Roundup: Historians' Take

Robert I. Rotberg: Who will have the courage to save Zimbabwe?

[Robert I. Rotberg directs Harvard's Kennedy School program on Intrastate Conflict and is president of the World Peace Foundation.] AFTER IDI Amin terrorized and killed his own Ugandans throughout the 1970s, President Julius Nyerere of neighboring Tanzania finally sent his army across the border to end the mayhem and restore stability. Who will now do the same for beleaguered Zimbabwe? Who will remove despotic Robert Mugabe from his besmirched and exposed presidency? Pr

Jonathan Zimmerman: Where are the protests against Mugabe?

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, is teaching this semester at the university's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," which will be published in the fall by Yale University Press.] Accra, Ghana Here's something cool to drop at cocktail parties: I went to college with Barack Obama. We had just one class together, as best I can re

James M. Banner Jr.: Don't blame Ireland

[James M. Banner Jr., a historian in Washington, is a founder of the National History Center.] Europe's almost there but still doesn't get it. Recently, for the second time in two years, the European Union's effort to create a Europe-wide constitution went down to defeat, this time at the hands of Irish voters. What's the problem, and what's Europe to do? Don't blame the Irish, although they're being assailed for throwing a big monkey wrench into the gears

Tom Engelhardt: No Blood for... er... um...

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad B

Michael Kazin and Julian E. Zelizer: A New Social Contract

For the first time since 1964, Democrats have a good chance not just to win the White House and a majority in Congress but to enact a sweeping new liberal agenda. Conservative ideas are widely discredited, as is the Republican Party that the right has controlled since Ronald Reagan was elected. The war in Iraq has undermined the conservative case for unilateral military intervention and U.S. omnipotence. Economic insecurity has led Americans to question the rhetoric about "big" governm

Meg Jacobs & Julian E. Zelizer: The Dems have been right about our energy policy but Repubs have been better at selling theirs

[ Meg Jacobs is an associate professor of history at MIT. She is writing a book on the energy crisis in the 1970s. Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s."] Almost 29 years ago, on July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter delivered what is considered one of the worst speeches of his career. Americans were struggling with a

Michael Dobbs: Cool Crisis Management? It's a Myth. Ask JFK.

[Michael Dobbs is the author of "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War." He writes the "Fact Checker" column for The Washington Post.] ... To use the 1962 showdown as a guide to handling modern-day crises, we must separate history from political spin. Kennedy and his aides had an obvious interest in stressing the president's cool resolve under fire. Camelot's court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., has described the way JFK "dazzled the world" through a "combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated." Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, declared that "there is no longer such a thing as strategy; there is only crisis management."

Juan Cole: The Real State of Iraq

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] American television loves natural disasters. The Burmese cyclones that may have carried off as many as 200,000 people offered the cameras high drama. The fl

Walter Russell Mead: The New Israel and the Old

[ Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author, most recently, of God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World.] On May 12, 1948, Clark Clifford, the White House chief counsel, presented the case for U.S. recognition of the state of Israel to the divided cabinet of President Harry Truman. While a glowering George Marshall, the secretary of state, and a skeptical Robert Lovett,

Ira Chernus: It's time for a Radically Different View on Patriotism

[Ira Chernus is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.] Republicans do not own the rights to this word. Obama has an opportunity to change how we think about patriotism. Will he take it? "If the 2008 election is to be a debate about the true meaning of patriotism, then bring it on." That's the clarion challenge from bellwether liberal columnist E.J.

Robert S. McElvaine: Why presidents love economic euphemisms

[Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson Miss. His latest book is"Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America."] ... There is, however, one word Bush has not used: "recession." It's but the latest chapter in a long history of euphemisms that politicians employ in hopes of making economic disasters not sound so bad. "Recession" was itself an early example. When the economy, still not recovered from the Great Depressi

Julian Zelizer: Russert's Most Important Legacy

[Julian E. Zelizer is Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the co-editor of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard University Press).] There have been many moving eulogies about the late NBC reporter Tim Russert. We have heard about his personal modesty and his extensive preparation for interviews. Russert was able to subtly expose the inconsistencies and underside of politicians with a smile. But Russert's

Peter Navarro: China's theft of American secrets

[Peter Navarro is a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, a CNBC contributor, and author of The Coming China Wars. For more information, please visit http://www.comingchinawars.com.] According to a leaked secret FBI document, Chinese counterfeiters have sold close to $75 million of fake Cisco Systems routers to the U.S. military. While this revelation has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, it raises troubl

Jim Sleeper: The Conservatives' Conundrum -- and Ours

[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York and Liberal Racism.] What has gotten into George Packer? In Blood of the Liberals he undertook a wrenching examination of American liberalism's agonies and ironies; and in The Assassin's Gate and his play Betrayed, he bore searing, humbling witness to the ordeals of Americans and Iraqis who wouldn't have written for themselves.

Neve Gordon: How Israel’s occupation has changed in the past 20 years

[Neve Gordon is a senior lecturer in the Politics and Government Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. For information about his forthcoming book and more www.israelsoccupation.info.] It took me a moment before I understood why my story about a few relatively inconsequential incidents, which occurred years ago at my high school, had such an effect on the undergraduates taking my fall semester course in 2006. On

Stanley Kutler: A Government of Law, Not Fear

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes” and numerous other writings on American constitutional law and the presidency.] The Constitution holds, albeit by a slender thread. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled unconstitutional a 2006 law barring enemy combatants held at Guantanamo from seeking writs of habeas corpus. For now, we are not under Chief Justice John Roberts’ or Justice Antonin Scalia’s constitution. Fear reigns in th

Daniel Pipes: The Enemy Has a Name

If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the"global war on terror," the"

Juan Cole: John McCain's Oil Scam

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] McCain is arguing for offshore drilling to lower US petroleum prices in the"short term."It is all a big lie, and a dangerous one at that. Our marine environment and our fisheries are already at risk. And the

Earl Tilford: Seduction By Air ... Then and Now

[Dr. Earl Tilford is Professor of History at Grove City College and enjoyed an extensive military career in the U.S. Air Force. He is former director of research at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute, where he worked on a project that looked at future terrorist threats. He also authored three books on the Vietnam War and co-edited one book on Operation Desert Storm.] Air power is seductive. From the Army Air Service’s Col. Billy Mitchell’s Winged Defense, written in the aft

Allan Lichtman: The (Non-Electoral) Case for the Obama-Clinton Ticket

[Mr. Lichtman is a professor of history at American University and the author of The Keys to the White House (1996). His latest book is: WHITE PROTESTANT NATION.] Leaving aside the elusive question of which vice-presidential pick would help Barack Obama get elected, non-electoral criteria powerfully favor an Obama-Clinton ticket. Hillary Clinton clearly has the requisite experience and skills to assume the presidency if necessary and her campaign demonstrated that the