Tomgram: Roger Morris, The Gates Inheritance
The Gates Inheritance
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174812/roger_morris_the_gates_inheritance
posted June 19, 2007 2:25 pm
Think of him as the spymaster who came in from the cold. Well, it wasn't actually so cold out there. After all, Robert Gates was on innumerable corporate boards and the President of Texas A & M University (which, not coincidentally, houses the library, presidential papers, and museum of George H. W. Bush under whom he served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency). But after two dozen years in the CIA and on the National Security Council, after a career which touched (or more than touched) on just about every great foreign policy event in Washington's world from the final days of the Vietnam War and the great Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union to the Central American wars of Ronald Reagan, the Iran-Contra Affair, the Afghan anti-Soviet war, and so much else, he was out of Washington and in hibernation until James Baker's Iraq Study Group called him back. Then, of course, he was picked by George W. Bush as the replacement for the disastrous reign of error of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Washington Montly: Those Weren't the Days
Those Weren't the Days
Nixon has been looking better lately compared to George W. Bush. But in fact he's as bad as we remember.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Nixon in particular broke new ground as a polarizer. He wanted to turn his domestic critics into the functional equivalent of traitors; the antiwar college kids, whom he loathed, were supposed to serve as a kind of domestic Fifth Column, like the communists of the early 1950s, that could shore up the Republican base and stigmatize the Democrats in the eyes of the Silent Majority he felt he represented. In 1970, for example, Nixon’s press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler read a statement of Nixon’s after the shooting of students at Kent State which declared that it “should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” It almost seemed that the president of the United States was blaming the students for their own deaths. According to Dallek, nothing shook Nixon’s conviction that he needed to wage warfare on his opponents. Despite his landslide election victory in 1972, Nixon was, Dallek writes, “almost morbid,” convinced that his adversaries in the Georgetown salons and elsewhere were already plotting to undo him. Indeed, “he saw the price of reelection as a fresh round of conflict with domestic enemies”—read liberal elites.
LA Times: Roman Empire: gold standard of immigration
The ancient superpower could teach the U.S. a thing or two about a strong multicultural society.
By Cullen Murphy
June 16, 2007
So it's natural to wonder if the Romans might have anything to teach Americans. I'd argue that they do. One lesson is that the notion of "taking control of the borders" is overrated; borders were pliable then, and are even harder to define (or police) now. A second lesson is the importance of nurturing a national culture. It was the source of Rome's power, just as it is the source of ours.