Roundup: Historians' Take

Tom Engelhardt: Iraq Has Always Been "South Korea" for the Bush Administration

[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.]

Frederick Kagan: Misunderstanding the Surge

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI and one of the prime authors of "the surge." He taught history at West Point.] Yesterday the New York Times published yet another article in an ongoing series that might be called "The Surge Has Failed." This one was titled "Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal." The article reports on a one-page summary of a document the Times characterized only as an "internal military assessment."

Gary Leupp: Bomb Iran?

[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

Victor Davis Hanson: The Global Immigration Problem

Thousands of aliens crossing our 2,000-mile border from an impoverished Mexico reflect a much larger global one-way traffic problem. In Germany, Turkish workers — both legal and illegal — are desperate to find either permanent residence or citizenship. "Londonstan" is slang for a new London of thousands of unassimilated Pakistani nationals. In France, there were riots in 2005 because many children of North African immigrants are unemployed — and u

Eugene Volokh: Is Anti-Semitism Good for the Jews?

[Mr. Volokh is a law professor at UCLA. ] American Jews naturally worry about anti-Semitic speech, for the obvious reason that it could lead to anti-Semitic murder, other crimes, job discrimination and more. They also worry about unfair criticism of Israel, because it could undermine American help for Israel, American trade and professional exchanges with Israel and the like. But it seems to me there are also contrary effects. American help for Israel--especially privat

Barry Rubin: Interviewed about Syria

MJT: Your new book is called The Truth About Syria. For those who haven't yet read your book, tell us, what's the truth about Syria? Give us the short version. Rubin: To begin with, to understand Syria—like other regional forces—one must first examine the nature of the regime and its real interests. The way to do this is not to cite the latest interview or op-eds by Syrian leaders or propagandists in the Western media or what one of them told some naïve Western “useful idiot” who

Aviva Chomsky: Fallacies of the immigration debate

[Aviva Chomsky is professor of history at Salem State College.] The fact that people move around the world has been true ever since the human race stood up on two legs. There is nothing crisislike about this. To the extent that we are in fact facing crises, they are economic and environmental in nature. These two crises are connected with immigration because of the way resources are concentrated in certain parts of the world. The beginning of immigration typically comes with peasant

Warren Goldstein: The Conundrum That Is Barry Bonds

[Warren Goldstein is chairman of the history department at the University of Hartford. He is author of William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience (Yale University Press, 2004).] The san francisco outfielder Barry Bonds, one of the most talented hitters ever to play major-league baseball, as well as probably the single most disliked player in the game, is about to break one of the most hallowed records in all sports: Henry Aaron's lifetime home-run record of 755, which Aaron took a

Daniel Pipes: Islamists in the Courtroom

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] The decision last week by the Islamic Society of Boston to drop its lawsuit against 17 defendants, including counterterror

Juan Cole: Libby gets 30 months

Judge Reggie Walton threw the book at Irv Lewis Libby on Tuesday, sentencing him to 30 months in prison and imposing a $250,000 fine.Libby, VP Robert Bruce Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, was formally charged with obstruction of justice. He has been convicted of lying under oath to the special prosecutor about his role in leaking the identity of undercover CIA operative Vale

Daniel Pipes: MPAC, CAIR, and Praising Osama bin Laden

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Niall Ferguson: Africa has always generated hot air

Anyone who has seen the film Amazing Grace will appreciate the parallels between the career of William Wilberforce, as romanticised by Hollywood, and that of Tony Blair, as romanticised by Tony Blair. Like Mr Blair, Wilberforce had his roots in the north of England. Like Mr Blair, he did not distinguish himself at Oxbridge. Like Mr Blair, he lost no time in entering politics, where his affability ensured rapid advancement. And, like Mr Blair, Wilberforce was strongly influenced by t

Juan Cole: Gore on Bush Propaganda

It is no surprise that Al Gore is attacking Bush in his new book, of course. Nor is it a surprise that Gore accuses Bush of ignoring all reasonable evidence in both making the decision to invade Iraq and in deciding to do nothing about global warming. What is important about what Gore is saying is his focus on how the pollution of America's information environment by 1) corporate media consolidation (all television news is brought to Americans by five private corporations, t

Alan J. Kuperman: Genocide ... The Cases of Rwanda and Sudan

[Alan J. Kuperman is Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, and author of The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001) and co-editor with Timothy Crawford of Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion and Civil War (Routledge, 2006). This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPR

Victor Davis Hanson: Is the Sky Falling on America?

The suicide-murders and roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan sicken Americans. Soon-to-be nuclear Iran seems loonier than nuclear North Korea. American debt keeps piling up in China and Japan. And we think of angry Venezuela, the Middle East and Russia every time we fill up — if we can afford to fill up.... Yet American Cassandras are old stuff. Grim Charles Lindberg in the late 1930s lectured a Depression-era America that Hitler's new order in Germany could only be appeased, neve

Rick Perlstein: Rigging the marketplace of ideas

[Mr. Perlstein is the author of a history of the rise of the modern conservative movement.] ... Come with me, then, on a journey, courtesy of historian Nancy Fones-Wolfe's outstanding Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and LIberalism, 1945-60.... It starts in 1934. In the second year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, NAM's annual PR budget was already hefty at $360,000 (almost five and a half million in today's dollars). It wasn't

Juan Cole: On the False Analogy Between Iraq and South Korea

Bush is now talking about a "South Korea" model for Iraq. He likely got this nonsense from John Gaddis at Yale, who I heard talking it last November at the Chicago Humanities Fair. So what confuses me is the terms of the comparison. Who is playing the role of the Communists and of North Korea? Is it the Sunni Arabs of Iraq? But they are divided into Iraqi/Arab nationalists and Salafi Sunni revivalists. (The secular Arab nationalists are the vast majority according

Henry Kissinger: The Lessons of Vietnam

THE IRAQ WAR has reawakened memories of the Vietnam War, the most significant political experience of an entire American generation. But this has not produced clarity about its lessons. Of course, history never repeats itself exactly. Vietnam and Iraq are different conflicts in different times, but there is an important similarity: A point was reached during the Vietnam War when the domestic debate became so bitter as to preclude rational discussion of hard choices. Administrations

Jim Sleeper: David Brooks ... A Columnist Who Doesn't Know Himself or His Country

[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). ] Here he goes again. In 2004, David Brooks told us that John Kerry had "a brain of sculpted marshmallow," and he never missed a chance to ridicule Kerry with some variation of George Wallace's old barb about liberal "p

William Underwood: Proof of POW Forced Labor for Japan’s Foreign Minister

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