Roundup: Media's Take

Robert Fisk: Once Untouchable, the Old Despot and His Sons Faced the Wrath of the Nation They Had Terrorised

Robert Fisk is an award-winning Middle East correspondent for the Independent. Just when the Arab dictators desperately need to drink the secure, cool waters of an Arab summer, along came the Egyptians yesterday to poison the well. Deep into its depths, those dictators could see a flickering enmeshed face, fragile, fingers playing over its nose and mouth, the arm of a man on a stretcher raised to prevent the light getting too close but – for just a few brief moments – with the same old arrogant eyes. Then the heavy black mike appeared in the man's left hand. "I am here, your honour," said a chillingly strong voice. "I have not committed any such crimes." Yes, the Egyptians really did put their wretched, ancient dictator on trial yesterday, along with his effete, sullen sons – both dressed in white as if heading for yet another summer tennis party, an illusion broken only by the green Koran under Alaa Mubarak's arm.

Thomas Friedman: The New Hama Rules

Thomas Friedman is a columnist for the NYT.What a difference three decades make. In April 1982, I was assigned to be the Beirut correspondent for The Times. Before I arrived, word had filtered back to Lebanon about an uprising in February in the Syrian town of Hama — famed for its water wheels on the Orontes River. Rumor had it that then President Hafez al-Assad had put down a Sunni Muslim rebellion in Hama by shelling the neighborhoods where the revolt was centered, then dynamiting buildings, some with residents still inside, and then steamrolling them flat, like a parking lot. It was hard to believe and even harder to check. No one had cellphones back then, and foreign media were not allowed access.That May I got a visa to Syria, just as Hama had been reopened. It was said that the Syrian regime was “encouraging” Syrians to drive through the town, see the crushed neighborhoods and contemplate the silence. So I just hired a cab in Damascus and went. It was, and remains, one of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen: Whole neighborhoods, the size of four football fields, looked as though a tornado had swept back and forth over them for a week — but this was not the work of Mother Nature....

Steven Sailer: Breivik ... A Right-wing Imitator of Marx and Lenin

Steven Sailer is an American journalist and movie critic for The American Conservative. It has long been anticipated—with foreboding on the right but with something approaching longing on the left—that mass immigration would lead to a ghastly backlash atrocity. Thus, when in January a young white man in Arizona, the frontline state in the struggle over illegal immigration, attempted to assassinate his Democratic congresswoman, numerous voices of respectability, such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, blamed the massacre on the hate-filled bigotry of Arizona Republicans, the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and anybody else they happened to loathe. Almost immediately, copious evidence emerged that the killer was psychotic and had never paid attention to conservative commentators.

Rich Lowry: The End of Keynes

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. Sen. Dick Durbin, the liberal lion from Illinois, pronounces the debt deal “the final interment of John Maynard Keynes.” The burial ceremony should be a nice, simple one after the violence done to the aged economist by the failure of the broad Obama stimulus program. The administration’s serial overpromising in his name did more to discredit Keynes than a century’s worth of broadsides by his intellectual enemies. Nearly three years into the Obama administration, the unemployment rate is more than 9 percent, a grassroots movement devoted to cutting government has the upper hand in the House of Representatives, and the debt of the United States could well be downgraded by Standard and Poor’s.

Peter Beinart: How the Tea Party Won the Deal

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. ...Liberals are furious that President Obama agreed to massive spending cuts, and the promise of more, without any increase in revenue. They should be: Given how much the Bush tax cuts have contributed to the deficit (and how little they’ve spurred economic growth), it’s mind-boggling that they’ve apparently escaped this deficit-reduction deal unscathed.

How Clinton Handled His Debt Ceiling Crisis Better Than Obama

by Kara Brandeisky

Of course, in 1996, the Republicans were bluffing.

Stephen M. Walt: When Did the American Empire Start to Decline?

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.Today is the 21st anniversary of a key date in world history. On this date in 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting in motion a train of events that would have fateful consequences for Saddam himself, but also for the United States. Indeed, one could argue that this invasion was the first step in a train of events that did enormous damage to the United States and its position in the world.

The Tea Party, The Debt Ceiling, and White Southern Extremism

by Michael Lind

The radicalism of the Tea Party has more in common with secessionists than revolutionaries.

Peter Wehner: The Rapid Collapse of Liberal Presidents

Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Previously he worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

Roger Cohen: The Racist Scourge

Roger Cohen is an opinion writer for the New York Times.LONDON — Soon after I was born my father moved our family from Britain back to his native South Africa to become dean of the school for black medical students at the University of the Witwatersrand. Blacks were obliged to live separately from whites, a principal reason for his having left Johannesburg in the first place....Once he arrived to hear an Afrikaner policeman scoffing at a young black woman who was close to qualification as a doctor: “You think you’re some clever student, but really you’re just a Kaffir.” (The insult is now legally actionable in South Africa.)Racism is stupidity’s recourse. There are plenty of stupid people in the world. Apartheid survived for almost a half-century, a system based on the view that the only thing blacks were good for was to work as hewers of wood and drawers of water. It had its American parallels: Jim Crow laws were on the books for almost a century....

Joe Nocera: Tea Party’s War on America

Joe Nocera is an opinion columnist for the New York Times....Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.One thing Roosevelt did right during the Depression was legislate into being a social safety net to soften the blows that a free-market economy can mete out in tough times. During this recession, it’s as if the government is going out of its way to make sure the blows are even more severe than they have to be. The debt-ceiling debate reflects a harsher, less empathetic America. It’s sad to see.

