Roundup: Historians' Take

Tom Engelhardt:"Fixing" the War

[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.] This i

Niall Ferguson: Another way to interpret this report is 'Stay but don't screw up'

'Persuasion involves both incentives and penalties," Henry Kissinger once remarked. "So there is an element of implied coercion." Last week saw the publication of a masterpiece of persuasion. But whom will it persuade? And with what sticks and carrots? Most commentators have interpreted the report of the Iraq Study Group as a well-crafted admission of defeat. Predictably, that was exactly how President Bush himself reacted to it. "I… believe we're going to succee

Gabriel Kolko : Making sense of a mad world

[Gabriel Kolko is a leading historian of modern warfare. His latest book is The Age of War. ] These are dismal days for those who attempt to run the affairs of the world. But how should we understand it? It would be a basic error to look at our present situation as if it were rationally comprehensible. The limits of rational explanations are that they assume rational men and women make decisions and that they will respect the limits of their power and behave realistica

Robert Pallitto: Secrecy and Foreign Policy

[FPIF contributor Robert Pallitto teaches political science at the University of Texas at El Paso. He and William Weaver have co-authored Presidential Secrecy and the Law, which will be published in Spring 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.] Since the beginning of the republic, U.S. presidents have used some form of secrecy in the course of governing. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, congressional hearings in the 1970s and the disclosure of covert U.S. programs of assa

Daniel Pipes: James Baker's Terrible Iraq Report

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] The Iraq Study Group Report, cobbled together by ten individuals lacking specialized knowledge of Iraq, dredges up past failed U.S. policies in the Middle East and would enshrine

Louis Fisher: History Refutes the President's Claims to Unlimited Power Over Foreign Affairs

[Louis Fisher is a specialist in constitutional law with the Law Library of the Library of Congress. His books include Presidential War Power (2004). The views expressed here are personal, not institutional.] Advocates of unchecked presidential power in the post-9/11 period rely heavily on the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936). In dicta, Justice George Sutherland cited a statement in 1800 by then-Rep. John Marshall (the future Supreme Co

Juan Cole: The president's Shiite allies in Iraq really don't like some of James Baker's Sunni-friendly suggestions

... President Bush is presumably in sympathy with one of the ISG's main concerns about partition, which is that there should be a central Iraqi government in control of the country's petroleum reserves and revenues. Both James Baker and the president have ties to U.S. petroleum companies, which would rather negotiate with a single central government than be forced to strike deals with each province or regional federation. To forestall partition, and to promote national unity and re

Jon Wiener: John Lennon's Legacy

On the anniversary of John Lennon's murder (Dec. 8, 1980), I've been thinking about his famous argument with Gloria Emerson in December, 1969 – filmed by the BBC, and included in the recent documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Emerson was a celebrated war correspondent for the New York Times who had just returned from the bloody battlefields of Vietnam; Lennon had just written "Give Peace a Chance" after he and Yoko declared their honeymoon a "bed-in for peace"-

Kevin Baker: America’s Revolutionary Party ... It’s always been the Republicans

The midterm elections have brought us a sweep of both houses of Congress by the Democrats. Just what this means in terms of the war in Iraq or specific legislation is still unknowable, but it now seems undeniable that we are living in an age of radicalism. Republican radicalism, that is. This should come as no surprise to anyone who followed reports of a September Oval Office press conference George W. Bush gave for a group of selected columnists. “I got into politics i

Jerome Eric Copulsky: Obama's Religious Challenge

[Jerome Eric Copulsky is Director and Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Virginia Tech.] Last Friday, Barack Obama, the charismatic junior senator from Illinois and possible Democratic presidential hopeful, made news by speaking at an AIDS conference at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, one of the flagships of contemporary evangelicalism. To an audience of more than 2,000 evangelical leaders, the senator spoke movingly of his experiences in Africa, and set forth his vision for

Michael Beschloss: Presidents listen to blue-ribbon panels—sometimes

America was mired in a frustrating, seemingly endless war. An election year was approaching, and the president’s own party leaders were terrified that their recent crushing midterm congressional defeat would be repeated in the coming race for the White House. To blunt the war’s unpopularity, a commission was proposed to measure the crisis and give the president political cover for finding a way out. The time: January 1968. The war: Vietnam. The president: Lyndon Johnson. Half a mill

Eric Alterman: What do the Weekly Standard's Kristol and Barnes think now?

Now that the Baker-Hamilton Commission is ending this country's long national acid trip, I am struck by the fact that, save possibly Donald Rumsfeld and Christopher Hitchens, no one's intellect, analysis, and honesty have been more profoundly undermined by the results of the Iraq war than the editors of The Weekly Standard. Remember when William Kristol was separating loyal liberals from the traitorous kind? Kristol

Martin Kramer: Democracy Promotion ... Plan B.

[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 December 4, 2006, Carl Gershman, Jennifer Windsor, and Martin Kramer addressed The Washington Institute's Special Policy Forum, on "Democracy Promotion in the Middle East: Time for a Plan B?" Gershman is pres

Daniel Pipes: How to End Terrorism

[Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org), director of the Middle East Forum, last week presented a longer version of this analysis in Brazil, at a conference hosted by the country's intelligence agency, the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência (ABIN).] An effective counterterrorism strategy must focus on the fact that terrorism by Muslims in the name of Islam presents the strategic threat today to civilized peoples, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.

Ralph Luker: The recent round of controversies over endowed chairs

[Ralph E. Luker is an Atlanta historian and a blogger at Cliopatria.] Six weeks ago, President Ronald D. Liebowitz of Middlebury College announced the establishment of a William H. Rehnquist Chair in American History and Culture. The announcement stirred considerable controversy on the campus. Some students and faculty members claimed that honoring the late Chief Justice Rehnquist by naming an endowed chair for him was an act of “symbolic violence” that betrayed the college’s commit

Andrew J. Bacevich: A civil war -- and worse

[Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is the author of "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War."] WHEN NBC NEWS and the Los Angeles Times decided recently that the ongoing mayhem in Iraq fits their definition of civil war, other media outlets treated this as big news. True, to insist otherwise -- as President Bush continues to do -- is to find oneself in the company of those still clinging to th

Tom Engelhardt: The Iraq Study Group Rides to the Rescue

[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.] Finally, t

Juan Cole: Rumsfeld's Shocking Memo

The NYT has gotten hold of a memo by Donald Rumsfeld detailing options on Iraq. Several things struck me about it: 1. Rumsfeld doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis or the tightrope the US is walking in the Gulf. His attitude is almost lackadaisical. Doing an all right job, but it isn't working fast enough or well enough. So maybe make some changes-- apparently any old changes will do because there are infinite lives to play with and infinite monies to

Peter Montague: We are essentially living in a new world (Part II)

[Click here for Part I.] [Mr. Montague is a journalist and historian holding a Ph.D. degree in American Studies from University of New Mexico (1971).] Here we continue describing the new world that has evolved during the past 50 years. In the past 50 years, corporations have grown almost unimaginably influential. Originally invented as a way for entrepreneurs to raise capital from strangers, publicly-traded corporation

Peter Montague: We are essentially living in a new world

[Mr. Montague is a journalist and historian holding a Ph.D. degree in American Studies from University of New Mexico (1971).] We are living in a world that is essentially new. Almost everything has changed in the past 50 years. Perhaps we are trying to understand this new world using habits of thought from the old world. Maybe that is why things seem so confusing. Let's consider some of the ways the world has changed since 1950. In the largest sense, here is the big change