Roundup: Media's Take

Jerrold M. Post: Moammar Kadafi's Inner 'I'

Jerrold M. Post is director of the political psychology program at George Washington University. He was founding director of the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior and is the author of Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World and The Mind of the Terrorist. In March, a few days after NATO planes began bombing Libya, Moammar Kadafi delivered a speech to the nation he had ruled for more than four decades. "Great Libyan people," he began, "you are now living through glorious hours." In the speech, designed to rally Libyans with soaring rhetoric to stand against the rebellion and the foreign attacks, Kadafi ended with a promise. "We will defeat them by any means.... We are ready for the fight, whether it will be a short or a long one....

John F. Copper: Why We Need Taiwan

John F. Copper is the Stanley J. Buckman Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of more than thirty books on China and Taiwan. A spate of articles, op-eds and comment pieces have appeared in the U.S. press and academic journals in recent months arguing that Taiwan is not important to America and/or isn’t worth fighting China over, that the United States cannot afford to spend more on its military (which it has to in order to protect Taiwan), and that Taiwan should be abandoned. Some, a lot fewer, have come to Taiwan’s defense and argue otherwise. There are numerous arguments to be made that Taiwan is an ally that should be kept. It is a democracy. It is sovereign. It is faithful to the United States, etc. The critical case to be made, however, is—or at least should be—that Taiwan is strategically important to the United States. I believe there are two good arguments to be made for Taiwan’s strategic importance: One comes from looking at the history of the United States. The other from geopolitics...

Jeffrey Lord: The Party of Stars ... The GOP Talent Pool of 2012 Looks Like the Democrats of 1960

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. Will the Republican National Convention of 2012 -- scheduled to be reaching its zenith one year from today -- look more like a political version of American Idol? Showcasing an explosion of fresh political faces destined to star in American politics for decades into the future? Is it 1960 all over again? When the Democratic National Convention was showered with so much sparkling new political talent that it shaped both the party and the nation for the next quarter century? Except this time, in 2012, it's show time for Republicans? With a new Republican Kelly or Jennifer or Carrie just waiting to be discovered? While today's media follows the traditional ups-and-downs of the campaign trail (Perry is beating Romney! Palin is getting in! Palin is out!

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Let’s Honor the Real Dr. King, ‘An Extremist for Love’

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.We tend to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. we want to honor, not the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who actually existed.We forget the King who at the time of his ministry was labeled an “extremist,” who explicitly called out “moderates” for urging African Americans to slow down their march to justice, who quite brilliantly used the American creed as a seedbed for searing criticisms of the United States as it existed.

Robert Kaplan: Libya, Obama and the Triumph of Realism

The writer is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. Realism is dead, clamour the cheerleaders of the Arab spring. The collapse of dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and now Libya heralds a new birth of freedom that supposedly consigns realism to the graveyard. But Barack Obama – by taking part in the Libyan operation but not leading it – has been nothing if not a realist. Realism, as a theory of international relations, posits that tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good, but instead the triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. It was the US president’s realist views that led him to argue against taking a leadership role in Libya, to keep America’s powder dry for more important crises to come – a demonstrable good.

Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen: Expect a Third-Party Candidate in 2012

Mr. Caddell served as a pollster for President Jimmy Carter. Mr. Schoen, who served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is author of "The Political Fix" (Henry Holt, 2010).The United States is in the midst of what we would both call a prerevolutionary moment, and there is widespread support for fundamental change in the system. An increasing number of Americans are now searching beyond the two parties for bold and effective leadership.A Rasmussen Reports poll conducted earlier this month found that "just 17% of likely U.S. voters think that the federal government today has the consent of the governed," while an extraordinary 69% "believe the government does not have that consent."...We have seen in the past where economic distress and political alienation can lead. In both the 1980 and 1992 presidential campaigns, third-party candidates emerged—John Anderson and then Ross Perot—and each garnered high levels of public support. Mr. Perot actually led in the polls for several months during the 1992 campaign. And the conditions in those years were nowhere near as severe as they are today.

William Broyles: Oval Office Appeaser

Broyles, a screenwriter and former editor of NEWSWEEK, supported Barack Obama in 2008.When Barack Obama was inaugurated, a Republican president had taken the peace, prosperity, and budget surpluses of the Clinton years and given us two wars, a devastated economy, and an almost trillion-dollar deficit. Obama was going to be our Franklin Roosevelt, our Winston Churchill—a visionary leader who would give America hope again. Instead, he has turned out to be the Neville Chamberlain of American politics, drifting toward national catastrophe, one compromise at a time.

