Roundup: Historians' Take

Martin E. Marty: A Muslim Pope Luther?

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, a.k.a. Paracelsus, was challenged by authorities who called him the Luther of medicine. "Why do you call me a medical Luther?... I leave it to Luther to defend what he says, and I will be responsible for what I say." I thought about P.A.T.B.v.H. this week while reading columns on what today's public Islam lacks. In the New York Times (October 15) Nicholas D. Kristof's headline read "Looking for Islam's Luthers," but

John Fabian Witt: Why trial lawyers are (once again) changing their name

[John Fabian Witt, a professor of law and history at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law.”] IF a rose would smell as sweet by any other name, will trial lawyers smell better with a new one? That’s the question posed by the impending self-reinvention of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. After Election Day, the 65,000-member outfit whose lawyers brought us multibillion dollar settlements in cigarette cases

Daniel Pipes: In Iraq, Stay the Course - but Change It

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] As coalition policy reaches a crisis, may I resurrect an idea I have been flogging since April 2003? It offers a way out of the current debate over staying the course (as President George W. Bush has long advocated) or withdrawing troops on a short timetable (as his critics

Herbert Bix: The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq

[Herbert P. Bix, author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, writes on problems of war and empire. He is professor of history and sociology at Binghamton University.] Tonight I would like to look at (a) the initial conditions of our entry into Afghanistan and Iraq, (b) the reasons why we have failed in both places, and (c) our obligations in the current US political situation. By the latter I mean that a majority of Americans are ready to do the right thing but our constitu

Ralph C. Hassig and Kongdan Oh: Prospects for Ending North Korea's Nuclear Program

[Ralph C. Hassig is a Washington, D.C.-based consultant on North Korea and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Maryland University College. He is the co- author, with Kongdan Oh, of North Korea through the Looking Glass (Brookings, 2000). Kongdan Oh is a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses and a non- resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The authors made a present

Graham Allison: Bush's failed North Korean strategy

[Graham Allison is Douglas Dillon professor of government and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.] In the battle of wills between North Korea and the United States, the score is Kim Jong Il, 8; George W. Bush, 0. And yet, the White House doggedly pursues a strategy that has repeatedly failed to achieve American objectives. Despite the overwhelming power of the United States and the abject weakness of North Korea, David has so fa

Timothy Garton Ash: This is the moment for Europe to dismantle taboos, not erect them

What a magnificent blow for truth, justice and humanity the French national assembly has struck. Last week it voted for a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians during the first world war. Bravo! Chapeau bas! Vive la France! But let this be only a beginning in a brave new chapter of European history. Let the British parliament now make it a crime to deny that it was Russians who murdered Polish officers at Katyn in 1940. Let the Turkish pa

Greg Grandin: Democrats should remember what went wrong in 1986 before they start celebrating

[Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at New York University and is the author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and The Rise of the New Imperialism.] A Republican Party on the ropes, bloodied by a mid-second-term scandal; a resurrected Democratic opposition, sure it can capitalize on public outrage to prove that it is still, in the American heart of hearts, the majority party. But before House Democrats start divvying up committee assignmen

Jim Sleeper: Duty Bound ... Assessing the civic-republican tradition that has defined Ned Lamont's family history

[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.] How to tell"the good fight" from a bad one against liberal democracy's enemies? In 1941, a 17-year-old at Exeter struggled with that question as World War II raged in Europe and storm clouds gathered over America. Wrestling with his demons under New Hampshire's charcoal skies, he penned this sonnet: When pausing in our drowsy show of life Where bloated pigmies hold their petty sway, The mind f

Michael T. Klare: Beware Empires in Decline

[Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College, a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (Metropolitan Books, 2004).] The common wisdom circulating in Washington these days is that the United States is too bogged down in Iraq to consider risky military action against Iran or—God forbid—North Korea. Policy analysts describe the U.S

Daniel Pipes: Op Eds Now More Central in War than Bullets

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Soldiers, sailors, and airmen once determined the outcome of warfare, but no longer. Today, television producers, columnists, preachers, and politicians have the pivotal role in deciding how well the West fights. This shift has deep implications.In a conventional conf

Daniel Pipes: No Islamic Law in Minnesota, for Now

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]A week ago, it appeared likely that Muslim taxi drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport would win special dispensation to avoid transporting alcohol-carrying passengers. The Metropolitan Airports Commission had proposed to give those Shar'i-minded driver

Corey Robin: Going After Gays (Again)

[Corey Robin, the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea, teaches political science at Brooklyn College and CUNY. He is writing a book about political repression in the United States.] According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused

Juan Cole: Why it's believable that more than 600,000 Iraqis have died in the war

[T]he big news is a big new Johns Hopkins study published in The Lancet that suggests that the US misadventure in Iraq is responsible for setting off the killing of twice as many civilians as Saddam managed to polish off in 25 years.A careful Johns Hopkins study has estimated that between 420,000 and 790,000 Iraqis have died as a result of war and political violence since the beginning of the US i

Francis Fukuyama: The American Way of Secrecy

[Francis Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the author of “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy.”] ... It has become a cliché to say that “everything changed” after 9/11, but for two great American intellectuals — the sociologist Edward Shils and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former New York senator — recent events would have represented the eternal return

Stacy Schiff: Susan B. Anthony, Poster Child for the Anti-Abortion Movement?

[Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.”] ... "[Susan B. Anthony's Adams, MA birthplace home] belongs now to Carol Crossed, the founder of the New York State chapter of Feminists for Life. Ms. Crossed made the acquisition on behalf of the national anti-abortion organization, which will manage and care for the house. It is not the first time that Anthony has found herself leading the c

Randall Kennedy: Sen. George Allen and the N-Word

[Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University. He is the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.] ... [H]ow do we evaluate the case of Senator George Allen, the most recent high-profile N-word offender? He has been accused of repeatedly referring to blacks as "niggers" during his college years in the 1970s. Given my interest in the history of "nigger," I was, of course, captivated by this recent illustration o

Stanley Karnow: Worse Than McNamara?

[Stanley Karnow, author of "Vietnam: A History" (Penguin), covered the Vietnam War for The Washington Post.] By the mid-1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson had deployed nearly half a million troops to Vietnam. His spokesmen loudly maintained that our troops' palpable military superiority -- they were equipped with ultramodern artillery, supersonic airplanes, technological gadgets and other sophisticated weaponry -- was having a decisive impact, killing countless Viet Cong g

Victor Davis Hanson: The Pseudo-Histories of the Iraq War

Three recent books about the "fiasco" in Iraq - "Cobra II" by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward and just plain "Fiasco" by Tom Ricks - have attracted a lot of attention, and sales. All three well-written exposes repeat the now well-known argument that our government's incompetence and arrogance have nearly ensured America's failure in birthing democracy in Iraq. It's worth noting, though, that many of the au

John Lewis Gaddis: So Bush Stole the Truman Doctrine, So What?

'It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The speaker could have been Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. In fact, it was George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address; and what he said is what historians will probably remember as the Bush Doctrine. This