News Abroad

The Iraq War Was a Major Departure in American Foreign Affairs

by Colin F. Baxter

The Bush Administration's decision to intervene in Iraq resulted in a short, blitzkrieg victory over Saddam Hussein's conventional military forces, but a slow and agonizing struggle to return peace to a tyrannized and traumatized people. This experiment, with little or no precedent in American history, has provoked a steadily rising public outcry. Many critics, including Michael Barone in US News and World Report magazine, have argued that Americas proactive intervention in Iraq was a r

What the Iranians Are Probably Thinking

by William R. Polk

The American military learned from the German army that war gaming is often helpful in seeing what motivates the opponent, what he is likely to do and what effect his doing it would have. So, I will here imagine that I am an Iranian policy planner doing what I used to do for the American government. Here is what I would see and what would I advise. Reading what American officials are saying in the press I would assume that they are planning to attack the country, abort Iran’s nu

Selling Iraq with the Wrong Pitch

by Michael R. Adamson

President Bush likes to tell his usually hand-picked audiences that Iraq will become more democratic and prosperous because of America's intervention. What he has in mind are the remarkable changes in Germany and Japan after World War II because of American aid to those countries. His comparison holds little water. So why does he invoke it? Because invoking the correct comparison -- with South Vietnam -- would give neither his beleaguered administration nor most Americans any comfort.

Open Skies For Chinese-American Relations?

by William Lambers

How the United States deals with China is one of the greatest foreign policy challenges Americans face in the 21st century. Preventing an arms race with the fast-growing Asian power is critical to U.S. security. At their recent meeting both President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao acknowledged the need to better increase their exchanges and cooperation between their armed forces. A competition in armaments between China and the United States will cause increased tensions and the

What Does History Bring to the Study of Jihadism?

by Fawaz A. Gerges

What does a historian bring to the study and understanding of Islamism and jihadism? History provides complexity, rich narrative, comparative perspective, and a healthy degree of skepticism. Let me illustrate what I mean. Most of the books wr

Letter from Romania

by Jonathan Rees

In a corner of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest is a gallery filled with old Communist relics. Alongside a few busts of Lenin and portraits of the dead dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is a memorial to a huge group of Communism’s victims in this country: ordinary farmers who opposed collectivization.Since my Romanian is nowhere near good enough to have understood the captions on this exhibit, I’ll let this excerpt from the British academic Tom Gallagher’s boo

Bush's Latest Nuclear Gambit

by Lawrence S. Wittner

In 2005, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, recognizing that the Bush administration's favorite new nuclear weapon--the "Bunker Buster"--was on the road to defeat in Congress, told its leading antagonist, U.S. Representative David Hobson (R-Ohio): "You may win this year, but we'll be back." And, now, like malaria or perhaps merely a bad cold, they are. The Bush administration's latest nuclear brainchild is the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). Ac

The Strange Alliance between Ukrainian “Progressive Socialism” and Russian “Neo-Eurasianism”

by Andreas Umland

One of the worrying results of the March 2006 elections to the Ukrainian parliament, Verkhovna Rada, was that the so-called “Popular Opposition” bloc led by the head of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Natal’ya Mikhailovna Vitrenko (b. 1951), managed to come close to passing the 3% barrier (with 2.93% of the official turnout) and thus almost entered the Rada. Vitrenko is the premier representative of radical anti-Westernism in Ukraine; she

The Dangers - Then and Now - of a Pre-Emptive Strike

by Harvey Simon

Reports that Pentagon officials are actively discussing plans for using nuclear weapons to prevent Iran from building its own A-bomb reveal that President Bush is falling victim to the same lack of imagination that led John F. Kennedy to think he could attack China to keep it from getting the bomb without igniting a major war. Even more worrisome is the catastrophic possibility that Bush will form another" coalition of the willing" by teaming up with Israel in a joint attack on Iran.

