Roundup: Historians' Take

Jonathan Zimmerman: A right reason and the wrong reason to oppose Bush's plan in Iraq

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (Harvard University Press, 2006).] Here's a good reason to oppose President Bush's proposed troop surge in Iraq: It won't work. We've already tried versions of this plan, and it has failed. There's no reason to believe it will succeed now. Here's a bad reason to oppose the surge:"Iraqi culture" isn't ready for democracy.

Garry Wills: At Ease, Mr. President

[Garry Wills, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern, is the author, most recently, of “What Paul Meant.”] WE hear constantly now about “our commander in chief.” The word has become a synonym for “president.” It is said that we “elect a commander in chief.” It is asked whether this or that candidate is “worthy to be our commander in chief.” But the president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army. I first crin

Stephen Sestanovich: The Right Strategy Isn't Enough

[Stephen Sestanovich, George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies] Americans are rummaging through the past for lessons to help us in Iraq. There’s just one problem: The two unsuccessful wars we’ve fought since World War II don’t teach the same lesson. In Korea and Vietnam, presidents had to salvage wars that had gone bad, and their decisions provoked fierce congressional opposition. But here the stories start to diverge. In Korea, Congress demanded that Har

Michael Oren: What if Israel and Syria Find Common Ground?

[Michael B. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is the author of “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.”] ISRAEL’S newspapers are rife with reports of a peace agreement secretly forged between Israeli and Syrian negotiators. Though both the Syrian and Israeli governments have denied any involvement in the talks, past experience shows that such disavowals are often the first indication of truth behind the rumors.

Rick Perlstein: The biggest lie ever told about liberals (Vietnam)

[Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.] ... The fact that Hillary Clinton has to sprinkle any Iraq speech with irrelevancies about how she won't leave American troops without armor is testament to the most perversely successful propaganda campaign in American history. And who's the figure most responsible for the absurdity? Our new, late, secular saint: the thirty-eighth president of

Kenneth Stein: My Problem with Jimmy Carter's Book

[Mr. Stein is the historian who resigned as an advisor to the Carter Center in December after complaining that President Carter's new book was biased.] Jimmy Carter's engagement in foreign affairs as a former president is unprecedented in U.S. history. Because he regards the Arab-Israeli conflict as among Washington's most important foreign policy topics, he has written more than two dozen articles and commentaries about the conflict, eight in the past year alone. In these publicati

Tom Engelhardt: Rural America Pays the President's Price in Iraq

[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.] When we hear ab

David M. Kennedy: Founders' Fuzziness (Congress Vs. President on warmaking)

[Mr. Kennedy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, is a professor of history at Stanford.] ... War gave birth to the U.S., but when the men who made the American Revolution went on to make a Constitution, they agonized over the rules for the new Republic's warmaking powers. They had no doubt that the state's very existence depended on its ability to field an armed force swiftly and effectively. Yet they also read history as a sorry record of warlords, monarchs and tyrants who exe

Richard Brookhiser: What's a Resume Got to Do with It? (Re: Obama)

[Brookhiser is a historian and author of What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers.] Barack Obama is the freshest face in the early lineup of presidential candidates. Is he too fresh? Would eight years in the Illinois state senate and four in the U.S. Senate qualify him for the Oval Office in 2008? American political history gives an answer: a resounding probably. Thirty-seven men have been elected President since 1789, and the American people have applie

Daniel Coquillette: Is it OK for attorneys to represent Guantanamo defendants? It should be!

[Daniel Coquillette, former dean of Boston College Law School, is coeditor of the forthcoming "Portrait of a Patriot: The Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Jr." ] LAST WEEK'S attack by a top Defense Department official on lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees raises an issue Americans have visited many times before -- an issue that was familiar to our Founding Fathers. On March 5, 1770, a group of British Regulars, on guard duty in a hostil

Martin Kramer: Know Thy Enemy or an Approximation Thereof

[Martin Kramer is the Wexler-Fromer Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center's Institute for International and Middle Eastern Studies in Jerusalem.]On Monday, January 22, I gave this address to the Herzliya Conference, an annual Israeli gathering for high-level soul-searching. The title of the panel (not of my choosing

Frederick W. Kagan & William Kristol: All We Are Saying . . . Is Give Petraeus a Chance

[Mrf. Kagan is the former West Point historian who argued in November for a surge in troops to Iraq. Mr. Kristol is the editor of the Weekly Standard.] Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has returned from her visit to Iraq with a bold (if not entirely new) recommendation: Congress should vote to cap the number of U.S. forces the president can deploy to Iraq. (She notes that her demand has precedent in the experience of Lebanon in the early 1980s: Was she pleased with the results of th

Jack Weatherford: Conquering Iraq in the 13th and 21st Centuries. Could Genghis Khan teach the US?

[Jack Weatherford teaches anthropology at Macalester College and is the author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.] In his final televised speech to the Iraqi people in 2003, Saddam Hussein denounced the invading Americans as "the Mongols of this age," a reference to the last time infidels had conquered his cou

Adam Hochschild: Mired in the Trenches of the Iraq Fiasco

[Adam Hochschild is the San Francisco-based author of six books include Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, a finalist for the National Book Award, and King Leopold's Ghost. He is writing a book on the First World War.] If we needed more evidence that those surrounding President George W. Bush

Tom Engelhardt: George Bush's Crusading Scorecard (2001-2007)

[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.] Just five d

Niall Ferguson: A war to start all wars

[Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. His latest book, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, is published by Penguin Press.] The United States invaded Iraq in April 2003 for multiple reasons, but the most ambitious was a desire to remake a whole region. The Middle East, it was argued, was full of political and economic underachievers, driven to violenc

Ron Jacobs: Back to 1965 ... Further Along the Dead-End Road of Iraq

[Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net] If there was ever any doubt about who is really running the war in Iraq, George Bush erased it last Wednesday night. Subsequent testimony before C

Jon Wiener: Counting the Dead in Iraq

The new UN estimate of 34,000 Iraqis killed in 2006 made headlines around the world, but it's almost certainly far too low. The number, as the New York Times reported, was "the first attempt at hand-counting individual deaths for an entire year," and was based on information from "morgues, hospitals and municipal authorities across Iraq." The first problem with the UN count is that refers only to civilians--and thus almost certainly omitted deaths of Iraqi police

Gareth Porter: How To De-Fund The Escalation

[Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam was published in June 2005. During the Vietnam War, Porter was a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Vietnamese history and politics who debunked the Nixon administration's "bloodbath" argument in a series of articles and monographs.] Democratic congressional leaders have thus far been unable to decide what to do about a p

Robert Buzzanco: The Bush Junta

[Robert Buzzanco is a professor of history at the University of Houston. He can be reached at: buzz@uh.edu.] In late November, my colleague James Carter and I published a short piece comparing events of 1968 to 2006 and assuming/predicting that the Bush administration would take some steps to begin deescalating their dismal war in Iraq (See "Deja Vu All Over Again: 1968 and 2006," History News Network, 20 November 2006, ) . We were not nai