Roundup: Historians' Take

Niall Ferguson: Some civil wars never end

IT WAS THREE YEARS AGO that a prescient Beirut journalist I know predicted that Iraq would end up as "Lebanon to the power of 10" — meaning Lebanon during its 16-year civil war between 1975 and 1991. This year, his prophecy has been fulfilled as Iraq has spiraled into bloody internecine strife. By contrast, my friend was quite optimistic about Lebanon's future. But last week's assassination of Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel raises the grim possibility that Lebanon may no

Andrew J. Bacevich: Iraq Panel's Real Agenda: Damage Control

[Mr. Bacevich is Professor of history and international relations at Boston University.] Even as Washington waits with bated breath for the Iraq Study Group (ISG) to release its findings, the rest of us should see this gambit for what it is: an attempt to deflect attention from the larger questions raised by America's failure in Iraq and to shore up the authority of the foreign policy establishment that steered the United States into this quagmire. This ostentatiously bipart

Niall Ferguson: Bribe the Insurgents

... This is not the first time that a U.S. military intervention has produced a debacle, and the tragic fate of South Vietnam is far from the sole precedent. The history of Central America and the Caribbean offers numerous others. In Guatemala in the 1950s and 1960s, a U.S.-backed regime change was the prelude to a protracted civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. By any meaningful definition, a similar process is now underway in Iraq. According to the unofficial Ir

Thomas Powers: The War Last Time

[Thomas Powers is the author, most recently, of “Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda.”] ... Simple realism — totting up the Congressional votes the president can count on to back or oppose him — suggests that a turning point has been reached in Iraq. Getting in is over, and getting out is about to begin. I am reminded of a similar moment 41 years ago, when Lyndon Johnson was facing the bleak but imminent prospect of his South Vietnamese allies’ collaps

Victor Davis Hanson: A civilization that has lost confidence in itself cannot confront the Islamists

[Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, a distinguished fellow of Hillsdale College, and author most recently of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." This article is adapted form a speech he delivered at the Claremont Institute's annual dinner in honor Sir Winston Churchill. ] Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlighten

Rick Perlstein: Whistling Past Dixie

[Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.] In the days after the 2004 election, the same CNN exit poll was on every pundit's lips: Asked about their most important issue, a plurality of voters cited "moral values." Eighty percent of that plurality voted for George W. Bush--no matter that cooler heads soon demonstrated these findings to be statistically meaningless. For "m

Frederick W. Kagan: Go Big Now

Many months into the debate over finding a new strategy in Iraq, two myths continue to cloud the discussion. The Washington Post recently proclaimed: "The United States and its allies in Iraq would need at least 500,000 and perhaps more than 1 million troops" to bring order to the country. Incoming House majority leader Steny Hoyer declared: "As a practical matter, there are no troops to increase with." Neither of these statements is true. The persistence of these myths forec

Robert Higgs: War Weariness

War weariness is the prevailing public sentiment in the third stage of a major U.S. neo-imperialist war. In this prolonged stage, most people have grown tired of the war. They have surrendered their prior illusions about the glorious outcomes it was supposed to bring. They have come to understand that for them it is worse than pointless, that its costs have been real and its benefits a chimera, and that it seems likely to damage them further as it continues. Yet the war goes on and on, with no e

Juan Cole: What's the military mission now?

... What is the mission of the US military in Ramadi? I hope my readers will press their representatives in Congress and the executive branch to answer this question. What is the mission? When will it be accomplished? At what point will the people of Ramadi wake up in the morning and say, 'We've changed our minds. We like the new government dominated by Shiite ayatollahs and Kurdish warlords. We're happy to host Western Occupation troops on our soil. We don't care if those troops

Dominic Johnson & Dominic Tierney: History suggests we should be careful before leaping to the conclusion that Iraq is lost

[Dominic Johnson, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, and Dominic Tierney, an assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore, are the authors of “Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics.”] IN January 1968, Americans turned on their televisions to find scenes of chaos and carnage as Vietnamese communists unleashed their surprise Tet offensive. It would go down in history as the greatest Am

