Roundup: Historians' Take

Mark Naison: To Win the Presidency, Barack Obama Needs to Take a Page Out of the Book of Harry Truman and James Brown

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] The Obama Presidential campaign is off to a terrible start. The cerebral, thoughtful persona that Obama projects in his campaign advertisements, while it plays well with younger, educated voters, and leaders of foreign nations, has fallen flat with the main constituency Obama needs to win over to become President- working class and middle class Americans battered by stagnant wages, rising

Daniel Pipes: Barack Obama through Muslim Eyes

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] How do Muslims see Barack Hussein Obama? They have three choices: either as he presents himself – someone who has"never been a Muslim" and has"

Victor Davis Hanson: Blame Everyone But Russia

Everyone is distracted by the Olympics. The squabbling here on the campaign trail consumes the media. Two presidential candidates and a lame-duck president all are weighing in on foreign policy. No wonder Vladimir Putin thought it was a good time to invade Georgia. Apparently the Russian prime minister knew exactly what he was doing but assumed no one in the West did. And he was right. Our pundits and politicians are all over the map as Mr. Putin is variously portrayed

Joseph Lane: Is McCain going to alter our constitutional government by creating a "Question Time" in Congress?

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.] [Little] attention has been paid to [John] McCain’s reiterations, and expansions, upon his claim that he will provide unprecedented access to both Congress and the media to ask questions of him when/if he is President. Over at least the last thirty years, we have been watching a trend towards less and less unfettered public or congressional access to the Presiden

Reidar Visser: Change the Iraqis Can Believe In? Why Obama–Biden Could Mean More of the Same (Or Maybe Something Worse)

[Reidar Visser is research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs with a background in history and comparative politics (University of Bergen) and a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies (University of Oxford). In many ways, Barack Obama’s approach to Iraq is strikingly similar to that of the Bush administration and John McCain. In theory, the addition of Joe Biden to Obama’s ticket could change this, but over the last weeks and months there have been interesting

Damon Linker: How Obama found himself in trouble this time: charting the ignominious history of "born alive" abortion legislation

As recently as six weeks ago, Barack Obama hoped to use his moderation and facility with religiously informed rhetoric to inspire a portion of the evangelical vote to defect to the Democratic Party in 2008--a move that might usher in a broader electoral realignment. But events during the past week may very well have derailed this plan for good. On right-wing websites, cable news programs, and near-mainstream newspapers, conservatives are doing their indignant best to spread the word that, as an

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: What Would Mao Think of the Games?

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is co-founder and regular contributer to The China Beat: Blogging How the East is Read. His books include China's Brave New World (2007) and the forthcoming Global Shanghai, 1850-2010.] China specialists make a parlor game of imagining what Mao Tse-Tung would make of the People's Republic of China today, with its capitalist-friendly Communists and young people more familiar with the theme s

Rick Perlstein: A Liberal Shock Doctrine

[Rick Perlstein's is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.] Progressive political change

Frederick Kagan: It’s Not a Cold War ... It just sounds like one

[Frederick W. Kagan posts regular updates on the Russo-Georgian conflict at www.aei.org and www.understandingwar.org.] The most grotesque aspect of Russia’s aggression in Georgia is the repeated Russian claim that Georgia poses a threat to Russia and its citizens. In language harking back to the Orwellian rhetoric of the Cold War, all Russian troops are “peacekeepers” and all Georgian forces are “diversio

Harvey Sicherman: A Clarifying Act of Violence: Russia, Georgia, and The West

[Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is president of FPRI and a former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state.] In the early 1970s, Walter Laqueur described the then existing detente between the United States and the Soviet Union as “the Cold War by other means—and sometimes by the same means.” Russia’s attack on Georgia, although superficially an outburst of ill temper over a minor issue, reflects the increasingly muscular foreign policy of the Putin era. Put plainly, the Russian Prime Minis

Mark Naison: Race, Presidential Politics, and the US Men's Olympic Basketball Team

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] The other day, I was eating dinner with a friend of mine, one of New York;s top criminal defense attorneys, when he shared a story about the racial attitudes of some of the people he does business with. " Several attorneys I know, highly educated people, were absolutely shocked when I told them I planned to vote for Barack Obama," my friend told me. "They told me they couldn't beli

Tom Engelhardt: Double Standards in the Global War on Terror

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a co

Juan Cole: The fall of Bush's man in Pakistan

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] It is a measure of the Bush administration's broken foreign policy that the departure of Pervez Musharraf, the corrupt, longtime military dictator of Pakistan, is provoking fears in Washington of "instability." Despite Bush's warm embrace, Musharraf gutted the rule of law in Pakistan over the

Moshe Dann: Iran's ticking bomb ... why Israel must act

Last week, the pistachio nut dropped. With adequate missile defense technology, I had questioned the necessity of a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear capability. Uncomfortable as living with an Iranian bomb would be, I thought, better to defend ourselves than attack first. And wh

Andrew Bacevich: How the United States Did Not Reinvent War … But Thought It Did

[Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. This piece is adapted from his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (Metropolitan Books, 2008). He is also the author of The New American Militarism, among other books. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic Monthly,

William R. Polk: Rushing toward War with Iran

[William R. Polk was Professor of History at the University of Chicago and a Member of the Policy Planning Council under President Kennedy. He is the author, among other books, of Understanding Iraq; Violent Politics, a History of Insurgency, Guerrilla Warfare and Terrorism; and, with former Senator George McGovern, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now.] As the Bush Administration begins its final months in office, it has embarked upon two courses of action that will p

Walter Laqueur: Why Russia acted

Some have said that the Kremlin is unpredictable. I always found the Soviet (Russian) leadership more predictable than the White House. According to Vladimir Putin, the breakdown of the Soviet Union was the greatest disaster of the 20th century. If so, one ought to undo (or reduce) the damage, and Moscow is now in a position to do so. In his view, this does not necessarily mean physical occupation. The Central Asian governments need Russian political and economic help i

John Walbridge: Ron Suskind on America's Declining Moral Authority

[John Walbridge was General Editor, Bahai Encyclopedia Project. He is affiliated with Indiana University.] Most of the discussion of Ron Suskind's new book, "The Way of the World," has focused on a single anecdote. Citing CIA sources, he claims that the White House ordered the production of a rather clumsy forgery of a letter from the head of the Iraqi intelligence service to Saddam purporting to prove that Muhammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers trained in Iraq a

Daniel Pipes: The West's Islamist Infiltrators

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Aafia Siddiqui, 36, is a Pakistani mother of three, an alumna of MIT, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University. She is also accused of working for Al-Qaeda and was

Robert Kagan: History's Back

[Robert Kagan, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author most recently of The Return of History and the End of Dreams.] One wonders whether Russia's invasion of Georgia will finally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world's democracies after the close of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union offered for many the tantalizing prospect of a new kind of international order. The fall of the Communist empire and the apparent embrace of democracy b