Roundup: Historians' Take

John Keegan: Lessons from history suggest that Iraq, though in chaos, has not yet reached civil war

What is civil war? The question is often raised about the disorders in Iraq. Does the violence between Iraqi religious and political factions amount to civil war, or is it best described another way? The US-led coalition's spokesmen, echoing the views of the White House and Downing Street, refuse to call the disorders civil war. Presumably they believe that to do so would be to admit defeat in their project to set up a stable, legitimate new Iraq. To assess the situation in Iraq, it

Judith Klinghoffer: Indians like to watch their country being put down

[Judith Klinghoffer, an affiliate professor at Haifa University and an HNN blogger, is currently lecturing at a law school in Goa, India.] To a significant degree the fate of liberty and peace in the 21st century will depend on the successful development of the largest world democracy. For it is in India that the autocratic development model is truly challenged. That is the reason it is so disheartening to find that much of the Indian (very leftist) elite is so dismissive of the coun

Michael Oren: Israel has to consider a pre-emptive strike against Iran

[Mr. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present," forthcoming from W.W. Norton.] "Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone." With these words, Lyndon B. Johnson greeted Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban at the White House on May 26, 1967. The Middle East was in the throes of an escalating crisis. Gamal Abdul Nasser had evicted U.N. peacekeepers

Tom Engelhardt: What It Means to "Salvage U.S. Prestige" 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.] Things are

Gavan McCormack: The Okinawan Election and Resistance to Japan's Military First Politics

[Gavan McCormack is a Japan Focus coordinator. His new book, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, will be published by Verso in May 2007. For earlier essays by him on Okinawa, see the Japan Focus files.] The election for Governor of Okinawa on 19 November is unique among prefectural elections in Japan in its national, regional and even global implications. The Japanese state has been struggling for more than a decade to secure the compliance of Okinawan people with an agenda

Gavan McCormack: Why Japan Is Following the Bush Administration Line on Iraq

[Gavan McCormack, author of the just-published Target North Korea (Nation Books), in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (March 16, 2004)]One week before UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's visit to Japan this February, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi declared it crucial for Japan to show the United States what a"trustworthy al

Jonathan Zimmerman: US midterms rebutted cynical liberals who rail about the public's stupidity and ignorance

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] To quote President Bush, the Republican Party received a good old-fashioned thumpin' in last week's elections. But so did many American liberals, who love to rail about the naivety, ignorance, and general stupidity of the American electorate.Call it Radical Pique. Way back in 1970, Tom Wolfe coined the term &

Richard Gott: Latin America is preparing to settle accounts with its white settler elite

[Richard Gott is the author of Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press).] The recent explosion of indigenous protest in Latin America, culminating in the election this year of Evo Morales, an Aymara indian, as president of Bolivia, has highlighted the precarious position of the white-settler elite that has dominated the continent for so many centuries. Although the term "white settler" is familiar in the history of most European colonies, and comes with a pejorative rin

Derek Catsam: The Unpredictability of an Unhappy Electorate

[Derek Catsam is a history professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa, Tex., and a writer for the History News Service.] The confetti has begun to settle after the latest election. The Democrats have congratulated themselves, the Republicans have pointed fingers, and the pundits have tried to convince us that they knew all along that this was precisely what would happen. One of the preferred approaches of conser

Ira Chernus: The Unfinished Story of Election 2006

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His latest book is Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.] Election statistics are like pies. You can slice them up any way you want. And the way you slice them depends on the tool you use. My favorite tool is a nugget of wisdom from Democratic political guru Stanley Greenberg: "

H.W.Brands: How last century's money wars may lead to healthcare, pension reform

[H.W. BRANDS teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is "The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy and the Hundred Years' War Over the American Dollar."] PITY BEN BERNANKE. As chairman of the Federal Reserve, his every utterance (or cough or sneeze) is analyzed for clues as to the future direction of interest rates. The weight of the American economy is laid on his shoulders by pundits and much of the public. And he labors in the shadow of Alan Green

Daniel Pipes: Europe is Finished, Predicts Mark Steyn

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Mark Steyn, political columnist and cultural critic, has written a remarkable book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Regnery). He combines several virtues uncommonly found together – humor, accurate reportage, and deep thinking – then applies these to what

Ruth Rosen: America’s election ... Daddy’s swagger vs Mommy’s care

[Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who formerly wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A new edition of her book The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (Penguin, 2001) will be republished in 2007 with an updated chronology and epilogue.] The world will long wonder what took the American people so long to

Daniel Burnstein: Katrina Blues Compounded by Continuing Incompetence

[Mr. Burnstein is associate professor of history at Seattle University. He is the author of: Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City.] As a native New Orleanian, I have been appalled at the Bush administration’s treatment of that city since Hurricane Katrina struck last year.  Its low-priority approach to the human suffering there was demonstrated in a recent article in the New York Times (“Slow Home Grants Stall Progress

Michael Rubin: Rumsfeld and the Realists

[Mr. Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly. He earned a PhD in history at Yale.] On Dec. 20, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, then Ronald Reagan's Middle East envoy, met Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. According to declassified documents, the Reagan administration sought to re-establish long-severed relations with Baghdad amid concern about growing Iranian influence. While U.S. intelligence had earlier confirmed Sadda

Richard Neumann: Three Questions about the 2006 Elections

Richard K. Neumann Jr. is a professor at the Hofstra University School of Law.Were the polls accurate? Mostly no. The key question polls ask before election day is the “generic ballot” about the House of Representatives: If the election were held today, would you vote for the Democrat or for the Republican in your district? Here are the last polls taken before the election: 

Rick Perlstein: The Democrats won, but they shouldn't for a second let victory cause them to forget the Republicans' dirty tricks operation.

[Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.] Democrats have their majority in the House, and that's cause for celebration. But as of this writing several House races are still listed as "too close to call." The Senate has also changed hands -- after the Virginia race narrowly escaped a recount, and Republicans came close to challenging the results in Montana and Missouri. Whethe

Rick Perlstein: What the Dems Owe the Bloggers (Plenty)

[Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year. ] The Democrats have won back the House. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), nearly tripped over himself on the way to the microphone to claim the credit. In fact, while the tidal wave in the House looks like a bit of strategic genius by Emanuel--and pundits are starting to call it that way (Howard F

Thomas A. Foster: Sex and American Politics

[Thomas A. Foster teaches history at DePaul University. He is the author of "Sex and the Eighteenth Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America" and editor of the forthcoming "Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America."] In 2002, publishers of American history high school textbooks altered an image of Emanuel Leutze's famous painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware'' (1851) because the original painting

Gil Troy: Dems would be wise not to repeat mistakes that led to GOP's downfall

"Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" a woman asked Benjamin Franklin as he left the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Franklin replied: "A republic, if you can keep it." Twelve years ago, Republicans in Congress were given power - if they could keep it. On Tuesday, American voters passed judgment on their custody and demanded a change. Back in 1994, when the Republicans seized control from the Democrats, the Democrats ha