Roundup: Historians' Take

Anthony Grafton: What the Renaissance teaches us about torture

[Anthony Grafton is a contributing editor at The New Republic.] Just over half a century ago, the great historian J.H. Hexter set out to teach the world a modest lesson. In an essay titled "The Historian and his Day," he used the example of his own life to refute the claim--a common one in his era and ours--that historians, caught up in the passions and controversies of their own time, cannot view the past objectively. In fact, he explained, he usually worked in the opposi

Juan Cole: Bush and Musharraf's grand illusion

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] In the fall of 1999, as he campaigned for the presidency, George W. Bush was asked by a reporter to name the leader of Pakistan. Bush could not. He famously replied: "The new Pakistani general, he's just been elected -- not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring st

Juan Cole: What Musharraf is up to (It's not cracking down on terrorists)

[Barnett Rubin at our Global Affairs site] is in Islamabad. He points out that Musharraf has been invoking the need to fight Muslim extremism as a pretext for his coup. But in fact, he made the (further) coup because the Pakistani Supreme Court had unanimously decided that he was ineligible to run for president, and he hasn't cracked down on the radio station of Fazlur Rahman in the north (one of the Pakistani clerics who trained the Taliban and who denies that al-Qaeda exists). He has cracked d

Frederick Kagan: The Iraqi parliament behaves like a bunch of politicians

[Frederick W. Kagan is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] How much does it matter that the Iraqi parliament has not yet passed an oil law? According to war critics, it is the only thing that matters: Iraqis' failure to complete "reconciliation" by passing "benchmark" legislation as required by Washington is evidence not only that the current strategy has failed, but also that any strategy wil

Jim Sleeper: Hawking War Guilt

[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, is the author of The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism.] One of the most dispiriting causes of the biggest strategic blunder in American history may be the least understood: from the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 until at least the 2006 elections, it wasn't the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters who stampeded the chattering classes and liberal audiences toward our still-unfolding disaster. It was the "best&qu

Juan Cole: Combating Muslim Extremism

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] All the major Republican presidential candidates have bought into George W. Bush's rhetoric of a central struggle against Muslim extremism and have thus committed themselves to a generational, often self-generating war. By foregrounding this issue, they have ensured that it will be pivotal to the 2008 pr

Mike Davis: Does Pete Wilson deserve a statue?

[Mike Davis, who teaches urban history at U.C. Irvine, grew up in the now incinerated backcountry of San Diego County. His other articles about the recent Southern California fires will soon be published in the Nation and the London Review of Books. His most recent book is In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket 2007).] This August, just as the first Santa Ana winds bent the boughs of the eucalyptus trees in Balboa Park, 500 wealthy business people and Republican P

Alexander Keyssar: How Not to Choose a President

[Alexander Keyssar is a professor of history and social policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.] The effort by some California Republicans to alter the way the state's electoral votes are distributed in presidential elections has been miraculously resurrected. The proposal -- which would replace the winner-take-all system with an allocation of electoral votes by congressional districts -- had stalled last month in the wake of a strangely surreptiti

Juan Cole: Needed ... A Left-leaning "Team B" for Intelligence

It isn't surprising that Iraqi expatriates like Curveball should be trying to peddle a load of horse manure about Iraqi 'weapons programs' in the early zeroes. It is not remarkable that Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and its US enablers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Abram Schulsky, etc., should have been running a sting on US intelligence (and most of them have never even been investigated for

Murray Polner: We Aren’t One: American Jewish Voices for Peace

[Mr. Polner was the editor of Present Tense, published by the American Jewish Committee from 1973–90. He wrote Rabbi: The American Experience; co-edited (with Stefan Merken) Peace Justice Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition, as well as No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and, with Jim O’Grady, Disarmed & Dangerous, a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. He is an HNN Book Department editor.] Back in the 1980s the major American Jewish welfare organization ad

Daniel Pipes: Mosul and Iraq's Next War

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] About 100,000 Turkish troops, backed by aircraft and tanks, are poised to enter Iraq for counterterrorism purposes. But once there, they might just stay permanently, occupying the Mosul area, leading to dangerous regional consequences.To understand this danger req

Michael Schwartz: Iraq Policy Floating on a Sea of Oil

[Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and in

Tom Engelhardt: Thoughts on Getting to the March

[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 just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] As I was heading out into a dark, drippingly

Frederick Kagan: American Defense Policy at a Crossroads

[Frederick W. Kagan (fkagan@aei.org) is a resident scholar at AEI. He is the author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Encounter, 2006).] America's military policy is in disarray, but not for the reason most people think. For the first time since around 1950, there is no coherent theoretical framework for thinking about how to shape our armed forces for current and future threats. This fact presents both a dange

M. Reza Pirbhai: The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming!

[M. Reza Pirbhai is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University.] From January 1857 to September 2007, the New York Times published eighty-six items that mention 'Wahhabism'--a 'puritanical' ( salafi) Islamic creed named after its 18th century Arabian founder, Abd al-Wahhab. Six appeared before the attacks of September 2001, while eighty have appeared since. Although the frequency of references has tapered of late, giving way to more generic terms like 'Islamo-fa

David Greenberg: Rudy a Lefty? Yeah, Right.

You wouldn't know it from reading the papers, but the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination is a confirmed right-winger. On issues such as free speech and religion, secrecy and due process, civil rights and civil liberties, pornography and democracy, this moralist and self-styled lawman has exhibited all the key hallmarks of Bush-era conservatism. That candidate is Rudolph W. Giuliani. As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s wo

Robert Nelson: Leaving "nature" alone in southern California is one of the reasons those fires have burned out of control

[Mr. Nelson, a professor of environmental policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center, is the author of "A Burning Issue: A Case for Abolishing the U.S. Forest Service" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).] ... Since the 1960s ... the central policy goal of environmentalism has been to restore nature, seemingly posing a direct conflict with the goal to curb or eliminate fire. In environmental thinking,

François Furstenberg: Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons

[François Furstenberg, a professor of history at the University of Montreal, is the author of "In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery and the Making of a Nation."] MUCH as George W. Bush’s presidency was ineluctably shaped by Sept. 11, 2001, so the outbreak of the French Revolution was symbolized by the events of one fateful day, July 14, 1789. And though 18th-century France may seem impossibly distant to contemporary Americans, future historians examining

Bruce Cumings: Kim Jong Il confronts Bush — and wins

[Bruce Cumings teaches in the History Department and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago and is the author of the two volume work The Origins of the Korean War and North Korea: Another Country.] The leaders of South and North Korea have met. The meeting had been formally delayed since the summer because of serious flooding in the North – but in fact both sides had to wait six years for this opportunity. The two Korean heads of state met

Nick Turse: Targeting Iraqis as "Big Game"

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, GOOD magazine, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book,