Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: Democrats, Republicans, and Israel

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Middle Eastern issues will likely play a role of unprecedented importance in the American mid-term elections less than a half-year away. Three topics head the agenda: the course of the Iraq war, the proper response to Iran's nuclear ambitions, and the soaring price of fu

Steven Aftergood: The Bush Administration's Use of State Secrets to Block the Flow of Information Is Unprecedented

The state secrets privilege has been invoked by the Bush Administration with greater frequency than ever before in American history in a wide range of lawsuits that the government says would threaten national security if allowed to proceed. In virtually every case, the use of the privilege leads to dismissal of the lawsuit and forecloses the opportunity for an injured party to seek judicial relief. Most recently, a lawsuit brought by Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen wh

Thomas Blanton: The lie behind the secrets

GOVERNMENT secrecy in the name of national security has reached record-setting proportions. In case after case, the government has used it as an excuse to thwart lawsuits by whistle-blowers and people with grievances against the United States. There was, for instance, the FBI linguist who alleged corruption and malfeasance inside her translation unit. There was the African American CIA officer who reported racial discrimination inside the agency, and the Syrian Canadian who was &qu

David Greenberg: Democrats struggle to shape a post-9/11 foreign policy,

EARLIER THIS MONTH, two contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination stood together to stop what they saw as a dangerous drift in their party's stance on national security. At the National Press Club on May 9, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh summoned Democrats to dig in for ''what will in all likelihood be a generation-long struggle against jihadism and radical, suicidal terror." Former Virginia governor Mark Warner agreed that his partymates had to refute Karl Rove's taunt that the

Juan Cole: Another Fraud on Iran ... No Legislation on Dress of Religious Minorities

Maurice Motamed, the representative of the Iranian Jewish community in Iran's parliament, has strongly denied the rumors started by Canada's National Post that the Iranian legislature has passed a law requiring members of religious communities to wear identifying badges. The report was al

Tom Engelhardt: The Billion-dollar Gravestone

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 the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publis

Richard White: Border Crossing (Immigration Debate)

[Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, is president of the Organization of American Historians.] Except for the immigrants themselves, the current public discussion usually involves the usual suspects and is idiotically simple. It is about principles: secure borders and punishing lawbreakers on one side and economic justice and the rights to citizenship on the other. Or, alternatively, it is about economic calculations: immigrants do or

James E. Young & Michael Van Valkenburgh: Last Chance for Ground Zero

IMAGINE our country today without the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, without the open and painstaking competition that gave veterans, their families and the rest of us a place unlike any other to mourn our losses of that era. As difficult and adversarial as that process was at times, it was necessary. Our need for a memorial at ground zero is no less profound, as is our need to stick by the plan for the World Trade Center Memorial devised more than two years ago, no matter how difficult that may be.

Liam Brockey: When Celestial Kingdoms Collide (Vatican & China)

[Liam M. Brockey, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, is the author of the forthcoming "Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724."] ONCE again, one of the world's largest countries is at loggerheads with one of the world's smallest. Yet before thinking of David and Goliath, remember that in one way, both are equally large — China and the Vatican each claim the nominal allegiance of about a fifth of humanity. The recent standoff between these

Juan Cole: George W. Nixon

George W. Bush's Iraq misadventure has made him among the least-liked presidents in modern history, according to an ABC News/ Washington Post poll. Even Lyndon B. Johnson in the dark days of 1967-1968 was at 43 percent! And he had to decline to seek a second term over it! With regard to public approval of him, Bush is down to 33%. And only 17% say they strongly approve of his performance. (And probably they aren'

Bruce Kuklick: Presidents often lean on intellectuals for advice. But history says that's not always so smart.

[Bruce Kuklick, BRUCE KUKLICK is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the new book "Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War From Kennan to Kissinger."] NO ONE HAS RECEIVED as much attention — or blame — for Washington's increasingly unpopular war in Iraq as the coterie of neoconservative intellectuals around President Bush. The group — including the cerebral former deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and such bookish c

Daniel Pipes: Mr. Olmert Visits Washington

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] It's a grand occasion when a new Israeli prime minister makes an inaugural visit to Washington. He typically meets with the president, addresses a joint meeting of Congress, appears on plum television shows, talks to influential audiences, and consults privately with a ran

James Campbell: Not all of us answer the call. But one Mississippi woman dared to stand up for civil rights

[James T. Campbell (James_T_Campbell@brown.edu), an associate professor of American civilization and Africana studies at Brown University, is the author of "Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005," published this week.] Last week, the government of Canada offered a billion-dollar settlement to Native Americans who were taken from their families as children and consigned to state boarding schools as pa

Victor Davis Hanson: The Prison of the Present

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.] Listen to the present televised hysteria. Too few troops! No, too many still there! The CIA is out of control! No, it is weak and irrelevant! The Iraq mess only

Daniel Pipes: Is Campus Watch Part of a Conspiracy?

In their now-notorious pamphlet, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt say this about the founding of Campus Watch in 2002:The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that post

Juan Cole: Saving Iraq ... Mission Impossible

The man who would be Iraq's prime minister announced Tuesday that "90 percent" of the work in forming a new government was done. You would never know, from the petty squabbling in the U.S.-protected Green Zone over who gets what ministry, that beyond its concrete barriers a brutal "war of the corpses" rages each night in the nightmarish streets of Baghdad, and that the rest of Iraq continues to spiral out of control. Guerrillas killed 20 and injured 70 with a truck bombing in

Gary Leupp: The Threat from Iran Is to Israel

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.] I read again in this morning’s Boston Globe a matter of fact reference to Iran’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map.” This echoes the repeated allegation by President Bush and other top administration officials that Iran’s President Ah

Juan Cole: Ahmadinejad as W.'s Penpal

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to W., in which he insisted on Iran's right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to conduct scientific research on uranium enrichment. The NPT does in fact allow such research, but it is Bush administration policy to abrogate that right and stop even civilian research programs that might lead to the closing of the fuel cycle. It is another big leap from such an ability to making a bomb. Ahmadinejad is a crank, and some of what he say

Ruth Rosen: The Motherhood Manifesto

[Ruth Rosen, a journalist and historian, teaches public policy and history at U.C. Berkeley, is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute, and the author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.] A baby is born. A child is stricken with a serious illness. A spouse has a stroke. A parent falls ill. These are the kind of events that throw a working mother’s delicate balance between her job and her family into chaos. Poor and minority women

Daniel Pipes: Deterring Tehran

[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 the Iranian regime barrels forward, openly calling for the destruction of Israel and overtly breaking the nuclear non-proliferation rules, two distinctly undesirable prospects confront the West.The first is to acquiesce to Tehran and hope for the best. Perhaps dete