James Joyner: Libya After Qaddafi ... Lessons From Iraq 2003

James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council and writes at outsidethebeltway.com. The end of Muammar Qaddafi's regime appears near. Regardless of one's views on the wisdom of American intervention, that's cause for celebration. Indeed, celebration is the order of the day, with large crowds cheering and dancing in Libya, in front of the White House, and around the world. The giddiness and exultation is natural and understandable. And, in the case of Libyans who risked everything to reach this point, earned. Still, sober observers would be wise to recall similar triumphalism and I Told You So's at a similar stage in Iraq eight years ago, when Saddam Hussein was toppled...  

Robert Fisk: History Repeats Itself, With Mistakes of Iraq Rehearsed Afresh

Robert Fisk is an award-winning Middle East correspondent for the Independent. Doomed always to fight the last war, we are recommitting the same old sin in Libya.Muammar Gaddafi vanishes after promising to fight to the death. Isn't that just what Saddam Hussein did? And of course, when Saddam disappeared and US troops suffered the very first losses from the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, we were told – by the US proconsul Paul Bremer, the generals, diplomats and the decaying television "experts" – that the gunmen of the resistance were "die-hards", "dead-enders" who didn't realise that the war was over. And if Gaddafi and his egg-headed son remain at large – and if the violence does not end – how soon will we be introduced once more to the "dead-enders" who simply will not understand that the lads from Benghazi are in charge and that the war is over? Indeed, within 15 minutes – literally – of my writing the above words (2pm yesterday), a Sky News reporter had re-invented "die-hards" as a definition for Gaddafi's men. See what I mean?

Michael Tomasky: Obama a Great Foreign Policy President

Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Barack Obama hasn’t been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone’s point of view. And it’s a little hard to picture how he might ever be seen as such—that is to say, even if he’s reelected, he’ll probably have a Republican House or Senate (or both) that will thwart him at every turn, so the best he’ll be able to say is that he presided over a slow and very difficult economic recovery, which presumably will finally happen by January 2017. But foreign policy could be a completely different story. Here one can see how he might become not just a good but a great foreign-policy president. Yes, of course, let’s stipulate: the war isn’t actually, you know, over.

Jan Zielonka: Europe Returns to Empire

Jan Zielonka is Professor of European Politics at the University of Oxford and author of Europe as Empire (Oxford University Press, 2006). The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the first official proposal to create common economic governance for Eurozone countries “undemocratic and likely to stir up social resentments”. His speech, published in April in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, accused politicians of ceding power to the financial markets and allowing the EU to dictate the social and economic policies of sovereign countries.

Simon Jenkins: The End of Gaddafi Is Welcome. But It Does Not Justify the Means .

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian as well as broadcasting for the BBC. He has edited the Times and the London Evening Standard.DD.  The downfall of a dictator is always welcome. Especially welcome is the downfall of Gaddafi of Libya. He was not the worst of his genre, but for 42 years was the beneficiary of the crassest western intervention, veering between ineffective sanctions and ostracism and Tony Blair's cringing, oil-drenched "friendship". More welcome still would have been his downfall clearly at the hands of his own people, not courtesy of western armies. The odds on mayhem after revolution are always high, and the pressure on those who aided revolution to forestall mayhem is intense.

David Owen: Libyan Intervention Shows Power of the West

Lord Owen is a former Foreign Secretary. During the darkest moments of Nato’s campaign in Libya, it was suggested that its sluggish progress represented the death knell for the doctrine of humanitarian intervention – that a West chastened by its experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and enfeebled by debt lacked the money, the morale and the military resources to take action against those who broke international law. Now that the rebels have swept into Tripoli, the opposite argument is being made – that their success represents a vindication of the Nato strategy, and provides a template for the toppling of despots in Syria and elsewhere. The truth, however, is that Libya is not a successor to Kosovo or Sierra Leone. Instead, it is the prototype for a new kind of intervention, one that reflects the very different world that we find ourselves in today. From the start, the campaign faced a wall of scepticism from military and diplomatic experts.

Doug Bandow: Rick Perry: Know-Nothing Neoconservatism Reincarnated?

