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Zakaria on a Third Surge in Afghanistan

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Fareed Zakaria - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - The real question we should be asking in Afghanistan is not "Do we need a surge?" but rather "Do we need a third surge?" The number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in January 2008 was 26,607. Over the next six months, the Bush administration raised the total to 48,250. President Bush described this policy as "the quiet surge," and he made the standard arguments about the need for a counterinsurgency capacity—the troops had to not only fight the Taliban but protect the Afghan population, strengthen and train the Afghan Army and police, and assist in development.

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Why Fox News Is Un-American

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Jacob Weisberg - Oct. 18 (Opinion) - That Rupert Murdoch may tilt the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox's model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.

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Containing a Nuclear Iran

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Fareed Zakaria - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - It is time to clarify the debate over Iran and its nuclear program. It's easy to criticize the current course adopted by the United States and its allies, to huff and puff about Iranian mendacity, to point out that Russia and China won't agree to tougher measures against Tehran, and to detail the leaks in the sanctions already in place. But what, then, should the United States do? The critics are eager to denounce the administration from the sidelines for being weak but rarely detail what they would do to be "tough." Would they attack Iran today? If not, then what should we do? It is time to put up or shut up on Iran.

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Torture Doesn't Work and Here's Why

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Sharon Begley - Sep. 27 (Special Report) - While we wait for Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, or the CIA to release evidence that "enhanced interrogation techniques" produced useful, truthful intelligence that could not be obtained without torture, neuroscientists are weighing in on how likely torture is to elicit such information—and they are not impressed.

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Copenhagen or bust

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Gordon Brown - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - If we miss this opportunity, there will be no second chance sometime in the future, no later way to undo the catastrophic damage to the environment we will cause. So when world leaders gather this week, first at the United Nations in New York and then at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, it is essential that we move toward resolving the issues that still divide our nations. As scientists spell out the mounting evidence both of the climate change already occurring and of the threat it poses in the future, we cannot allow the negotiations to run out of time simply for lack of attention. Failure would be unforgivable.

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Even Babies Discriminate: A NurtureShock Excerpt

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman - Sep. 14 (Review) - Vittrup sent a third of the families home with multiculturally themed videos for a week, such as an episode of Sesame Street in which characters visit an African-American family's home, and an episode of Little Bill, where the entire neighborhood comes together to clean the local park.

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Why We Believe Lies, Even When We Learn the Truth

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Sharon Begley - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - The same skewed thinking that supports a Saddam-9/11 link explains the power of health-care myths.

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Report Reveals CIA Conducted Mock Executions

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff - Aug. 22 (Special Report) - Top Bush CIA officials, including Tenet's successors as CIA director, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, strongly lobbied for the IG report to be kept secret from the public. They argued that its release would damage America's reputation around the world, could damage CIA morale, and would tip off terrorists regarding American interrogation tactics. "Justice has had the complete document since 2004, and their career prosecutors have reviewed it carefully for legal accountability," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "That's already been done."

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On Iran, Do Nothing. Yet

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Fareed Zakaria - Jul. 29 (Opinion) - The hyperbole in America and Israel about apocalyptic mullahs with nukes missed the big story in Iran, which was that the mullahs were not apocalyptic, and they were fading in influence anyway. One might have said that the Islamic Republic of Iran is losing its distinct religious basis of power and becoming another Middle Eastern dictatorship—except that it now hosts an opposition movement that does not seem ready to quiet down.

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Can Obama Sell Health Care Reform Without Getting Too Specific?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Holly Bailey - Jul. 02 (News Analysis) - Not unlike George W. Bush when he tried to use his own political capital to sell the equally tricky task of reforming Social Security four years ago, Obama is trying to have it both ways. He wants to bank on his enormous popularity to influence the public to pressure Congress to get something done this year, but he also wants to stay above the fray. Obama doesn’t want to get too specific about what he wants and doesn’t want in a bill because he knows what ultimately emerges from Congress will be a test of compromise.

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Obama's Pay-Go Flameout

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Robert J. Samuelson - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - If President Obama thought he'd score some easy political points by endorsing new PAYGO legislation to control deficit spending, he was sadly mistaken. Although PAYGO--budget-speak for "pay-as-you-go"--seems to limit Congress' ability to cut taxes or raise spending, the initial reviews were unkind and sometimes harsh.

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GM: Is This The End of The UAW?

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Daniel Gross - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - Most significantly, as stockholders, unions will have to start thinking like owners. The theory of Detroit was that the United Auto Workers union didn't care about returns Chrysler, Ford, or GM could generate to the stockholder because it was simply concerned with maximizing wages and benefits. But the joke was ultimately on the unions, since high labor costs were one of the many factors that caused the companies to fail—and hence to renege on the long-term retirement and health care benefits they had agreed to pay.

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Why Google Faces Antitrust Scrutiny

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Daniel Lyons - May. 27 (Opinion) - Most people think of Google as a free search engine—and it is that. But the real genius of Google was that it figured out that advertisers would pay to have their messages pop up when someone types in a keyword. For instance, a hotel chain might pay to show ads to anyone who types in "hotel in Phoenix." Those search ads now represent the biggest chunk of all Internet advertising. Google gets the lion's share, which has allowed it to amass such power that it may end up the target of a federal antitrust investigation.

