Roundup: Historians' Take

Andrew Meyer: What's wrong with the analogy with Korea

[After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year Mr. Meyer returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which he teaches at the City University of New York.] Recent statements by Bush administration officials to the effect that the President envisions a "Korea model" for the future trajectory of US involvement in Iraq add a new dimension to the vast edifice of distortion, delusion, and sheer lunacy that is the Bus

Daniel Pipes: American Intifada

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Note to the reader: All quotations contained in this article and all references to events before June 2007 are genuine. All references to future events are, obviously, fictional. The sentences in square brackets did not appear in the print version. In retrospect

Rick Perlstein: Fencing with fellow liberals over the necessity of a wall between us and Mexico

An immigration-lawyer friend of mine recently pointed out that even a good liberal like Eric Alterman has fallen for a very dangerous bit of right-wing propaganda: that America needs a fence along the Mexican border: "Personally, I support a fence. The current system encourages the horrific abuses that take place against immigrants attempting to sneak in. Naturally, I support allowing generous numbers of immigrants into this country, but I support doing so legally, first and fo

Tom Engelhardt: Iraq by the numbers

[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.] Sometimes, num

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: No swan song for Hong Kong

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of "China's Brave New World – And Other Tales for Global Times."] What will become of Hong Kong? Many residents of the city asked this a decade ago, in the anxious days before the Hong Kong handover of July 1, 1997. And some still pose it nervously today, as the 10th anniversary nears of Hong Kong's transition from a British crown colony to a special administrative region

Ehud Krinis, David Shulman and Neve Gordon: The Palestinians from the South Hebron hills need your help

While all eyes are on the crisis in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians who live in Susya, in the hills to the south of Hebron, are in imminent danger of being expelled from their homes. They are surely not the only ones who might be evicted from their ancestral lands in the upcoming months -- the inhabitants of the small village Nuaman just south of Jerusalem, for example, are also under imminent threat -- but they are among the most vulnerable people living under Israeli military rule in the West

Victor Davis Hanson: The good ole’ days in the Middle East

“Mess,” “fiasco,” “disaster,” “blunder,” and “catastrophe.” Fill in the blanks with almost any stock noun of gloom these days when speaking about Iraq. For finger-in-the-wind politicians, writing off Iraq is mere throat-clearing before moving on to any discussion of immigration reform or taxes. For ahead-of-the-curve pundits, starting out with “The failure in Iraq” is like opening their browser before daily pontificating. No need of explanation or empiricism, one just

Barry Rubin: What can Olmert and Abbas do now?

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and author of the just-published, The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan).] In completely objective, totally detached terms, there is a really great policy available in the aftermath of Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip. Palestinian Authority (PA) and PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah-dominated government in the West Bank could present their people with an attrac

Gary Leupp: An Open Letter to the Regents of the University of Colorado on Ward Churchill

[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

Walid Phares: What should we make of the Palestinian civil war?

[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.] What most analysts agree on end of June 2007 is that a new reality has transformed the geopolitics of the Palestinian territories to the disadvantage of all parties claiming to represent the

Daniel Pipes: Salman Rushdie and British Backbone

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Is the knighting of Salman Rushdie, 60, by the queen of England"a sign of the changing mood" toward British Muslims, as Observer columnist Nick Cohen wrote? Is it"a welcome example of … Br

Bernard Weiner: An "interview" with a historian in 2034 about the Bush legacy

[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 ).] Boston, June 26, 2034 Pulitizer Prize-winning historian Isadora Tribe's much-awaited "The Restoration Years: America in the Post-Bush Era" jumped to th

Glenn Greenwald: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency

[The following is an excerpt from "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency," which will be published June 26. To read Greenwald's response to letters about this excerpt, visit his blog.] One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness -- who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a crusade against Evil -- is that the moral imperative driving

Fouad Ajami: Brothers to the Bitter End

[Fouad Ajami, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq.”] SO the masked men of Fatah have the run of the West Bank while the masked men of Hamas have their dominion in Gaza. Some see this as a tolerable situation, maybe even an improvement, envisioning a secularist Fatah-run state living peacefully alongside Israel and a small, radical Gaza hemmed in by Israeli t

Victor Davis Hanson: Hypocrisy That Undermines Civilization

There is only a thin veneer that separates civilization from man's innate barbarity. Some 2,500 years ago the historian Thucydides once warned us about the irony of revolutionaries and insurrectionists destroying this fragile patina of culture, as if they themselves might be exempt from ever wanting it back again. Yet no sooner, he warned, have such outsiders torn down the system of law than they are in need of it themselves when they assume power and the responsibility of governan

Azar Gat: Who Needs America? We Do.

[Azar Gat is professor of national security at Tel Aviv University and the author of "War in Human Civilization." A longer version of this article appears in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs.] Today's global liberal democratic order faces a significant challenge from the rise of nondemocratic great powers - the West's old Cold War rivals, China and Russia, now operating under "authoritarian capitalist" rather than Communist regimes. The categ

Timothy Garton Ash: Faced with the tragedy of Iraq, the US must rethink its whole foreign policy

You think you've reached bottom, then you hear knocking from underneath. As I follow the news from Iraq, and the American debate about it, I fear that the worst is still to come. Here's the latest twist. In desperation, and since the surge is not having the desired effect, the US military is now arming and funding Sunni gangs to help them fight other Sunni gangs linked to al-Qaida. The enemy of my enemy is my friend - even if, until only yesterday, he was the enemy I had claimed to be defeating.

Christopher J. Fettweis: The war is lost, Americans should begin to deal with what that means

[Christopher J. Fettweis is assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.] LOSING HURTS MORE than winning feels good. This simple maxim applies with equal power to virtually all areas of human interaction: sports, finance, love. And war. Defeat in war damages societies quite out of proportion to what a rational calculation of cost would predict. The United States absorbed the loss in Vietnam quite easily on paper, for example, but the societal ef

David Greenberg: How presidential primaries backfired

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out: Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge.] Presidential primaries were created to put power in the hands of the people—to make the choice of party nominees, once the preserve of the bosses, more democratic. But instead of producing what you'd expect from democracy—greater disagreement, difference, and unpredictability—the ascent of binding primaries has turned the pre-convention months int

Eric Rauchway: The Great Voter-Fraud Myth

[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. ] When we think of voter fraud, we generally think of the grift depicted in Preston Sturges's 1940 film The Great McGinty: The drifter McGinty accepts a party operative's offer of two bucks for a fraudulent vote and, enterprisingly, zips through 37 preci