told me. “Committees worked. Tip saw his role as speaker of the whole House, not just the Democrats.”

Ross Douthat: It’s Still the 9/11 Era

Ross Douthat is an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times  .The New York Times. Osama bin Laden is dead. So is Saddam Hussein, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and too many Qaeda No. 3’s to count. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is awaiting his military tribunal. George W. Bush is home on the ranch, Dick Cheney is on book tour, and even Gen. David Petraeus is a general no more, having traded in his stars for a civilian position atop the Central Intelligence Agency. But 10 years to the week after the twin towers fell, we are still living in the 9/11 era. The names and faces are different, the White House has changed hands, and the country has turned its gaze from our distant wars to the economic crisis on the home front.

Lionel Barber: The End of US Hegemony ... Legacy of 9/11

Lionel Barber is Editor of the Financial Times. On the morning of September 11, 2001, America’s prospects appeared as bright as the clear blue sky over Lower Manhattan. The price of Brent crude oil was $28 a barrel, the Federal government was running a budget surplus, the US economy was turning (albeit imperceptibly) after the dotcom crash.

David Ignatius: Obama's Successful Post-Bush Foreign Policy

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. Barack Obama got elected president in part because he promised to change the foreign policy priorities of a Bush administration that was unpopular abroad, had strained relations with key allies and was facing a growing Iranian challenge and a continuing menace from al-Qaeda. So what’s happened over the past 32 months? There have been a lot of bumps and bruises, especially in the global economy. But if you step back from the daily squawk box, some trends are clear: Alliances are stronger, the United States is (somewhat) less bogged down in foreign wars, Iran is weaker, the Arab world is less hostile and al-Qaeda is on the run.   Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, argues that this isn’t an accident — and that the president deserves more credit for accomplishing the goals he set in 2009. He would say that, of course; it’s part of the national security adviser’s job to spin perceptions.

Charles Moore: 9/11 ... What Have We Learnt?

Charles Moore covers politics with the wisdom and insight that come from having edited The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. On a lazy summer’s day in 2002, it came home to me. I was mink-hunting (then a legal activity) by a river on the Kent/Sussex border, and a cockney foundry worker called Vince was there with his terrier. We chatted, and eventually it came out that his sister had been killed in the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. She had been helping to organise a conference there, Vince said.

Bill Kristol: FDR, Reagan . . . Obama?

Bill Kristol is the editor of the Weeky Standard.Time's Michael Scherer reports that, in June, "White House chief of staff Bill Daley arranged a secret retreat for his senior team at Fort McNair ...  Historian Michael Beschloss went along as a guest speaker to help answer the one question on everyone’s mind: How does a U.S. President win re-election with the country suffering unacceptably high rates of unemployment? The historian’s lecture provided a lift for Barack Obama’s team. No iron law in politics is ever 100% accurate, Beschloss told the group. Two Presidents in the past century―Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984―won re­election amid substantial economic suffering. Both used the same two-part strategy: FDR and Reagan argued that the country, though in pain, was improving and that their opponents, anchored in past failures, would make things worse. ... The President’s aides, all but resigned to unemployment above 8% on Election Day, now see in Roosevelt and Reagan a plausible path to victory."...

W. James Antle: Grand Old Peaceniks ... Will Austerity Turn Republicans Away From War?

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.  Fairly or not, Mitt Romney’s approach to national security during the 2008 presidential race can be captured by a single phrase: “Double Guantanamo.” When asked about the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects, the eager-to-please former Massachusetts governor’s first instinct was to propose super-sizing it like a McDonald’s value meal for hungry Republican primary voters. That was when Romney was trying to compete with John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, both more natural national-security hawks than he.

Adam Garfinkle: Reflections on the 9/11 Decade

Adam Garfinkle served as chief staff writer of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (Hart-Rudman Commission), which predicted mass-casualty terrorism on American soil before 9/11 and first proposed creation of a Department of Homeland Security. He then served as editor of The National Interest and as speechwriter to Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

Roger Cohen: Score One for Interventionism

Roger Cohen is a British-born journalist and author. He is a columnist for The New York Times and International Herald Tribune. It will be two decades next year since the outbreak of the Bosnian war — and since the debate on interventionism began to rage, becoming one of the most acrimonious moral questions of our times. Now Libya, a successful Western intervention, will be placed on the scales. The issue has divided friends and united enemies. Democrats under the age of 30 were almost as eager to go to war in Iraq as Republicans over 65, according to a Pew Research Center poll of October 2002, a moment when liberal hawkishness and conservative American hubris coalesced with disastrous consequences. It has been the focus of an age-old foreign policy debate between realism and idealism, prompted a deluge of finger-pointing, and proved a catalyst to the U.N.-endorsed notion of a responsibility to protect. At the heart of the polemics lie divergent views on the very nature of American power. Like many of my generation, I became an interventionist in Bosnia.

Peter Beinart: Neoconservatism ... The Latest 9/11 Casualty

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, something unexpected has happened: the ideology that 9/11 made famous—neoconservatism—has died.  The evidence is all around us.