Roundup: Historians' Take

Paul Rogers: Afghanistan’s Vietnam portent

[Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001.] There have been many suggestions among media and military analysts since 2003 of possible parallels between the war in Iraq and the United States imbroglio in Vietnam that ended so humiliatingly in 1975. The argument is most prominently made by critics of both wars, though it has also been articulated

Jim Sleeper: Obama's Way Out of the Race Trap

[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.] Ed Kilgore's fascinating and widely read post here at TPM examines Barack Obama's prospects after the Pennsylvania primary by comparing Obama in some ways to George McGovern and proposing, with commenters, a number of strategic alternatives.

Frederick Kagan: Dollars are the best bullets

CONGRESS IS PREPARING TO consider (finally) the remaining $108 billion in supplemental authorizations to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Previous talking points of the antiwar party--the surge has failed, Iraqis will never reconcile, Iraqi troops won't fight, violence won't fall or, if it does, it won't stay down--have fallen by the wayside as they have been visibly disproven one by one. So the current authorization debate is unlikely to see serious renewed attempts to legislate milita

Efraim Karsh: The Jordanian Option

In an April 16 op-ed entitled “Back to the Jordanian Option,” Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council, argued that an Israeli-Palestinian final status agreement is “unfeasible in the foreseeable future.” He asked: “So what should we do?” We should reshuffle the cards and try to think about other solutions as well. One of them is a return to the Jordanian option. The Jordanians won’t admit this publicly, yet a Palestinian state in the West Bank

Tom Engelhardt: 12 Reasons to Get Out of Iraq

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003

Jonathan Zimmerman: Americans at the bottom of the economic pile are bitter; but their lives are peachy compared to those of poor Africans

[Jonathan Zimmerman , a Pennsylvania resident and history professor at New York University, is teaching this semester at the university's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (jlzimm@aol.com).] So here's what we've learned from the latest round of political sniping at Barack Obama: Americans really are bitter. They just don't like to be reminded of it.

Martin E. Marty: An Islamless World

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com. ] An early deadline prevents our commenting on the papal visit, the religious theme of the week. So, another topic: Last week we sighted the hard-to-miss, politically-minded preacher Rod Parsley of Ohio, who wants the Christian United States to wage war for the "destruction" of Islam. Suppose he

Juan Cole: McCain and the Myth of al-Qaeda in 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.]I am quoted in this NYT piece today on John McCain's allegations that the US is fighting"al-Qaeda" in Iraq and that there is a danger of"al-Qaeda" taking over the country if the US leaves.

Victor Davis Hanson: Casualties of the Campaign

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.] It is only four months into 2008, but the presidential campaign -- already too long and nasty -- is still a long way from over. And the casualties are mounting.

Daniel Pipes: A Democratic Islam?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] There's an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen – and it's accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterl

Michael T. Klare: The End of the World as We've Known It

[Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil. Consider this essay a preview of his newest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, which has just been published by Metropolitan Books.] ... Throughout history, major shifts in power have normally been accompanied by violence -- in some cases, protracted violent upheavals. Either states at the pinnacle of power ha

Hillel Fradkin: Who speaks for Islam?

[Hillel Fradkin is a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute where he directs its Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. He is the founder of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, the leading journal on contemporary Islamism (sometimes known as militant or radical Islam) which he co-edits with Husain Haqqani and Eric Brown. He is also general editor of Hudson’s monograph series on contemporary Islam and Islamism as well as the center’s website.] Who speaks for I

Robert McElvaine: Pope Should Start "Spiritual Renewal" with Bisexual God

[Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College. This piece is based in part on his new book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, which has just been published by Crown.] On Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI asked the crowd gathered in St. Peter's Square to pray that his first visit to the United States as pontiff this week would "be a time of spiritual renewal for all Americans." Surely spiritual renewal would be beneficial to all of us -- not least

Stanley I. Kutler: Blame Obama's latest controversy on the media

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate.”] It was inevitable for Barack Obama to beat a retreat from his recent remarks about his difficulty in reaching Pennsylvania’s working-class voters. The railroad, coal and steel jobs that once fueled the Pennsylvania economy have declined dramatically for several decades. Obama noted that the frustrations and anger of working-class families determined and dominated their voting beliefs. “It’s not surprising, then,” he said, “t

Julian E. Zelizer: United government no universal cure

[Julian E. Zelizer is a 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). He is currently writing a history of national security politics since World War II that will be published by Basic Books.] The only thing that makes the brutal presidential nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton tolerable for most Democrats is the hope for a b

Edwin Black: An Egyptian Jew Battles Coca-Cola in the USA for a Modern Day Injustice

[Edwin Black is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust, as well as award-winning investigations of the relationships between General Motors, Ford Motor Co, Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation with Nazi genocide.] Refael Bigio in Montreal remembers the moment that the regime of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized his family’s property. He was driving to the factory with his father that traumatic August day in 1962. Pol

Frederick W. Kagan: Progress, Actually

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI. ] The last time General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker reported to Congress on the state of the Iraq war, "benchmarks" were all the rage. Congress had established 18 criteria in early 2007 both to pressure the Iraqis and to keep score on their progress. And in September, Congress faulted the Iraqi government for failing to meet many of those measures. Concocting a checklist of laws and actions that would lead to

Jonathan Zimmerman: Are the Olympic games politicized? Yes.

[The writer is a professor of history and education at New York University.] Are protesters following the Olympic torch trying to"politicize" the Beijing Games, as Chinese leaders have charged? You bet. And it's a good thing, too. Remember, the Olympics have always been political. They were in 1936, when Adolf Hitler used the Berlin Games to burnish his international image; in 1968, when two African-American medalists in Mexico City raised their fists in a black-power salute; in

Tony Perrottet: Beware of Greeks Bearing Placards

[Tony Perrottet is the author of “The Naked Olympics” and the forthcoming “Napoleon’s Privates.”] WHEN it comes to Olympic protests, the demonstrators in London, Paris and San Francisco are a pretty wimpy bunch, at least compared to the ancient Greeks. Back in the classical era, protesters really knew how to disrupt an Olympics ceremony. In 364 B.C., soldiers stormed the arena in Olympia and a pitched battle occurred on the field. It was history’s most dramatic clash of

Daniel Pipes: Europe or Eurabia?

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube/Diller distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is in Australia for the Intelligence Squared debate to take place this evening in Sydney. This article derives from a talk he delivered yesterday to the Quadrant.] The future of Europe is in play. Will it turn into"Eurabia," a part of the Muslim world? Will it remain the distinct cultural unit it has been over the last millennium? Or might