Murray Polner

Murray Polner has written for The New York Times, Washington Monthly, Commonweal, The Nation, The American Conservative, Columbia Journalism Review, Newsday, and other publications.

After He Leaves, What Will They Say About Obama’s Foreign Policy?

With only eighteen months remaining, Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy will be much debated after he leaves the White House. Excluding our crackpots and bigots, historians, memoirists and biographers will surely take into account the challenges he faced because of the two wars he inherited – one of which, Afghanistan, he always supported. Even so, … Continue reading “After He Leaves, What Will They Say About Obama’s Foreign Policy?”

Kent State 1970: We Need a Serious Look at What Happened and Why

It’s been 45 years since draft-deferred Ohio National Guardsmen aimed their M-1 rifles and .45 pistols at unarmed Ken State College students, killing four and wounding nine on May 4, 1970. You have to be well into middle age now to remember that day. My memory is stirred whenever I look at three photos: John … Continue reading “Kent State 1970: We Need a Serious Look at What Happened and Why”

Are You Ready To Fight Putin’s Russia?

"Who came down from the mountain and said the U.S. must police the globe from the South China Sea to the jungles of Peru"? ~ Eric S. Margolis For my sins, I’ve just finished reading the latest report by three of Washington’s centrist think tanks, "Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression." From their peaceful, safe and posh offices … Continue reading “Are You Ready To Fight Putin’s Russia?”

Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin, and More Putin

I rarely agree with Henry Kissinger, our latter day Metternich, but his recent Washington Post Op Ed was on the mark: Western “demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” He suggested instead that the U.S. goal should be to find a way for the two … Continue reading “Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin, and More Putin”

The Ukrainian Muddle: Lies, Manipulation, and Silence

Poor Katrina van den Heuvel and husband Stephen Cohen, she the editor of The Nation and he a scholar of Russian history and author of a definitive biography of Nikolai Bukharin, executed during Stalin’s mad blood purges, and more recently Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: Stalinism and the New Cold War. Virtually alone among American … Continue reading “The Ukrainian Muddle: Lies, Manipulation, and Silence”

Thou Shalt Not Leak

In early 2012 at a White House press briefing ABC’s Jake Tapper asked why the U.S. applauded courageous reporting overseas but did the reverse at home. “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the U.S. by using the Espionage Act to take … Continue reading “Thou Shalt Not Leak”

Presidential Aggressor

Mitchell B. Lerner, editor, Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light (University Press of Kansas, 2005). In Mitchell Lerner’s informative and worthwhile collection of essays by a group of historians scrutinizing LBJ’s domestic and foreign policies (Lerner teaches history at Ohio State University in Newark, Ohio and is the author of … Continue reading “Presidential Aggressor”

A Draft After the Elections?

While President Bush has thus far never said whether or not he would bring back the draft (Sen. John Kerry stated that he opposed a draft on Sept. 22, 2004 in West Palm Beach, Fla.), there are increasing rumors and speculation that it will be reinstated after the election, perhaps as soon as 2005. There … Continue reading “A Draft After the Elections?”

The Neocons Earn an ‘F’

When an off-Broadway show opened a few seasons ago with the deliciously relevant title, Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty, it made me think of the bright, clever neoconservatives I have known. Looking back, many of their prominent publications and groups were far too inflexible to accept that the USSR was no … Continue reading “The Neocons Earn an ‘F’”