Kara Brandeisky: How Clinton Handled His Debt Ceiling Crisis Better Than Obama

Kara Brandeisky is an intern at The New Republic. “Nobody should assume we’re going to have a debt-limit extension,” John Boehner warned. “If the vote were held today, it would not pass.” Sound familiar? This was Boehner in November of 1995, when he was the House Republican Conference chairman and his party was refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless President Bill Clinton agreed to a package of sweeping spending cuts. The big difference is that back then, Republicans backed down, whereas today they’re on the verge of winning major policy concessions in exchange for a deal. How did President Bill Clinton head off this threat where Obama failed? The story begins in October 1995, when, in exchange for raising the debt limit, Republicans demanded $245 billion in tax cuts, welfare overhaul, restraints on Medicare and Medicaid growth, and a balanced budget within seven years. The GOP’s plan, argued Boehner, was “the only one […] certified to eliminate the deficit and save our nation’s future from bankruptcy.” But from the very beginning, Clinton would have none of it.

Barbara Slavin: The Tangled History of Al Qaeda's Ties To Iran

Barbara Slavin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, former senior diplomatic reporter for USA Today, and the author of a 2007 book on the United States and Iran, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S., and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. Despite the alarmist headlines, no one should have been shocked by last week's U.S. Treasury Department designation of a Syrian based in Iran as a conduit for sending money and personnel to al Qaeda. Iran has had links to members of what became known as al Qaeda since the early 1990s, when both had a presence in Sudan.

Steve Richards: History Repeats Itself in Libya

Established as one of the most influential political commentators in the country, Steve Richards became The Independent’s chief political commentator in 2000 having been political editor of the New Statesman. He presents GMTV's flagship current affairs show The Sunday Programme and Radio 4’s Week in Westminster. Some of the best thrillers depend on the audience knowing in advance that a deadly outcome is unavoidable. We sit, watch and wait, gripped with fear as the inevitable end looms. And often the characters suspect they are making the wrong moves but cannot stop themselves from doing so. The same pattern applies in politics. Governments tend to make the same colossal mistakes as their predecessors. Leading figures recognise the errors when they were committed the first time around but then proceed to make a similar set of misjudgements.

Laszlo Bruszt and David Stark: The West Must Support Democracy in Arab World as It Did in Central Europe

Laszlo Bruszt is professor and chairman of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. David Stark is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University in New York City. Their coauthored book, “Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe,” will be translated and published in Arabic in 2012.

John B. Judis: If Obama Likes Lincoln So Much, He Should Start Acting Like Him

John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. When Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007, he did it in Springfield, Illinois, in the same place where Abraham Lincoln had made his historic challenge to slavery in June 1858. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln had declared, conveying his conviction that the union could no longer countenance the existence of a slave-owning South.  This speech, Obama said, was the basis of his candidacy: “And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States,” Obama said. But Obama had Lincoln’s speech exactly backwards. Lincoln wasn’t calling for a divided house to stay together.

Paul Kengor: A Tale of Two Dealmakers

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and the newly released Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. Presidential scholars write on all sorts of aspects of the American presidency. Among the most interesting have been several important works on so-called presidential character and temperament.

Shashank Joshi: A Conflict Haunted by Echoes of the Past

The writer is an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute. When Syrian tanks stormed Hama at dawn, they swept through like haunting echoes of the forces that destroyed the city in 1982. On that occasion, several hundred times as many residents perished. Bashar al-Assad has not yet penetrated Hama’s centre, as his father did nearly thirty years ago, but his army’s loyalty suggests that it has every chance of doing so. The Assad dynasty’s strength is rooted in decisions taken long ago by the occupying French, who built up Syria's Alawite sect after the First World War as a counterweight to the Ottoman-backed Sunni majority.

Thomas L. Friedman: Bring Back Poppy

Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for the New York Times.WATCHING today’s Republicans being led around by an extremist Tea Party faction, with no adult supervision, I find my mind drifting back to the late 1980s when I was assigned to cover the administration of George H.W. Bush, who I believe is one of our most underrated presidents. I have long admired the elder Bush for the deftness with which he dealt with the collapse of the Soviet empire. But, in later years, I came to admire him even more for the fact that he believed that math and science were not matters of opinion — a view increasingly rare in today’s G.O.P.Despite having run on the promise of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” when the deficit started spiraling to dangerous levels under his presidency, Bush agreed to a compromise with Democrats to raise several taxes, along with spending cuts, as part of a 1990 budget deal that helped to pave the way for the prosperity of that decade. It definitely hurt his re-election, but he did it anyway.George H.W. Bush also believed in science. How many Republicans know that he and his aide Boyden Gray pioneered the use of cap-and-trade to deal — very effectively — with the problem of acid rain produced by power-plant emissions?...

Thomas Hegghammer: The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists

Thomas Hegghammer is a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment in Oslo and the co-author of “Al-Qaida in Its Own Words.”AT first glance, the 1,500-page manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the man accused of the terrorist attacks in Oslo, appears to be a fairly standard ideological treatise of the far right. The document, which Mr. Breivik posted online on July 22 just hours before the attacks and which he titled “2083 — A European Declaration of Independence,” evokes several of the movement’s central themes and cites numerous right-wing ideologues.On closer inspection, however, Mr. Breivik’s worldview does not fit squarely into any of the established categories of right-wing ideology, like white supremacism, ultranationalism or Christian fundamentalism. Rather, it reveals a new doctrine of civilizational war that represents the closest thing yet to a Christian version of Al Qaeda....