Roundup: Historians' Take

Andrew Meyer: What happened to the Iraq Tet Offensive?

[After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year I returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which I teach at the City University of New York. ] Much of the logic from apologists for the Bush strategy in Iraq has begun to resemble that of the protagonist in an old joke:A: Why are you banging your head against that wall?B: It keeps the snakes away.A: There are no snakes around here.

Jim Sleeper: Time For a Review of the Times Book Review?

[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale and a writer on American civic culture and politics, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997). ] Two years ago the New York Times Book Review published an essay of mine, "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind," in which I showed that Bloom rejected conservatives' touting his 1987 bestseller The Closing of th

Raymond Ibrahim: The Two Faces of Al Qaeda

[Raymond Ibrahim is editor and translator of The Al Qaeda Reader, recently published by Broadway Books. All translations in this article are from the book.] ... Soon after relocating to Washington in order to attend Georgetown, I landed an internship, which later evolved into a full-time position, at the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, where thousands of new books, serials, and microfilms arrive yearly from the Arab world.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: What "Special Relationship"?

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of “The Controversy of Zion” and “Yo, Blair!”] ... This ["special"] relationship [between Great Britain and the United States] has always been a curious notion. Along with the even more dubious idea that Churchill popularized of a community of “English-speaking peoples,” it is sustained by make-believe and rewritten history. Americans don’t often use the phrase, but there was an almost comical exception when Senator John McCain visited En

Bernard Weiner: Looking to the 2008 Election ... Confusion, Anger, Hope

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers ( www.crisispapers.org ).] Let's construct a pair of binoculars out of two quotes. What we see may help us understand more clearly our current reality and where it could take us in November 2008.Seen through the right ocular is this doozy by

Timothy R. Furnish: On whitewashing radical Islam

[Mr. Furnish, Ph.D (Islamic History), is Assistant Professor, History, Georgia Perimeter College, Dunwoody, GA 30338. Mr. Furnish is the author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads and Osama bin Laden (Praeger, 2005). He is the proprietor of www.mahdiwatch.org.] As of this writing I am watching C-SPAN2's "Book TV." Lawrence Wright is interviewing Raymond Ibrahim, who works in the Middle East section at the Library of Congress a

Victor Davis Hanson: The world again turns on Jews, making them scapegoats

Who recently said: "These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War I. Why? Only to build Israel." Some holdover Nazi? Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as "bacteria" — controlled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States. Who alleged: "The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a

Alan McPherson: Iraq and the Politics of Withdrawal ... Lessons from U.S. Occupations in Latin America

[Mr. McPherson is an associate professor of history at Howard University and the author of Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (2003).] ... What is Iraq now was Latin America then, a time and place where the force of the United States as an invading power was considered at least as powerful as it is today. Whether in Haiti or elsewhere, Americans back then believed that they were top dog — and, after invading, could fix up a place like that rath

Eric Alterman: Hillary rolls along

Is the Democratic nomination already Hillary's? Could be. In some ways, it's a pretty simple calculation. She began with the support of the Democratic establishment, at least a third of primary voters, a big advantage with women, who make up the majority of these voters, and by far the most experienced campaign organization. Though she's been - rather amazingly - out-fundraised a bit by Barack Obama's campaign, she's got all the dough she needs. Last March a friend who's actually su

Paul Krugman: Sad Alan Greenspan's lament over the Bush tax cuts

... Mr. Greenspan now says that he didn’t mean to give the Bush tax cuts a green light, and that he was surprised at the political reaction to his remarks. There were, indeed, rumors at the time — which Mr. Greenspan now says were true — that the Fed chairman was upset about the response to his initial statement. But the fact is that if Mr. Greenspan wasn’t intending to lend crucial support to the Bush tax cuts, he had ample opportunity to set the record straight when it could have

Reider Visser: US Policy in Iraq at a Crossroads

[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,

Kiron K. Skinner, Serhiy Kudelia, Condoleezza Rice: Politics Starts at the Water’s Edge

[Kiron K. Skinner is a professor of history and political science at Carnegie Mellon and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Serhiy Kudelia is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a professor of politics at New York University and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Condoleezza Rice is the secretary of state. They are the authors of “The Strategy of Campaigning,” from which this article is adapted.] IT is rare for world leaders to be selected on the basis

Frederick Kagan: Webb's dangerous amendment on troop deployments

Jim Webb, the loquacious freshman senator from Virginia, is again proposing an amendment that would mandate a certain amount of time that soldiers must spend at home between deployments. At first glance, supporting this amendment looks like supporting motherhood and apple pie — Webb's stated aim is to take care of America's soldiers at war, and who could possibly object to that? The amendment, furthermore, gives the president the right to waive the requirement "if the President certifies to

Juan Cole: Can Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker Save the Next Democratic President?

Despite what the pundits will say, I fear the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the Hill Monday and Tuesday is not a turning point, does not give Bush breathing room, and is largely irrelevant. To any extent that what they do in Iraq ends up making a real positive difference, Petraeus and Crocker will likely be doing the Democrats a big favor, not Bush, who won't be in office much longer. The central question is whether the Democrats can f

Tom Engelhardt: The Petraeus Moment

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.] The former Coc

Stanley I. Kutler: Surge 2

[Mr. Kutler is the author of The Wars of Watergate.] Australian Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile politely asked George W. Bush on the tarmac in Sydney what he saw during his stopover in Iraq. "We're kicking ass," our chipper President replied. So, after four long years since his memorable words of "bring 'em on" and "mission accomplished," the President continues on his own merry course. Bush returns to direct the national "debate" on

Jay Winik: Putin's Inspiration Is Much Older Than the Cold War

[Jay Winik's new book, "The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800," will be published next month. He is the author of "April 1865."] ... The conventional wisdom is that Putin's background in the KGB is what ultimately drives his more notorious actions, leading foreign policy commentators to raise the specter of a renewed Cold War. But if the West is truly going to come to grips with Putin and a resurrected Russian state

Daniel Pipes: America's Crash Course On Islam

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] How goes the"war on terror"? One would think that the absence of a successful dramatic terrorist operation against Westerners since the London bombings in July 2005 would be heartening. But an atmosphere of gloom predominates. A recent much-publicized

Tom Engelhardt: Empire of Stupidity

[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.] On August 22nd, breaking into his Crawford v

Ruth Rosen: What Ever Happened to Freedom of Information?

[Historian and journalist Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, teaches history and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A newly updated edition of her book, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America was published in January 2007.] Disgraceful, shameful, ill