Roundup: Historians' Take

Mark Weisbrot: BAT BOY Lives - As Do Myths About Social Security

[Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. (www.cepr.net).] Despite the defeat of President Bush's attempt to partially privatize Social Security, the mass misunderstanding of America's largest and most successful anti-poverty program persists. This was evident on Sunday's Meet the Press with Tim Russert, which was devoted to an interview with Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Eric Rauchway: The Republican and Democratic parties both have a history of catering to white racists. The Democrats stopped. Have Republicans?

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America.] Campaigning for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, George W. Bush said that non-southerners, like his primary opponent John McCain, should "butt out" of the South's racial politics. In South Carolina, telephone callers asked thousand

Daniel Pipes: Washington Protects the Terror Masters

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] The Bush administration's counterterrorism policies appear tough, but inside the courtroom, they evaporate, consistently favoring not American terror victims, but foreign terrorists.Consider a civil lawsuit arising from a September 1997 suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Ham

Kimberly Kagan: Executing the winning strategy in Iraq

The surge of operations that American and Iraqi forces began on June 15 has dramatically improved security in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. U.S. commanders and soldiers have reversed the negative trends of 2006, some of which date back to 2005. The total number of enemy attacks has fallen for four consecutive months, and has now reached levels last seen before the February 2006 Samarra mosque bombing. IED explosions have plummeted to late 2004 levels. Iraqi civilian casualties, which peaked at 3,

Peter Berkowitz: The Insanity of Bush Hatred

[Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a professor at George Mason University School of Law.] Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself. The people, or various factions among them, have indulged in Clinton hatred, Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred, FDR hatred, Lincoln hatred, and John Adams hatred, to mention only the more extravagant hatreds that we Americans have conceived for our presidents. But Bush

Jonathan Zimmerman: Why gender still matters in American politics

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century.] Women are more kind and nurturing than men. They are natural altruists, placing the common good — including education, health and the environment — ahead of their narrow personal interests. And that's why we need a woman president. Right? Wrong. We don't need a female president, any more than we need a male one. Inst

David P. Redlawsk: The Iowa Caucuses are Like the Electoral College

[David P. Redlawsk is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa and Director of the University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll. ] Talking with some folks here in Iowa the other day, we began to think about how the Iowa Caucus mirrors that other great institution of presidential politics, the Electoral College (EC). Now this is ONLY for the Democrats. The Republicans approach their presidential preference process quite simply – they vote. That is, when Republicans arriv

Rashid Khalidi: In The Mideast, America Casts An Imperial Shadow

[Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. His latest book is "The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood."] Most Americans think that our role as a world power began with World War II, the "good war," and then continued with the similarly noble Cold War. We like to think that the United States acts in the world exclusively in the name of ideals such as freedom and democracy. So it may

Juan Cole: The US Drawdown Begins

The US military has begun to reverse last year's troop escalation, which brought the number of combat brigades in Iraq up to 20. It is now going back down to 19, and will stand at 15 in July of 2008 if things go according to plan. That is, the number of US troops in Iraq on the eve of the 2008 election will be about 140,000. If the"take, clear and hold" strategy of clearing guerrillas out of

David Haven Blake: The movie that tells us how politics really works in our democracy

[David Haven Blake, associate professor of English at the College of New Jersey, is the author of "Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity." He is currently writing a book about democracy and fame in the television age.] Frank Capra's film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939) pervades American political culture. For decades, the film's account of an idea

Gary Leupp: General Musharaff's "State of Emergency"

[Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.] I think the New Yo

Gary Leupp: The History and Politics of Sainthood

[Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.] The earliest Chris

Allan Lichtman: Crisis and Change in the Christian Right Movement (Part 1)

[Allan J. Lichtman is a professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. His six books include Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 and The Keys to the White House. His new book on the history of American conservative politics is forthcoming from Grove-Atlantic Press.] This is the first in a series of posts on the future of conservative politics in the United States. I in

Arthur Herman: Churchill understood that the Jews are the bedrock of Western tradition

[Mr. Herman's "Gandhi & Churchill" will be published by Bantam in April] "Why should we Anglo-Saxons apologize for being superior?" Winston Churchill once growled in exasperation. "We are superior." Certainly Churchill's views of what he and other late Victorians called the "lesser races," such as blacks and East Indians, are very different from ours today. One might easily assume that a self-described reactionary like Churchill, holding s

William Astore: If We Lose Iraq, You're to Blame

[William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), earned a doctorate in modern history from the University of Oxford in 1996. He has taught military cadets at the Air Force Academy and officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His books and articles focus primarily on military history and include Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Pres

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China Gets Beijing and Shanghai Ready for the 2008 Olympics and 2010 Expo

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the new book China's Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times.] CHINA'S ECONOMY IS booming like never before and its social fabric is being ripped apart and knit together in no

Susan Faludi: They Always Play the Gender Card

[Susan Faludi is the author of The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9-11 America. She wrote the bestselling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and has written for many publications, from the Wall Street Journal to the Nation.] No sooner had Hillary Clinton proceeded from the Democratic presidential debate to a speech at Well

James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn: How to win elections, FDR style

[James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn teach at Williams College. They are coauthors of "The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America" and "George Washington."] 'Do you wish to win for yourself the undesirable title of the 4-P's Candidate: Pusillanimously-Pussyfooting-Pious-Platitudinous Roosevelt?" wrote a Harvard friend to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, imploring him to forthrightly address the crucial issues of the day. But Roosevelt had

Martin Kramer: Hillary ... Triangulation on Israel?

[Martin Kramer is Olin Institute senior fellow at Harvard University, and senior Middle East adviser to the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani. These views are his own.] Hillary Clinton has published her foreign policy agenda in Foreign Affairs magazine, under the title "Security and Opportunity for the Twenty-

Daniel Pipes: Saddam's Damn Dam

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] The surge of U.S. troops in Baghdad is succeeding but deeper structural problems continue to plague the American presence in Iraq. The country's largest dam, 40 kilometers northwest of Mosul, near the Turkish border, spectacularly symbolizes this predicament.