Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: Annapolis Blues

[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 plans to convene a new round of Israeli-Arab diplomacy on Nov. 26 will, I predict, do substantial damage to American and Israeli interests.As a rule, successful negotiations require a common aim; in management-labor talks, for example, both s

Francis Fukuyama: A self-defeating hegemony

When I wrote about the End of History almost 20 years ago, one thing that I did not anticipate was the degree to which American behaviour and misjudgments would make anti-Americanism one of the chief fault lines of global politics. And yet, particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, that is precisely what has happened, owing to four key mistakes made by the Bush administration. First, the doctrine of "preemption", which was devised in response to the 20

Robert F. Turner: The president is bound by the Constitution, not the whims of Congress

[Mr. Turner holds both professional and academic doctorates from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he cofounded the Center for National Security Law in 1981. He is a former three-term chairman of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.] I have never met Judge Michael Mukasey, and I have no strong feelings on who should be our next attorney general. But after four decades studying and writing about national security aspects of our

Juan Cole: The collapse of Bush's foreign policy

[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 Bush administration once imagined that its presence in Afghanistan and Iraq would be anchored by friendly neighbors, Turkey to the west and Pakistan to the east. Last week, as the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to deteriorate, the anchors themselves also came loose.... Along

Mark Naison: Culture is Politics in the Bronx and Berlin

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] I just came back from another amazing trip to Berlin. I was there, with my wife Liz, to give a speech on Bronx Music and Migration at a Conference on Berlin and New York sponsored by the House of the Cultures of the World, but also was able to spend three additional days touring the city, talking to conference participants, and reconnecting with friends I had made on my last trip. Thanks to

Mark Naison: The Bronx Comes to Germany- My Visit To Hip Hop Berlin

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] My head is spinning after the three days I spent in Berlin. I came to deliver a paper on the Multicultural Roots of Bronx Hip Hop to an international conclave of scholars in Urban Studies, but spent as much time in the immigrant neighborhoods of Berlin as I did at the university and discovered, first hand, how much hip hop has become the chosen vehicle of expression for disaffected and disfranchised you

Juan Cole: US troop deaths are up this year ... but Iraq is fading as an issue?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]Edward Luce of FT argues that Iraq has faded as a campaign issue in the 08 presidential election. He attributes this lower profile for the issue to a drop in US military deaths in Iraq and to the rise of Iran as an issue instead.I may have been the fi

Arthur Herman: We’re Already at War with Iran

[Arthur Herman grew up in Wisconsin and received his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Minnesota in 1978. He went on to earn his Masters and Ph.D. with the Johns Hopkins University History Department. He taught at several universities in the Washington DC area, including Georgetown and George Mason University, before becoming Coordinator of the Western Heritage Program for the Smithsonian’s Campus on the Mall from 2000 to 2005.] The multitude of proposals regarding

Jonathan Zimmerman: Have you noticed that dorms now look like hotels?

[Jonathan Zimmerman (jlzimm@aol.com) is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Thousands of Americans will travel to colleges and universities this fall for "parents' weekend." They'll wander leaf-strewn lawns and quadrangles with their sons and daughters, asking earnest questions about courses, sports and friends. Later, when they retire to the local Hilton, Sheraton or Holid

Chalmers Johnson: Intellectual Fallacies of the War on Terror

[Chalmers Johnson is the author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy -- Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007).] This essay is a review of

Gary Leupp: Response to an Angry Marine

[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

Walter Russell Mead: Relax, America will survive George W. Bush

[Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World.] Nothing in the field of international affairs is as scandalous and as perplexing as the fact of American power. From Revolutionary times to the present, virtually all observers foreign and domestic have agreed that Americans don't do foreign policy well. Moralistic, uninformed,

Gary McDowell: The anniversary of Robert Bork's failed nomination reminds us what's at stake in the coming election

[Mr. McDowell, currently a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a professor at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond.] Twenty years ago today the United States Senate voted to reject President Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. The senators may have had every reason to believe that was the end of the story. However ugly it had been, however much time it had taken, Mr. Bork's defeat

Stanley I. Kutler: The New American Imperium

[Mr. Kutler is author of the Wars of Watergate.] The New York Times recently reported that President George W. Bush has told his visitors "that he needs to get to the Korea model," meaning a politically sustainable US presence to stabilize the Middle East. Obviously, this is part of his design to lock his successors (not just the next President) into defending the Middle East as a cardinal precept of American foreign policy. Bush intends for his successors to

Ivan Eland: U.S. Should Condemn All of Government Atrocities

[Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University.] The Bush administration is attempting to soothe the Turkish government’s apoplectic reaction to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s label of “genocide” on Turkey’s slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians, which occurred almost a cen

Tom Engelhardt: Do We Already Have Our Pentagon Papers?

[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.] They can't help themselves. They want to

Mary E. Stuckey: The “L” Word in American Electoral Politics

[Mary E. Stuckey is a professor of political science and communication at Georgia State University. She is interested in issues of political power and the national media, and especially how both affect minority groups. She is the author of eight books, including The President as Interpreter-in-Chief, Strategic Failures in the Modern Presidency, Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity, and Slipping the Surly Bonds: Reagan's Challenger Address. She is at work on Jimmy Carter, Huma

Art Gomez: National Park Service: Rising sun or setting sun?

[Art Gómez, a 25-year veteran of the National Park Service based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a member of the AHA Council.] Less than a decade after the U.S. victory in Europe and the Pacific, scholar-journalist Bernard DeVoto penned an essay in Harper's Magazine facetiously titled, "Let's Close the National Parks." For years, DeVoto had captured the imagination of the general reading public with his witty, thought-provoking column in which he analyzed issues concerning the

Ruth Rosen: The man who predicted Iraq is now writing about the agenda to make war with Iran

[Ruth Rosen, the author of the revised and updated book "The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America" (Penguin), is a visiting professor of history and public policy at UC Berkeley.] Some people are treated as pariahs when they tell the truth; later, history lauds them for their courage and convictions. Reese Erlich is one of those truth tellers. In January 2003, before the war in Iraq began, Erlich co-authored "Target Iraq: What the News Med

Gunnar Heinsohn and Daniel Pipes: The Arab-Israeli conflict in the global imagination ... Arab-Israeli Fatalities Rank 49th

[Professor Heinsohn is director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut für Xenophobie- und Genozidforschung at the University of Bremen. Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum.] The Arab-Israeli conflict is often said, not just by extremists, to be the world's most dangerous conflict – and, accordingly, Israel is judged the world's most belligerent country.For example, British prime minister