Daily Op/Ed Wrap-up

Chicago Tribune: Howard's revenge

"We run a great risk when our legislation threatens to undermine both our Constitution and our creativity," she (Rep. Jan Schakowsky D-Ill.) said. "The stakes are high and the threat to free speech is all too real..."

Molly Ivins: Just like Saddam?

" Even though I still consider getting rid of Saddam Hussein an unmitigated good, we may have lost the peace very early on. Peter Galbraith, writing in the May 13 New York Review of Books, reports that the initial looting right after the war ended was unbelievably costly in both monetary terms and Iraqi support. Others have concluded that the corruption, so familiar under Hussein and now again in full flower with the private contractors, has so wiped out respect for our efforts that Iraqis are concluding we are "just like Saddam." For us to continue killing Iraqis for their own good is not a policy likely to redound to our benefit..."

Gareth Evans: Four-Point Turn

"...The options available today are few and bad, a measure of the staggering misjudgments that have plagued post-war management from the start, and there is no guarantee that even these steps can stem Iraq's descent toward instability and civil war. Nor is there any guarantee that this approach will find takers. But a U-turn from a stubborn administration and engagement from a skeptical international community may represent the last remaining chance of success."

Gwynne Dyer: It looks as if game is up for Americans in Iraq

"...So the entire U.S. neoconservative adventure in the Middle East, never very plausible, is now doomed, though it will drag on in a broken-backed way for some time to come. Even the option of handing Iraq over to the United Nations and replacing American troops there with Muslim troops under U.N. command, still viable a month ago, will soon be foreclosed unless U.N. officials take a firmer stand against the occupation regime. It is going to get very messy."

Los Angeles Times: Sharon May Have Helped Create a Monster -- Israel's Settler Movement

"Ariel Sharon is not a rabbi, and the Kabbalah is a closed book to him. But he has created a Golem: the settlement movement in the occupied territories..."

Robert Kuttner: Bush's mess is Kerry's peril

"The 9/11 Commission hearings made clear that Clinton had a far better sense of the terrorist threat than the Bush people and a better sense of proportion regarding when it made sense to intervene militarily. Truman, likewise, opted for containing the Soviet Union rather than launching World War III. Kennedy steered the United States away from nuclear confrontation and began the era of arms control, all the while being firm against Soviet expansionism. It was Johnson's delusional policy in Vietnam, followed by the backlash of much of the Democratic rank and file, that left the Democratic Party with a fractured legacy of seeming both reckless and feeble, a legacy that Kerry is still trying to live down on behalf of his party..."

Seattle Times: Responsibility at Abu Ghraib

"Hersh quotes Taguba's report that Army intelligence officers, CIA agents and private contractors "actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses." That translated into a variety of terrifying indignities inflicted by those relaxed enough for souvenir snapshots...."

Anne Applebaum: Willing Torturers

"The American soldiers and civilians responsible for humiliating, torturing and possibly murdering Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad over the past few months do not belong in the same category as Nazi or Soviet camp guards. But their actions do prove, if further proof were needed, that no culture is incapable of treating its enemies as subhuman. We've now seen the horrific evidence: American soldiers, brought up in an American culture, stripped and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners. They dressed them in black hoods and laughingly threatened them with electrocution..."

Zachary Roth: The Making of George Bush, Macho Man

"The American people may not yet have made up their minds about their leaders, but the media certainly have. Whatever its outcome, Election 2004 has already been cast as the battle between the strong but stubborn George Bush and the nuanced but flip-flopping John Kerry..."