Mark Naison: Thoughts on the Latest NYPD Killing of an Unarmed Black Man

[Historian Mark Naison is Professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University.] When Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant, was struck down by 41 bullets in a Bronx vestibule six years ago, I had hoped that outrage that followed would insure that no incident like this would ever happen in New York City again. Though the 4 police officers who killed Diallo were acquitted of any crime, I thought that the NYPD would

William Lambers: Congress should fund school lunches for poor kids abroad

[William Lambers is the author of "The Road to Peace: From the Disarming of the Great Lakes to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty." He also writes for the History News Service. For more information on McGovern-Dole program: www. friendsofwfp.org.] After World War II, the United States sponsored the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild war-torn Europe. Food aid, medicine and reconstruction efforts vastly improved the lives of the children on that continent. Today, the

Martin Marty: The Catholic Vote

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com ] "God Gap Narrows as Democrats Take Majority of Catholic Vote" is Joe Feuerherd's headline in the liberal National Catholic Reporter (November 17). "Republican hopes that socially conservative church-going Catholics would help forestall an electoral catastrophe in the 2006 midterm elections we

Carolyn Eisenberg: Phased Withdrawal ... Nixon tried it in Vietnam, once most agreed the war was lost, and it cost 20,000 U.S. lives

Our pugnacious president visited Vietnam last week and found the lesson for Iraq: "We'll succeed unless we quit." In this reading of history, the United States was defeated in Vietnam because of a failure of will. If George W. Bush has his way, this won't happen again. U.S. troops are staying in Iraq. In his rigidity, Bush sounds eerily like President Lyndon Johnson, who could not acknowledge until too late his Vietnam policy was in shambles. But in the aftermath of the mi

Tom Palaima: Moral courage, free speech and open debate: Essentials of our democracy: The lessons of MLK and RFK

[Palaima is the Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas.] This Thanksgiving, let us be thankful that we live in a democracy. Let us work at reviving and nurturing the principles of free and open exchange of ideas. Let us work at respecting the rights and beliefs of our fellow citizens and immigrants to our country, legal or illegal. This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my good friend at the University of Texas at Austin, Paul Woodruff. Paul i

Andrew Meyer: Why dividing Iraq is no magic bullet

[After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year I returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which I teach at the City University of New York. This blog reflects my belief that the study of the history and culture of other nations is indispensible to the conduct of modern politics.] As US leaders cast about for ideas on how to pull the Iraq conflict out of the jaws of catastrophe one notion that has become very vogue is

Michael Ledeen: Unlike Previous Counterinsurgencies

[Ledeen is an expert on U.S. foreign policy. His research areas include state sponsors of terrorism, Iran, the Middle East, Europe (Italy), U.S.-China relations, intelligence, and Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). A former consultant to the NSC and to the U.S. State and Defense Departments, he has also written on leadership and the use of power. His latest book is entitled The War against the Terror Masters. He earned a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin.]

Juan Cole: Bush's Cedar Revolution Collapses in Yet Another Policy Failure

The assassination of Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel on Tuesday has thrown that country further into crisis. The crisis is a further testament to the bankruptcy of George W. Bush's Middle East policy. Under the dishonest rhetoric of 'democratization,' what Bush has really been about is creating pro-American winners and anti-American losers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. Bush's vision is not democratic because he always installs a tyranny of the majority. The vanquis

Roger Morris: Reason in an age of folly (and felony)

[Roger Morris, who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, is an award-winning author and historian whose new book, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of US covert interventions and foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia, will be published by Alfred Knopf next year.] Are we the eagle nation Or have we but the talons and the maw, And for the abject

Donna R. Gabaccia: Today's Immigration Policy Debates ... Do We Need a Little History?

[Donna Gabaccia is a professor of history and director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She is author of many books and articles on immigrant life in the United States and Italian migration around the world. She is an editor of the recent special issue, "Gender and Migration," of the International Migration Review and (together with co-editor Vicki Ruiz) American Dreaming, Global Realities: Re-thinking US Immigration History. ] In