Roundup: Historians' Take

Jonathan Zimmerman: America’s Overseas Teachers and the Dilemmas of ‘Culture’

[Jonathan Zimmerman is a former Peace Corps volunteer (Nepal, 1983-85) and a professor of education and history at New York University. This essay is excerpted from his book Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century, published this month by Harvard University Press. ] ... [T]he post-World War II era spawned a new awareness and appreciation of culture, a concept that would revolutionize the teachers’ perceptions of America, teaching, and themselves. Between 150,000

Andrew Meyer: The story of 2 dissidents

[After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year Andrew Meyer returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which he teaches at the City University of New York.] Last week saw the murder and imprisonment, respectively, of two dissidents on opposite sides of the line that is becoming increasingly reified in current discourse, that between "Islam" and "the West." The first was Anna Politkovskaya, the Russia

Robert Dallek: It's Time for Him to Go

Before he appointed Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, President Bush would have done well to listen to the tape of an old telephone conversation between Rumsfeld and President Richard M. Nixon. It was March 1971, and Nixon was offering career advice to Rumsfeld, then head of Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity: "You should be thinking of what you should do in the future," he told the 39-year-old Rumsfeld. "Down the road, my view is that you would be a Cab

Daniel Pipes: Don't Bring That Booze into My Taxi

[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 minor issue at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) has potentially major implications for the future of Islam in the United States. Starting about a decade ago, some Muslim taxi drivers serving the airport declared, that they would not transpo

Tom Engelhardt: George Bush's War of the Words

[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.] For Homer, t

Juan Cole: Split Iraq Up 3 Ways? Bad Idea

The London Times reports that the Baker Commission will recommend a loose federal Iraq with 3 semi-autonomous regions.This is a very bad idea for so many reasons it would take me forever to list them all. But here are a few:1. no such loose federal arrangement would survive very long (remember the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States?), so the plan leads to the dismemberment and partition of Iraq. This outcome is unacceptable to Turkey and Saudi Arabia an

Walid Phares: Intercepting Radicalization at the Indoctrination Stage

[Dr. Phares is Senior Fellow, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Director, of the Future Terrorism Project. He is the author of Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America.] Chairman Simmons and Members of the Committee, It is a privilege and an honor to appear before you today to discuss the theme “The Homeland Security implications of radicalization.” My contribution is titled: “Intercepting radicalization at the indoctrination stage.”

Jonathan Zimmerman: Amish Preserve Simpler Times

Conservative. Insular. Old-fashioned. Different. Strange. Those are the types of adjectives we’ve been hearing about the Amish, ever since last week’s horrible school shootings at the one-room West Nickel Mines School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And surely, they do look strange to most of us. With their hats and their bonnets, their horse-drawn buggies and their “Dutch” dialect, they sometimes seem like creatures from another country, or from another world.

Juan Cole: Lies and Cover-Ups are not "Being in Denial"

The right wing of the Republican Party has a problem with the truth. The American press corps has an addiction to euphemisms.Bob Woodward called his book"State of Denial." The press around the book raises the question of whether President George W. Bush and his highest officials--Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice-- are unable to face the truth ("in denial").Yet the sort of anecdote Woodward tells, and the new information surfacing on Tenet's briefing of Rice a

Niall Ferguson: Why Churchill Opposed Torture

LAST WEEK, both houses of Congress approved a bill — the Military Commissions Act — that would permit the indefinite, extrajudicial incarceration of terrorist suspects and their interrogation using torture in all but name. Does that sound shocking? What's really shocking is that this was a compromise measure. When President Bush signs this bill into law, a category of detainees will come into existence: "unlawful enemy combatants" who, regardless of their nationality, wil

David Nirenberg: What Benedict really said

[David Nirenberg is a historian and professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and the author of Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press).] ... It is the rare homily, and certainly the rare academic talk, that triggers firebombs and comparisons to Hitler. So what did the pope actually say? At the center of the storm are a few lines of his remarks, quoted from the "dialogue with a Muslim&qu

Gerald Posner: An Open Letter to the President

In the aftermath of the 9.11 attack on America, I wrote a September 25 editorial for The Wall Street Journal, titled "I Was Wrong About Bush." There, I broke the unwritten rule that journalists should only be neutral political observers by announcing that I had voted twice for Bill Clinton, and had not only voted for Al Gore in 2000, but had been passionately active in arguing after the election that the Republicans had stolen it. As I then said, you were "not only un

Ruth Rosen: The Child Care Crisis

What kind of society have we become? Before members of Congress departed for recess, they gave President George W. Bush—hardly known for his wisdom or compassion—the right to define what constitutes torture and to suspend the constitutional right of habeas corpus. But our elected representatives couldn’t find time to pass the Labor, Health and Human Service appropriations bill which, among things, funds child care.The “Child Care Crisis”&#

Daniel Pipes: NATO Fights the Jihadis

When he was secretary of state, Colin Powell once called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization"the greatest and most successful alliance in history." It's hard to argue with that description, for NATO so successfully waged and won the Cold War, it didn't even have to fight.But this greatest alliance is now in the throes of what José María Aznar, the former prime minister of

Joshua Brown: Kissinger, Cheney and Bush (Illustration)

 

John Prados: Kissinger's "Salted Peanuts" and the Iraq War

For understandable reasons, the George W. Bush administration has shunned comparisons between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War. But in his latest book, State of Denial, Bob Woodward writes that Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state--and a secret (and frequent) consultant to the current president--has made the parallel explicit to the White House. According to Woodward, Kissinger recently gave a Bush aide a copy of a memo he wrote in 1969 arguing against troop withdraw

Andrew Meyer: John Adams wouldn't have had a prayer as a leader in Iraq

[After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year Andrew Meyer returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which he teaches at the City University of New York.] Foreign occupying soldiers fire on a crowd of unarmed civilians, killing five. The soldiers are put on trial and a talented local lawyer steps forward to defend the men who had killed his compatriots. With skill and effort he wins acquittal for most of the accused.

David M. Perry: Crusades shouldn't be so painful a topic

[David M. Perry is a visiting assistant professor of history at Macalester College in St. Paul.] When did the "war on terror" get medieval? Osama bin Laden refers to George W. Bush as the "chief Crusader" and the U.S. military forces in the Middle East as "Crusaders." In 2001, a week after 9/11, Bush referred to the war on terrorism as a Crusade. The president of Iran frequently labels "Zionists and Crusaders" as his nation's chief enemies. Re

Jon Wiener: The John Lennon Case Shows What Can Happen If the FBI and CIA Cooperate in the Wrong Way

Today everyone agrees that cooperation between the CIA and FBI is a key to preventing future terrorist attacks. But what if CIA-FBI intelligence sharing isn't about terrorist threats? What if the CIA is telling the FBI about people who criticize the president and speak out against an unpopular war?That's precisely what we found in the John Lennon FBI files, released in 1997 under the Free

Philip Zelikow: The terrorists are like ... anarchists of old, with one big but

First there’s al-Qaeda: its affiliates, its adherents. What’s notable about it—the ideology is familiar, the president has given a speech recounting at some length the kind of ideas al-Qaeda espouses—is to step back and notice that these ideas are basically fantasist and the organization and its operation has been significantly broken by our efforts since 9/11 and now is largely atomized, though still quite dangerous for that. It is reminiscent in some respects, speaking as a one-time