Roundup: Historians' Take

Barry Rubin: The Profession of Death (Re: Bhutto)

[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 (MERIA) 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) .] Much will be said about Benazir

Gordon Taylor: Separatist Paranoia in Turkey

[Mr. Taylor is a former teacher in Turkey and the author of Fever and Thirst: An American Doctor Among the Tribes of Kurdistan. Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005.] The following article was published in Le Monde on December 27. It seemed to me, when I read it, that it needed to be seen by a lot more people, especially in the United States. Americans are famous for knowing little of the world, and our scattershot, drive-by media do nothing to correct the situation. Turkey, we are told

James E. Campbell: Electability ... Why Fred Thompson’s the Man for Republicans

[James E. Campbell is a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is a former Congressional Fellow, a former program director at the National Science Foundation, and the president-elect of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society. He has published four books, fifteen book chapters, and nearly fifty articles in scholarly journals. His books include The Presidential Pulse of Congressional Elections, Cheap Seats: The Democr

Juan Cole: Top 10 Challenges Facing the US in the Middle East, 2008

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] 10. Helping broker a deal in Lebanon between the March 14 Movement and the Shiites so that a new president can be elected and a national unity government can be formed. Lebanon's economy was badly damaged by the Israeli war on the poor little country in summer of 2006. Tourism is a big part of

Joseph Ellis: What Would George Washington Do? (Re: Iraq)

W hat would George Washington do about Iraq? An op-ed editor (not at The Washington Post, I should add) recently asked me to write an article answering that question, presumably because I had once written a biography of Washington and have just published another book on the founding generation. But, as I tried to explain, Washington would not be able to find Iraq on a map. Nor would he know about weapons of mass destruction, Islamic fundamentalism, Humvees, cellphones, CNN or Saddam Hussein.

David Oshinsky: Heil Woodrow!

[David Oshinsky, who holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas, is the author of “A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.”] Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word “fascist” all the time. College presidents were fascists, Vietnam War supporters were fascists, policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists, on and on. To some, the word smacked of Hitler and genocide. To others, it meant the oppression of the masses by the privileged f

Mark Naison: Owning Up to Our Racial Fears ... Thoughts on the Trial and Conviction of John White

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] A former student's appeal to "own up to" the racial baggage we all carry has inspired me to go public with my thoughts about the manslaughter conviction of John White, a black Long Island father who was defending his son from a mob of angry white teenagers who had come to his home shouting racial epithets There are many things about this incident which should give paus

Victor Davis Hanson: A Long War in a Nutshell

Views on the war in Iraq now transcend reasonable discussion. The war rests in the realm of emotion, warped by the hysteria of partisan bickering. The result is that we have forgotten why we invaded Iraq in long-ago 2003. We cannot agree why we had problems after the stunning removal of Saddam Hussein. And we are not sure either whether we are winning — or why we even should. Why We Invaded After the victory of the 1991 Gulf War, a bipartisan consensus had

Martin Kramer: Pat Buchanan is against fascist analogies and for them

In September of last year, Pat Buchanan, founder of the weekly magazine The American Conservative, published an article on its pages entitled "Fascists Under the Bed." In that piece, Buchanan attacked President Bush for his assertion that we are "at war with Islamic fascism." As a prelude, Buchanan made a general critique of the reckless way analogies to fascism have been deployed in

Juan Cole: Huckabee Obsesses about 660 Pakistani Aliens; Clinton's 5 Point Plan

[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 dark side of Huckabee, the anti-science and anti-gay side of Huckabee, and the

William Marina: Ron Paul is simply misinformed about the Civil War

[Mr. Marina is Prof. Emeritus in History, FL Atlantic U., Research Fellow, the Independent Inst., Oakland, CA, & Exec. Dir., the Marina-Huerta Educ. Foundation.] While I like Ron Paul as my candidate, he is simply wrong on the Civil War. There is no indication the South wanted to end Slavery in the way it had ended in other nations; on the contrary, radical leaders there wanted to expand it into the American West (Bloody Kansas), and to create a Slave Empire in the

Juan Cole: Benazir Assassinated

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People's Party, has been assassinated at a rally held Thursday evening near Islamabad. She appears to have been shot by the assassin, who was wearing a suicide bomb belt, which he

Walter Russell Mead: Why We're in the Gulf

[Mr. Mead is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the recently published "God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World" (Knopf, 2007).] Few subjects matter as much as oil, the Persian Gulf and American foreign policy. But few subjects are less well understood. Even relatively sophisticated observers will attribute American interest in the Persian Gulf to Uncle Sam's insatiable thirst for crude, combined with an effort

Barnett Rubin: The Musharraf Problem

[Mr. Rubin is the director of studies at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, and the author of "The Fragmentation of Afghanistan" (2nd edition, Yale University Press, 2002).] ... The murder of Bhutto was not just an attempt to derail Pakistani democracy, or prevent an enlightened Muslim woman from taking power. It was a counterattack, apparently by the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda, against a U.S.-backed transition from direct to indirect military r

Richard Bulliet: Benazir Bhutto, Star Pupil

[Richard Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University and author of "Islam: The View from the Edge."] The 1970s were beginning, and the unrivaled star of my "Introduction to the Middle East" class was "Pinkie" Bhutto. I asked her once about her given name, Benazir, and she giggled in embarrassment at its literal meaning: "incomparable." No one at Radcliffe or Harvard called her anything but Pinkie back then. But it was already appa

Daniel Pipes: The Palestinian Economy in Shambles

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Western financial aid to the Palestinians has, I showed last week, the perverse and counterintuitive effect of increasing their rate of homicides, including terrorist ones. This week, I offer two pieces of perhaps even st

Juan Cole: Top 10 myths about Iraq 2007

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] 10. Myth: The US public no longer sees Iraq as a central issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.Fact: In a recent ABC News/ Washington Post poll, I

Walter Laqueur: Anarchism and Al Qaeda

[Walter Laqueur has written more than twenty books, translated into as many languages. He was a co-founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History in London and the Washington Quarterly. Concurrently he was chairman of the International Research Council of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He has taught at Georgetown, Chicago, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Brandeis, and Tel Aviv universities. He lives in Washington, DC.] In a recent

Najum Mushta: Islam and Pakistan

by Najum Mushtaq

[Najum Mushtaq is a project director at the Pak Institute for Peace Studies and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org).] From its Cold War role as a bulwark against the irreligious, evil empire of the Soviet Union to its status as a major non-NATO ally in the post-9/11 war on terrorism, Pakistan has flaunted its various religious credentials. Vacillating from jihad to enlightened moderation, Pakistan’s ruling civil and military elite has unscrupulously employ

Deborah Lipstadt: Ron Paul and his neo-Nazi supporters

Since my previous post I have been hearing an increasing buzz about Ron Paul. [Maybe I am just listening for it now...]People -- including a number of people who describe themselves as liberals -- who are looking for an independent candidate seem to be intrigued by him. My observation is, of course, highly UNscientific.