The Day We Lost the Iraq War

by Michael Goldfarb

London -- It is Iraq anniversary season, those four weeks of the year when assessments and opinions on what the Bush Administration wrought when it overthrew Saddam Hussein fill up the airwaves, Internet and newspapers. We’ll be performing these annual assessments for years to come because the final result of th

Iraq, Vietnam, and the Bloodbath Theory

by Scott Laderman

By now we have all seen the analogies drawn between the present war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam decades ago. Some of these analogies have been insightful. Some, to put it charitably, have not. Nearly all, however, have focused on how the United States entered and fought both wars. Little attention has been heeded to what the Vietnam war might tell us about the United States getting out of this one. It is an issue that deserves our attention. More than thirty-five years ago, as Ame

What Has Been Our Dominant Tradition in American History: Interventionism Or Isolationism?

by Colin F. Baxter

The current Administration’s decision to intervene in Iraq resulted in a quick victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces but a slow and agonizing struggle to pacify a terrorist-traumatized country. This in turn has provoked intense debate and increased divisiveness within the nation. Many argue that we were not only misled by skimpy and faulty intelligence, but that we became uncharacteristically interventionist in the hopes of imposing democracy on an already divided nation. Others co

Who Pays When the Last Helicopter Leaves?

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Vietnam, Hassan Abbasi has a dream -- a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the"fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by"the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as"The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is"professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in Pr

Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal

by Peter N. Kirstein

The Iraq War, as Vietnam was, is morally wrong, strategically a disaster and fueled by the notion of American exceptionalism: that America has the might and the ethnocentric right to shape the international community in its own image. The occupation of Iraq must end with the rapid withdrawal of American military forces. The justification for war was deliberately falsified and demonstrated an incompetence of such magnitude as to warrant criminal prosecution of the national-security elites inc

Interview with Chalmers Johnson: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land

by Tom Engelhardt

As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims,"Look at that structure!" I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier."It's the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan," he says,"the newest carrier in the fleet. It's a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there goes the country's seventh largest city."

7/7 and the War in Iraq

by J. R. Kerr-Ritchie

On July 7, 2005, four bombs exploded on London’s public transport system. The final death toll was 56, including three Asian and one Jamaican suicide bombers of the Islamic faith. Stunned but resilient, the British populace including Muslims later partook of a two-minute silence to honor the slain victims of the worst terrorist attack on mainland Britain. Fourteen days after the original attack, Londoners awoke to discover that four more attempted bombings had been thwarted. Several

Algeria and Iraq: Yes, There Are Parallels

by Ted Morgan

In my book, My Battle of Algiers, I tell the story of my military service as a second lieutenant in the French army. After four months in a combat unit south of Algiers, I was assigned to help write and edit an army-run weekly newspaper called RéalitésAl

How Bush Confuses Virtue and Viciousness

by Joan Hoff

I don’t think that leftists or progressives can reclaim religion and morality to argue against the immorality of a pre-emptive war and the existence of U.S. standing armies all over the world. It seems to me this would constitute entering into a word game that we cannot win or have long since lost. Instead, I think that we should chuck the terminology of religion and morality and start to argue for and demand ethical and efficient (competent) behavior on the part of the United States a

I Am a Revisionist Historian

by Staughton Lynd and Carl Mirra

One hundred years ago, three officers of the Western Federation of Miners were indicted for murder. President Theodore Roosevelt declared that they were “undesirable citizens.” Working people and radicals all over the country responded with insignia stating, “I am an undesirable citizen.”According to popular legend, during World War II the Nazis occupied Denmark and ordered all Jews to wear the Star of David. King Christian thereupon appeared in public wearing t

Wartime Leadership: The First Republican President Versus The Latest

by Richard Striner

How will historians eventually rate our incumbent president as a wartime commander? A comparison of George W. Bush and the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, is instructive. Putting aside the issue of civil liberties in wartime — an issue that people of good will could debate almost endlessly — Lincoln was a very different kind of presidential strategist. In the first place, Lincoln wanted massive and fully equipped armies to fight the Confederates. All thr