Roundup: Historians' Take

David Nasaw: Clapping with one hand for Buffet's give-away

[David Nasaw is a professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the new biography Andrew Carnegie.] Warren Buffett's announcement in June that he was giving $31 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was greeted with near universal acclaim. About 120 years ago, when Andrew Carnegie declared in his "Gospel of Wealth" essays that he was going to give away his entire fortune and asserted that it was the duty of other rich

Daniel Pipes: Tempering our goals in Iraq is essential

Whether the Iraqi expedition is judged a success or failure depends almost exclusively on the views of Americans—not those of Iraqis, other coalition partners, or anyone else. So, fellow Americans, let's debate the topic. My take: It was right to pre-empt Saddam Hussein before he could oppress his Iraqi subjects further, invade another country, deploy more chemical weapons or build nuclear weapons. The world is a better place with this abominable thug in jail, not lording it in his

John O. McGinnis: Two liberal authors think American democracy is in peril. Just sour grapes?

[Mr. McGinnis is a professor at Northwestern University's School of Law.] If the party you prefer loses a string of elections, one response is to concede that it has the wrong policies or the wrong tactics. Another is to argue that the system itself is broken. Two new books take the second course and contend that American constitutional democracy is in deep trouble. Neither is written from what would be called a Red State perspective, which raises the question: Will a Democratic vic

Michael Kazin: The Democrats' Populist Appeal

[Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan and Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, edited with Joseph McCartin. ] The Democrats' big win was obviously a repudiation of Bush's war in Iraq and the hypocrisy, corruption, and ineptness of his allies in Congress. But the victors also may have taken a big step toward erasing an image that conservative Republicans pasted on them duri

Frederick W. Kagan: 'Redeployment' will not 'incentivize' the Iraqi military. It will lead to its collapse.

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of the American Military (Encounter). He formerly taught history at West Point.] The United States has two options in Iraq: stay and try to win, or cut, run, and lose. Attempts to chart a middle course--partial withdrawal or redeployment, accelerated hand-over to the Iraqis, political deals with Syria or Iran--ignore the realities of the military situat

Eric Alterman: An Iran-Contra episode Robert Gates might prefer to forget

[Note: Click on the SOURCE link above to read this article's footnotes and embedded links.] The president announced his pick to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense today: former CIA director Robert Gates. Bound to surface in the coming national scrutiny of Gates is his role in the Iran-Contra affair. One of the great misconceptions of the Iran-Contra scandal is the widely-held belief that when then-Attorney General Meese called a press conference on Novembe

Niall Ferguson: 1958 and today's GOP

... The latest USA Today/Gallup poll has the Democrats leading the Republicans by 53% to 38% among registered voters, as large as any Democratic lead since 1982. Gallup analysts say there is a "significant probability" that the Democrats could win the 15 seats they need to take control of the House. Some pessimistic Republicans fear that they could lose as many as 30 seats. There are even those whose recurring nightmare is the loss of the Senate too, though here the Democrats have a st

David Greenberg: The Myth of the 6 Year Itch

[David Greenberg writes Slate's "History Lesson" column and teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image and Calvin Coolidge (forthcoming).] Whenever the party in power takes a hit in the midterms, it takes refuge in the past. Since the governing party almost always loses seats in off-year races, the president is said merely to have fallen prey to the ineluctable tides of history—much in the way that presidents who face economi

Juan Cole: What the Election Means

The fourth popular revolution of the twenty-first century (after the Ukraine, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan) swept America on Tuesday, as voters engaged in the moral equivalent of storming the Bastille. The United States of America has roundly repudiated the Bush Administration and Republican Party dominance of all three branches of the Federal government and its dominance of many state offices, as well. Corruption and war drove this slap in the face to the Old Regime crafted by Newt Gingrich and Trait

Tom Engelhardt: Outlaw Empire Meets the Wave

[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.] The wave --

Stephanie Koontz: What Married Couples Need ... Some More Friends

[Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”] EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to fin

Juan Cole: Is Bush Unhinged?

Journalist Bill Gallagher of Detroit's Channel 2 News joins Andrew Sullivan in asking the increasingly unavoidable question: Is George W. Bush Criminally Insane? Gallagher writes: ' Bush's fantasies are even disturbing his fans. In a sit-down with wire-service reporters, Bush assured them that Rumsfeld, the most incompetent man on earth, would keep his job for t

Daniel Pipes: In 1796, U.S. Vowed Friendliness With Islam

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Has the United States ever engaged in a crusade against Islam? No, never. And, what's more, one of the country's earliest diplomatic documents rejects this very idea.Exactly 210 years ago this week, toward the end of George Washington's second presidential administrat

James Q. Wilson: What ever happened to patriotic reporters?

[Mr. Wilson, formerly a professor at Harvard and at UCLA, now lectures at Pepperdine University. Among his recent books are The Moral Sense and The Marriage Problem. This article, adapted from a Manhattan Institute lecture, appears in the Autumn issue of City Journal.] We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am

William Polk: The Blame Game (Iraq)

You might be interested to compare the remarks in the attached reports [among others, the news that Richard Perle now opposes the Iraq War] with the essays (on my website) I wrote in 2002 and 2003 before we lost 2,800 young men and women dead, over 20,000 maimed, another 50,000 suffering life-long results of concussions, about 40,000 or more with serious psychiatric problems and who knows how many more likely to get cancer from the use of depleted uranium (which on impact produces a particularly

Niall Ferguson: Bush's Failed Presidency

In the aftermath of George W Bush's re-election as president two years ago, his campaign manager, Karl Rove, amused himself and his boss with a battery-powered "Redneck Horn". At the touch of a dashboard button, the device would yell insults in a raucous Southern accent, providing automated road rage for "red state" Republicans. The toy's abusive messages ranged from the relatively mild "Slow down, dumbass!" to "Hey, hogneck, who taught you how to

Garry Wills: A Country Ruled by Faith

The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government—until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of the present. George W. Bush was not only born-again, like Jimmy Carter. His religious conversion came late, and took place in the political setting of Billy Graham's ministry to the pow

James Petras: US-Latin American Relations ... Ruptures, Reaction and the Illusion of Times Past

[James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). His latest book is, The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press, 2006). He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu.]Editor: This is a long article. What follows is part o

Frederick Kagan: Insult to Injury in Iraq

[The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] It's been coming for a long time: the idea that fixing Iraq is the Iraqis' problem, not ours -- that we've done all we can and now it's up to them. Such arguments have been latent in the Bush administration's Iraq strategy and explicit in Democratic critiques of that strategy for some time. Now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has declared: "It's their country. . . . They're going to have to

Richard K. Neumann Jr. : Despite Democrats' edge in the popular vote, Republicans have kept command of Congress

[Richard K. Neumann Jr. is a professor at the Hofstra University School of Law.] In the weeks before an election, pollsters ask the"generic ballot" question about the House of Representatives: If the election were held today, would you vote for the Democrat or for the Republican in your district? The most recent polls report that 54 percent to 57 percent of the public would vote for Democratic House candidates and 37 percent to 41 percent would vote for Republicans. These are landsli