Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Misreading the Enemy

President Bush's escalation of the Iraq War is premised on a profound misunderstanding of who the enemies are, how to deal with them and what the limits are of U.S. power. The president cannot seem to let go of his fixation on Al-Qaida, a minor actor in Iraq, and his determination to confront Iran and Syria. He still assumes that the insurgents are outsiders to their neighborhoods and that U.S. troops can chase away the miscreants and keep them out, acting as a sort of neighborhood

Bernard E. Harcourt: The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars

[Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.”] ... According to a study released by the Justice Department in September, 56 percent of jail inmates in state prisons and 64 percent of inmates across the country reported mental health problems within the past year. Though troubling, none of this should come as a surprise. Over the past 40

Mark Naison: The Duke Rape Case ... A Drama With No Heroes, and Many Victims

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] Since several people on my listservs have posted their opinions on the Duke"Rape" Case and its aftermath, I thought I might put my two cents in about what has happened here. At latest count, the tally of people who have had their reputations sullied and their lives ruined by this case includes the exotic dancer who made the accusation, the three young man she accused of raping her, and th

Jay Bergman: Diversity's More Than Skin-Deep

[Jay Bergman is professor of Russian history at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain and president of the Connecticut Association of Scholars, an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars.] In American higher education, "diversity" is the reigning mantra administrators and faculty invoke to impress on students the virtues of admitting and promoting certain "underrepresented" minorities for the unique perspectives they purportedly bring to i

Martin E. Marty: Troubles in Poland

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com <http://www.illuminos.com> .] Names like Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, Stanislaw Wielgus, Andrzej Zybertowicz, Stefan Wyszynski, Andrzej Paczkowski, Konrad Stanislaw Hejmo, Michal Czajkowski, Stanislaw Dziwisz, and Janusz Bielanski are likely to become household, or

Jonathan Zimmerman: Ford and Brown ... Remember the Dark Side

[ Mr. 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).] "The evil that men do lives after them," William Shakespeare wrote. "The good is oft interred with their bones." Maybe that was true, back in Elizabethan England. But not here, in the all-is-forgiven U.S.A. Instead, we seem to have reversed Shakespeare's formula: Once you're

David Greenberg: Admitting Failure, Without Being a Failure ... President's Dilemma

[David Greenberg, a history and journalism professor at Rutgers University, is the author of “Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image” and “Calvin Coolidge.”] PRESIDENT BUSH’S speech Wednesday night had to strike a perfect pitch. He had to defend the war that will define his legacy while admitting to enough error to regain credibility with the public. Consequently, commentators are still trying to figure out whether he conceded mistakes, showed regret or intends to change course at

J.M.Opal: Making Peace Patriotic

[J. M. Opal teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He is just beginning a book on the relationships between war, memory, and democratic politics in the early Jacksonian era.] President Bush and his courtiers like to remind us that we are "at war," a prepositional phrase that casts a pall over the entire culture. With whom or what are we at war, you ask? Not Al Qaeda, or the assorted fanatics it inspired by killing three thousand people on 9/11, or even the shadowy

Eric Alterman: Iraq and the Sin of Good Judgment

The Bush/Cheney war in Iraq has proven to be even more catastrophic than those who had the good sense to oppose it could have predicted. It has killed Americans and Iraqis, destroyed a functioning, albeit unfree nation, increased the threat of terrorism, destabilized the region, empowered our enemies--particularly Iran and Syria--inspired hatred of the United States across the globe and will ultimately cost American taxpayers upwards of a trillion dollars. It is, almost certainly, as Al Gore has

Tom Engelhardt: The President Alone in the Dark

[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.] On January 4

Nancy C. Unger: Pioneering women in Congress aren't guaranteed success

[NANCY C. UNGER is an associate professor of history and Women's and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University and is the author of ``Fighting Bob La Follette: the Righteous Reformer.'' She wrote this article for the Mercury News.] Nancy Pelosi is being hailed for ``breaking the marble ceiling'' as the first female speaker of the House. The fact that the number of women serving in Congress is the largest ever is also being cited as a significant breakthrough. But isn't a

David Newman: The Green Line makes a comeback in Israel

[David Newman, a professor of political geography at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, is a co-editor of the journal Geopolitics.] NEARLY 40 years after it was removed from official maps, atlases and school books, the Green Line has made a significant comeback. Israel’s education minister, Yuli Tamir, has ordered the Green Line border, which separates Israel from the West Bank, to be reintroduced in all texts and maps used in the Israeli school system. From now on, Israeli childre

Jon Wiener: You're Mistaken If You Think Declassifying Government Documents Means Making Them Available

[Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and professor of history at UC Irvine.] ON DEC. 31 at midnight, hundreds of millions of pages of secret government documents were automatically declassified ˜ the result of President Bush's Executive Order on Declassification, which covers all national security documents 25 years old or older. They included 270 million pages of FBI files, according to the New York Times, covering, among other topics, the civil rights m

Martin E. Marty: When pols flip flop on moral issues

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.] More and more observers who keep score on politicians, especially as they approach campaigns for office, have been chronicling changes on some of the issues most would describe as basic.  In each case, the chronicles point to movements that we would have to call "about-faces" or "180-degree turns."  That repositioning goe

Juan Cole: Saddam ... The death of a dictator

... As Iraq spiraled down into a brutal civil war with massive killing and ethnic cleansing, many Iraqis began to yearn for the oppressive security of the Saddam period. After the destruction of the golden dome of the Shiite Askariya mosque in Samarra last February, Iraqis fell into an orgy of sectarian reprisal killings. By the time of Saddam's trial, sectarian strife was widespread, and the trial simply made it worse. It was not just the inherent bias of a judicial system dominate

Mark Naison: Heroism, A Great Tradition in Working Class New York

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] When Wesley Autrey threw himself on top of a young man who had fallen onto the tracks to save him from an oncoming train, he not only reminded us that heroism is something that manifests itself in daily life as well as war and times of emergency, he gave new life and meaning to a great New York tradition. In a city of immigrants, where almost every person is a descendent of someone who took extr

Jim Sleeper: All the Good Guys Are Dead, Mr. Bush

[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, is author of “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York” (W.W. Norton, 1990) and “Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream” (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).] “It’s almost a war without a home front,” journalist Bob Woodward told Time magazine just before Christmas. “Taxes are down, everyone’s buying…. There is a sense almost that we’re not at war. I can’t explai

Tom Engelhardt: Doubling Down on the Imperial Mission in 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.] Okay, folks,

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: Folly’s Antidote

[Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who has won Pulitzer Prizes for history and biography, is the author, most recently, of “War and the American Presidency.”] MANY signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a co

Juan Cole: What the Number 3000 Hides

Iraqi guerrillas killed 6 more GIs and AP put the total dead in combat at 2998. The dreadful milestone of 3000 is upon us. Like all statistics, this one is deceptive. It does not include US troops killed in Afghanistan, that oddly forgotten war where the US still has a division engaging in active combat. Nor is it nice to ignore NATO dead in Afghanistan, including French and Canadians (yes). The number does not include the Coalition troops killed in Iraq. The sacrifices of