Roundup: Historians' Take

Tom Engelhardt: We Count, They Don't

[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.] At least Caesar was just commenting on reali

M. Cooper Harriss: Race, Myth, and Ritual in Jena

[M. Cooper Harriss is a PhD student in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and managing editor of the journal Ethics.] A curious coda was sounded in Jena, Louisiana this past week. In the wake of explosive confrontations between black and white high school students that have served, among other things, to bring to light just how poorly human beings can treat one another, Jesus appeared. For those familiar with the history of the fr

Diane Ravitch: Get Congress Out of the Classroom

[Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University, was the assistant secretary of education for research from 1991 to 1993.] DESPITE the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all si

John T. Kuehn: Abolish the office of Secretary of Defense

[John T. Kuehn is Assistant Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.] The political and defense communities of 2006 had the wrong debate about former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.1 Instead of “should he stay or should he go,” the debate should have been whether we even need the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). It is perhaps time to admit that the great post–World War II American experiment called “unification” has fa

Daniel Pipes: To Preempt Terrorists, or Not to Preempt Terrorists?

[Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).] "Everything" did not change on 9/11, as some expected, but one thing certainly did: the U.S. government's willingness to preempt enemies before they act. This new policy has outraged so many, it may be discontinued. In foreign affairs, preemption replaced the long-established policy of deterrence. A

Jonathan Zimmerman: The murder of five Amish schoolgirls taught us no one is safe

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," which will be published next year.] Today, many of us will pause to remember the five Amish girls who were murdered a year ago at a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa. Television crews will return to the community and dutifully record Amish children walking to their new one-room school, which looks a lot like the

Barry Rubin: In Search of Ahmadinejad

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://gloria.idc.ac.il and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (GLORIA) Center 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).] A massive controversy has erupted in the

Gabriele Marranci: The Invisible Suffering of Burma

[Gabriele Marranci is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion, School of Divinity and Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen. He is the founding editor of Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life and the author of Jihad Beyond Islam .] Since the revolt of the monks against the military junta in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, all the Western mass medi

Andrew J. Bacevich: General Petraeus wins a battle in Washington—if not in Baghdad

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.] In common parlance, the phrase “political general” is an epithet, the inverse of the warrior or frontline soldier. In any serious war, with big issues at stake, to assign command to a political general is to court disaster—so at least most Americans believe. But in fact, at the highest levels, successful command requires a sophisticated grasp of politics. At the summit, war and politics me

Michael Charney: The history behind the protests in Burma

[Michael Charney is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS and is a specialist in Burmese history. His research focuses on Burmese intellectual and religious history. He is the author of Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752-1885 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2006) and has recently completed his manuscript for The History of Modern Burma for Cambridge University Press.]

Frederick Kagan: Why We're Winning Now in Iraq

[Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author most recently of "No Middle Way: The Challenge of Exit Strategies from Iraq." (AEI, 2007).] Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the consensus of American strategists has been that the best way to fight a cellular terrorist organization like al Qaeda is through a combination of targeted strikes against key leaders and efforts to discredit al Qaeda's takfiri ideology in the Muslim community. P

Roger Owen: Iraq is doomed to warlord rivalry in the near term

[Roger Owen is a professor Middle East history at Harvard University.] WHAT GENERAL PETREAUS and his master, President Bush, would like us to believe is that recent American policy in Iraq can be seen as a military success but a political failure judged in terms of the inability of the country's sectarian leaders to unite. What they cannot see is that the two are much more closely related than they are willing to admit. One factor is that by arming and financing the Sun

Reider Visser: The US Senate Votes to Partition Iraq. Softly.

[Mr. Visser, D. Phil., is a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and editor of the Iraq website www.historiae.org. His latest books are Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq (2005), and, edited with Gareth Stansfield,

Juan Cole: The Transcript that Reveals Impeachable Offenses by President Bush

[Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edi

Victor Davis Hanson: The University Madhouse

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.] Have American academics lost their collective minds? This week, Columbia University allowed Iran's loony President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be a lectu

Jonathan Zimmerman: Hateful speech isn't hateful action

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Here's a quick news quiz: What do the Jena 6, San Diego Padres outfielder Milton Bradley, and the protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University have in common? In all three cases, Americans appear to have forgotten the difference between hateful speech and hateful action. And when we lose si

Juan Cole: Transcript Reveals Impeachable Offenses by Bush

[Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edi

Paul Ortiz: The Jena Six and US History

[ Paul Ortiz teaches in the Department of Community Studies at UC-Santa Cruz. He is co-editor of the book "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South" and writer of the book "Emancipation Betrayed."] In Jena, as throughout the rest of the US, we are supposed to believe that "race is no longer an issue" and that justice is colorblind. California fits the pattern perfectly. Out here, Martin Luther King Jr. commemorations ha

Walid Phares: How the Iranian media reported Ahmedinijad's visit to Columbia

[Professor Walid Phares is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington and a visiting fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy in Brussels. Dr Phares is the author of recent book The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy.] Et Voila, as expected, the Iranian official media edited out the stories about the Ahmedinijad visit to Columbia University. President Bollinger's "harsh" questions were deleted an

Daniel Pipes: Islamic Economics: What Does It Mean?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] While the outside world hardly noticed, a significant and rapidly growing amount of money is now being managed in accord with Islamic law, the Shari'a. According to