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire (Xulon Press).Texas Gov. Rick Perry has leapt to the top in the Republican presidential race. His domestic policy looks standard-issue conservative. But his foreign policy veers neoconservative—even after George W. Bush and Barack Obama together launched two full-scale wars, one “kinetic military action,” and two deadly drone-campaigns.

Ryan Lizza: How Michelle Bachmann Really Sees Slavery

Ryan Lizza is The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent. He covers the 2012 Presidential campaign and national politics....Back on her campaign plane—Bachmann dubbed it her “Barbie jet,” in homage to Barbie’s pink Glam Vacation Jet, sold by Mattel—on June 28th, as we headed from New Hampshire to South Carolina, Bachmann was celebrating the P.R. victory over Chris Wallace. The “flaky” comment made him look mean, even sexist, and her refusal to accept his non-apology made her look tough. He finally called Bachmann personally and offered a clearer apology, which she accepted.Bachmann marvelled at how the controversy “seems like it happened years ago.”

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Ayn Rand v. America

From 1995 to 2003, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend served as Maryland's first woman lieutenant governor. She now works in finance in Washington.A few weeks ago, Maureen Fiedler, the producer of the weekly radio show, Interfaith Voices, asked me to participate in a debate with Onkar Ghate, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. I eagerly accepted. I wanted to hear how a follower of Rand would defend proposals to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps while exempting the wealthy from paying their fair share.     In one sense there was agreement. Maureen, a Sister of Loretto, argued that Republican budget proposals turned their back on Christ's admonition to care for "the least among us," the hungry, the sick, the homeless. Ghate did not dispute that. Rand, he said, was an atheist who did not believe in government efforts to help those in need....What I did find startling was Ghate's insistence that just as there should be a separation of church and state, so there should be a separation of economics and state. That notion really got me thinking....

Barak Barfi: Libya’s Greatest Advantage? The Modest Expectations of the Libyan People

Barak Barfi is a research fellow with the New America Foundation.The Libyan people are right to celebrate as their country’s benighted Muammar Qaddafi era comes to a definitive close, but the country’s new leadership should also not forget that its work is just beginning. Building a new political order will be difficult, not least because Libyan political culture is notoriously underdeveloped, with only the barest history of civic engagement.However, if the leaders of the Transitional National Council prove to be as politically canny as they were physically brave, they’ll soon realize that their national vice is actually a potential virtue.

Jack White: White Backlash, Part Deux

Jack White, a frequent contributor to The Root, is a longtime observer of national politics.During the turbulent 1960s and '70s, segregationists like Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Boston anti-busing rabble-rouser Louise Day Hicks whipped up what was then known as "the White Backlash." It was nothing less than an all-out effort to use mob rule to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement and drive blacks back into second-class citizenship. It was a tactic that propelled Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan, to the presidency.

John J. Miller: Sorry, Bam: Lincoln Had It Way Worse

John J. Miller directs the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College and authored The First Assassin, a novel about Lincoln and the Civil War.President Obama has a new complaint: “Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”More abused than Abraham Lincoln? Obama has no idea.He has yet to experience anything like the hatred poured on his distinguished predecessor. Lincoln was the single most despised president in American history.The vitriol began even before he was elected. After securing the Republican nomination in 1860, he was branded the “Black Republican.” Southern newspapers obsessed over his physical appearance. He was “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a human frame” and “a horrid looking wretch . . . sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man.”They didn’t like his views any better. Lincoln was “a blood-thirsty tyrant,” a “border ruffian” and “a vulgar mobocrat.” An Alabama group proposed a motto: “Resistance to Lincoln is obedience to God.” Throughout the emerging Confederacy, Lincoln was burned in effigy. His name didn’t even appear on Southern ballots… 

Stephen M. Walt: Lessons of Two Wars ... We Will Lose in Iraq and Afghanistan

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. One of the things that gets in the way of conducting good national security policy is a reluctance to call things by their right names and state plainly what is really happening. If you keep describing difficult situations in misleading or inaccurate ways, plenty of people will draw the wrong conclusions about them and will continue to support policies that don't make a lot of sense. Two cases in point: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are constantly told that that "the surge worked" in Iraq, and President Obama has to pretend the situation there is tolerable so that he can finally bring the rest of the troops there home. Yet it is increasingly clear that the surge failed to produce meaningful political reconciliation and did not even end the insurgency, and keeping U.S.