recommended reading

We were flipping through back issues of the magazine when we were reminded that Hillel Fradkin and I. Lewis Libby anticipated Turkey's Islamist turn in the February  22, 2010, issue. The piece was headlined "Twilight of the Arabs." Here's a choice cut:

The "big think" pieces on the Tea Party movement are starting to come out. I've linked to John B. Judis's (subscriber only) analysis of the Tea Party before, but continue to recommend it. I also recommend William Voegeli's essay in the new Claremont Review of Books. Choice cut:

From George Will's Sunday column:

Tomorrow is a big day in American politics. Important primaries (and an equally important special election) will take place in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Arkansas. USA Today runs through the contests.

Geoffrey Lawler, a former Tory MP, has a funny primer on the British election in today's Los Angeles Times:

Liberals keep voicing amazement that the debate over financial reform is proceeding much more quickly and more smoothly than the debate over health care. The reason is simple: Health care was a clash of two competing governing philosophies, whereas most everyone agrees that something went seriously awry with our financial system in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The negotiations in the Senate are a good-faith attempt to work out the differences.

The debate over financial reform has devolved with record speed. As the two parties argue over which is more pro-Wall Street, the actual substance of the Senate legislation, aka the Dodd bill, has remained in the background. Maybe this isn't surprising, since the issue is so complex and no one really knows what's going on. Correction, Larry Lindsey knows what's going on, and he's written an analysis of the Dodd bill you ought to read.

Yesterday the Senate voted 85-13 for John McCain's anti-VAT resolution. The lack of any substantial support for a VAT in the Senate would suggest that, even if the president's fiscal commission recommends such a tax when it reports in December, Ross Douthat is right and the chances a VAT will be imposed prior to the fiscal crisis are small. Whew.

Arthur Herman has a must-read piece on Iranian nukes: "The Islamic revolutionary regime in Tehran is poised to hand the United States its worst foreign-policy setback since the fall of South Vietnam."

No matter how this weekend's vote turns out, we're going to need to take a break from health care reform. Like government spending, health care has crowded out the market for political discussion. Glance at the news, and you would have no way of knowing that other things are happening.

Yossi Klein Halevi comments from Jerusalem on "The Crisis" in the liberal New Republic. He ends with a serious charge: "[W]hat is clear today in Jerusalem is that Obama's recklessness is endangering Israeli--and Palestinian--lives. As I listen to police sirens outside my window, Obama's political intifada against Netanyahu seems to be turning into a third intifada over Jerusalem." 

Here's the first part of his piece:

Must reading this morning in the Washington Post:

This may be the one great innovation of Obama foreign policy. While displaying more continuity than discontinuity in his policies toward Afghanistan, Iraq and the war against terrorism, and garnering as a result considerable bipartisan support for those policies, Obama appears to be departing from a 60-year-old American grand strategy when it comes to allies. The old strategy rested on a global network of formal military and political alliances, mostly though not exclusively with fellow democracies. The idea, Averell Harriman explained in 1947, was to create "a balance of power preponderantly in favor of the free countries." Under Bill Clinton, and the two Bushes, relations with Europe and Japan, and later India, were deepened and strengthened.

Read the whole thing, as they say.