Roundup: Historians' Take

Edwin Black: Barack Obama--Mentored by an anti-American, anti-Zionist Black Separatist

[Edwin Black was the first Jewish journalist to interview Minister Louis Farrakhan while on assignment for the Washington Post as part his broad investigation of the Nation of Islam.] In the end it was not the lies about his religion, but the truth about his religion that may have irrevocably splattered the image of Barack Obama. Democratic presidential frontrunner Obama survived a malicious viral email campaign that he was a Muslim. While under Sharia, he was in fact bor

Nicholas J. G. Winter: Why Race, Gender, and Politics Are Dangerous Frames

[Nicholas J. G. Winter, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, is publishing his book, Dangerous Frames: How Ideas about Race and Gender Shape Public Opinion at the perfe

Jon Wiener: Clinton's Iraq Vote -- Five Years Later

[Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation and professor of history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (New Press, 2005).] The fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war provides an appropriate moment to revisit Hillary Clinton's argument in favor of authorizing Bush's use of force, and to contrast it with the case made at the time by Bush's opponents.In the last few years, Clinton has defended h

William R. Polk: The Iraq War and the Presidential Election

[William R. Polk is senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, he taught Middle Eastern politics and history and the Arabic language at Harvard University until President Kennedy appointed him a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State. He was in charge of planning American policy for most of the Islamic world until 1965 when he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center.

Barry Rubin: Let's Talk About the Nazis

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloriacenter.org and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal http://meria.idc.ac.il. His latest books are The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan) and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).]

Gerald Posner: Rev Wright and Barack

[Gerald Posner is the author of 10 books of investigative non-fiction, seven NYT bestsellers, and a finalist for the Pulitzer in History. His last book was Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi US Connection.] I am a Barack Obama supporter. I liked Senator John Edwards, think Hilary Clinton would make a super president, but have been persuaded ever since the start of the campaign that Barack offers the greatest chance for substantive, and greatly over needed, change.

Daniel Pipes: "America's Chickens are Coming Home to Roost"

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, and Barack Obama's pastor since 1988, told his congregation in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001 that U.S. terrorism had precipitated Al-Qaeda's at

Victor Davis Hanson: Looking at Iraq

By now everyone sees what he wishes in Iraq — a disaster of many proportions, a necessary war that will still be won. Liberals who used to demand that we promote democracy abroad are fierce critics of Iraqi democracy; conservatives, who want an iron hand dealing with a hostile Middle East, support spending hundreds of billions of dollars in rebuilding Iraqi society. So it will be left to historians, as has been true in the case of the far-more-costly Korean and Vietnam wars, to adj

Gordon N. Bardos: Hillary’s Balkan “Experience”

[Gordon N. Bardos is assistant director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.] Hillary Clinton’s claim to be the most qualified Democrat to run for president is largely based on her self-proclaimed foreign-policy “experience.” Much of this experience would logically come from her days in the White House when events in the Balkans were the focus of so much U.S. attention. As her husband said in January 1993, Bosnia w

Mark Naison: Spitzer, Clemens and Bonds ... A Case of Fiddling While Rome Burns

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] As I read the latest economic news, which includes stories of federal bailouts of some of the nation's largest investment banking firms and predictions of the worst recession in recent memory, I marvel at the amount of press coverage given to the Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds steroid investigations and Eliot Spitzer ill considered sexual escapades. I understand the appeal

Jonathan Zimmerman: Do African doctors have an obligation to practice in Africa? On brain drains and blame games.

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history 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."] ACCRA, Ghana Several years ago, at a staid academic conference, I heard an African-American speaker inveigh bitterly against "selfish" middle-class blacks. Once upon a time, he said, black people looked ou

Manning Marable: Obama's Problem--And Ours

[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Manning Marable, PhD is one of America’s most influential and widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, from 1993 to 2003. Dr. Marable is an author or editor of over 20 books, includin

Sean Wilentz: Response to Orlando Patterson's essays on the Clinton campaign's use of race

[Mr. Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton.] Orlando Patterson's reply is as unpersuasive as his original op-ed essay. His op-ed--a fanciful interpretation of Hillary Clinton's 3 A.M. campaign ad as racist--provides no facts to back up its assertions, thereby making refutation literally impossible. Now

Tom Engelhardt: The First Sixth-Anniversary-of-the-Iraq-War Article

[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 thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] Please don't write in with a correction. I kno

Michael T. Klare: The Bad News at the Pump

[Michael T. Klare, the author of Resource Wars (2001) and Blood and Oil (2004), is a professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. His latest book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, will be published on April 15th by Metropolitan Books.] On Monday March 3, the price of crude oil reached $103.95 per barrel on the New York Mer

Stanley I. Kutler: Why George Bush Loves John McCain

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes.”] John McCain now owns the Republican presidential nomination, and he also has Iraq all to himself. He has identified strongly with the “surge,” trumpeting it as a success, confident we are on the side of history. Success, for him, means winning the war and thwarting further terrorist attacks on the United States. But now, as our potential commander in chief, this is not enough: McCain is calling for arms

Sean Wilentz: Hold On--'3 A.M.' Wasn't Racist

[Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton).] Reading Orlando Patterson's op-ed in the New York Times, "The Red Phone in Black and White," is a depressing experience. Not only does the piece scurrilously accuse Hillary Clinton's campaign of cutting an ad that borrows from the filmmaker D.W. Griffith's glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Not only is this attack based on a Clinton

Juan Cole: John McCain runs for George Bush's third term

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] The most important thing about the endorsements proffered to John McCain by George W. Bush and evangelist John Hagee last week was McCain's reaction to them. The freshly minted Republican nominee for president, who has had harsh words in the past for both Bush's policies and evangelical "agents of i

William Lee Miller: What would Hillary supporters have said about Lincoln?

[William Lee Miller is the author of the forthcoming "President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman." He is the scholar in ethics and institutions at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.] I picture a supporter of William Seward, the senator from New York and odds-on favorite to the win the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, sputtering in exasperation at the upstart from Illinois who suddenly appeared to be taking the nomination away from his can

Joseph Lane: Memo to Senator Obama: Concede Florida & Michigan!

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.] TO: Senator Barack Obama FROM: Your Delegate Counters RE: Florida and Michigan Since the unfortunate losses in Ohio and Texas on March 4, we have had a number of bad news cycles. The Samantha Power comments certainly weren’t helpful, but more to the point, our good news about more than 50 million raised in February and our continuing ro