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Why Traditional Hybrid Cars Are Becoming Obsolete

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Daniel Lyons - May. 04 (Special Report) - "We are on the cusp of a period of technical innovation like the automobile industry has never seen," says Mike Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, the largest U.S. auto retailer. "There will be more change in the next five to 10 years than there was in the last 100."

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One Young Woman's Fight to Educate Afghan Girls

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Dina Fine Maron - May. 02 (Special Report) - To bring education to rural areas like this one—where many girls may not know a single woman who can read—Saleem has battled widespread illiteracy and daunting cultural obstacles for the past seven years, setting up schools to change the educational landscape, one child at a time.

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How Successful Were Obama's First 100 Days?

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Jonathan Alter - Apr. 27 (News Analysis) - How successful were President Obama's first 100 days? Let's go to the videotape—and the newsreel. With the help of the economic crisis, Barack Obama has put more points on the board than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, and his public investment greatly exceeds Roosevelt's in constant dollars. The only president he falls short of is Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. Even if you think he's wrong, Obama deserves high marks for articulating a new vision and getting Congress to act. But he still gets an "incomplete" for the term. That's because his ethos is to do "what works." Problem is, we don't know yet what will.

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Radical Ways to Cool the Planet

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Fred Guter - Apr. 20 (Special Report) - As forecasts for global temperatures grow increasingly dire, scientists are taking a serious look at an idea once considered crazy: reengineering the atmosphere.

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GOP Missed Opportunities Presented by Tea Parties

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Kurt Soller - Apr. 18 (News Analysis) - Largely set in motion by conservatives outside the Republican core and organized over the Web, the tea parties have been embraced by conservative leaders as the GOP's own version of a grassroots uprising.

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UBS: A Swiss Bank's Shadowy Operations

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Evan Thomas, Mark Hosenball - Mar. 19 (Special Report) - According to a recent U.S. Senate investigation, a single Swiss bank—the biggest, UBS—holds the secret bank accounts of 46,000 Americans, worth an estimated $18 billion. Lately, the Feds have tried to crack down on these rich Americans as tax evaders (generally, the depositors do not pay any taxes on the income from these accounts). The Swiss, not surprisingly, have been resisting. For more than three centuries, Swiss bank secrecy has offered safe haven to the wealthy, some of them unsavory types—Nazis, dictators such as Saddam Hussein and, allegedly, Islamic terrorists. At a time when the rich are coming under close and unsympathetic scrutiny, the details starting to come out about the way the Swiss banking game is played are eye-popping, if not infuriating. Judging from documents and testimony examined by NEWSWEEK, Swiss bankers, like spies, practice what is known in the espionage business as tradecraft—elaborate and often clever steps to evade detection. Last month UBS issued a statement saying, "UBS sincerely regrets the compliance failures in its U.S. cross-border business that have been identified by the various government investigations in Switzerland and the U.S., as well as our own internal review." Translation: the Swiss bank was running a shadowy operation to help rich Americans get their money out of the country, and sometimes back in, without the Feds finding out.

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To Save the Economy, We Need to Stop Saving

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Daniel Gross - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - As consumers hibernate and investors hoard cash, the economy is withering. This new age of thrift is understandable. But for a recovery to take hold, Americans will need to start taking risks again.

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Bush Adm. Weighed Restricting 1st Amendment

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Michael Isikoff - Mar. 04 (News Report) - In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday.

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Learning to Live With Radical Islam

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Fareed Zakaria - Mar. 01 (Opinion) - Pakistan's Swat valley is quiet once again. Often compared to Switzerland for its stunning landscape of mountains and meadows, Swat became a war zone over the past two years as Taliban fighters waged fierce battles against Army troops. No longer, but only because the Pakistani government has agreed to some of the militants' key demands, chiefly that Islamic courts be established in the region. Fears abound that this means women's schools will be destroyed, movies will be banned and public beheadings will become a regular occurrence.

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Understanding California's Crisis

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Joel Kotkin - Feb. 23 (Special Report) - For decades, California has epitomized America's economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.

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Pakistan, Afghanistan and the U.S. to Begin Talks

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Michael Hirsch - Feb. 20 (News Analysis) - Holbrooke seems keen on applying a similar tactic to one of the most intractable feuds of the present day: between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Next week, acting on a suggestion from Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Holbrooke and the Defense Department are convening a four-day trilateral meeting between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States in which senior foreign ministry and intelligence officials will come to Washington for direct negotiations.

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Bipartisanship Is All but Dead

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Jonathan Alter - Feb. 18 (News Analysis) - Say sayonara to "kumbaya." Bipartisanship is all but dead in Washington. President Obama cut a deal to win passage of his necessary—if not sufficient—stimulus bill with the last three moderate Republicans in Congress. But his effort to put a true conservative, Judd Gregg, in his cabinet turned out to be a bridge too far. While Obama wins points for coming across as a gracious and accommodating leader, his dream of a less polarized politics has been deferred—at least until he builds a new mass movement of independent voters with the help of the Terminator. Before I explain what California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has to do with the detoxification of Washington, let's briefly review how the purple dream went bust. After the economy tanked last fall, every sentient economist, including the top economic advisers to Ronald Reagan and John McCain, knew that we needed a large stimulus to avoid a depression. It looked like the new president would get at least a handful of GOP members of the House and as many as 20 Senate Republicans.

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