Roundup: Historians' Take

Benny Morris: About Mearsheimer and Walt's "The Israel Lobby"

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" is a nasty piece of work. Some of what they assert regarding the terrorist tactics of certain Zionist groups during the 1930s, and the atrocities committed by Israeli troops in the War of 1948, and the harsh Israeli measures against the Palestinians during the second intifada, and certain activities of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States over the past decades--some of this is correct, and I reali

Juan Cole: Old US Islamist ally against USSR allied now with bin Laden

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the radical Islamist guerrilla fighter, has pledged his allegiance to Usamah Bin Laden. Back in the 1980s, Hekmatyar was a "freedom fighter" supported strongly by the Reagan administration. His radical Islamists received on the order of a billion dollars from the CIA to fight the Soviets, via Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. In his youth, Hekmatyar is said to have thrown acid in the faces of unveiled girls. In the 1990s, he

Ruth Rosen: Liberal Hawks and Genocide in Darfur

[Ruth Rosen, Visiting Professor of Public Policy, Goldman School of Public Policy, U.C. Berkeley.] I keep waiting for the liberal hawks who supported a war against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein to speak out against the genocide in Darfur. But the silence, as they say, is deafening. Where are the liberal hawks, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who were (and still are), caught up in their hallucinatory fantasy that George W. Bush would fight their war, fo

Tony Judt: The country that wouldn't grow up (Israel)

By the age of 58 a country - like a man - should have achieved a certain maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and for bad, who we are, what we have done and how we appear to others, warts and all. We acknowledge, however reluctantly and privately, our mistakes and our shortcomings. And though we still harbor the occasional illusion about ourselves and our prospects, we are wise enough to recognize that these are indeed for the most part just that: illusions. In short

Greg Grandin: How Donald Rumsfeld Discovered the Wild West in Latin America

Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at NYU. He is the author of the just published Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, part of the American Empire Project series. He has written for Harper's Magazine, the Nation, and other publications. How fast has Latin America fallen from favor? Just a d

Tom Engelhardt: On Bombing Iran and Other Fantasies of American Power

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

Robert KC Johnson: Rushing to Judgment in the Lacrosse Scandal

[KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.] In response to the scandal surrounding the men’s lacrosse team, Duke president Richard Brodhead has initiated a “conversation on campus culture.” The first installment provided little insight. To Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American Studies, recent events showed that “we need an innovative and brave curriculum that will allow our students to engag

Shelby Steele: White Guilt and the Western Past

[Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is author, most recently, of "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era," published this week by HarperCollins.] There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II. For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nucle

Robert S. McElvaine: “You’re Doin’ a Heck of a Job, Rummy!”

[Mr. McElvaine is a Professor of History at Millsaps College. He is the author of Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (McGraw-Hill) (http://evesseed.net).] You're doin' a heck of a job Rummy! That, in essence, is what President Bush said in a prepared statement after six retired generals had taken the unprecedented step of calling for the removal of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq. Anyone who believes that R

Chalmers Johnson: Exporting the American Model

[Chalmers Johnson is, most recently, the author of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, as well as of MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982) and Japan: Who Governs? (1995) among other works. This piece originated as"remarks" presented at the East Asia panel of a workshop on"Transplanting Institutions" sponsored by the Department of Sociology of the University of Californi

Gary Leupp: “Out of Iraq, Into Darfur”?

At the huge, inspiring antiwar march in New York yesterday, I noticed many placards with the massage, “Out of Iraq, Into Darfur.” They were held by members of a group called “Volunteer for Change,” described as “a project of Working Assets.” I wasn’t sure what to make of the slogan. Was it somehow satirical, playing on “Out of the frying pan, into the fire” and warning about a future Somalia-like intervention in Africa? Or was this really a call to take US troops out of Iraq and deploy them inst

Daniel Pipes: Hugging Iraq's Leaders

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] The signals that came out of Baghdad on April 26, when two U.S. cabinet members met with the newly elected Iraqi prime minister-designate, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, struck me as counterproductive.The ostensible

Tom Engelhardt: "I'm Already Against the Next War"

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

William Anthony Hay: Can Democracy Be Imposed from the Outside?

William Anthony Hay is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University and author of The Whig Revival, 1808-1830 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005). This E-note and a related article in the Winter 2006 Orbis are based on a presentation he made to FPRI’s Study Group on America and the West on September 12, 2005, in Philadelphia.Can democracy be imposed on societies from the outside

Gary Leupp: Cheney, the Neocons, and China

Robert Dreyfuss’ article “Vice Squad,” about the Office of the Vice President in the American Prospect) is the best piece I’ve seen in awhile on the neoconservatives and their persistent influence in the Bush Administration. But it also places the neocons’ Middle East preoccupation in wider perspective. Dreyfuss notes that the OVP is “very difficult for journalists to penetrate” because of its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of secrecy. Even so, “a Prospect investigation shows

Gary Leupp: “The Secret Cabal Got What It Wanted: No Negotiations with Iran”

It was May 2003. President Bush had declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The State Department, which had been unenthusiastic about that war, was not inclined to provoke another with Iran and indeed had been calling for diplomatic engagement with the reform-minded Khatami regime. That regime for its part asked the Swiss ambassador to Tehran to forward to the United States a request for talks. These would address U.S. concerns about its nuclear program, as well as the lifting of sanctions and

Sumit Ganguly: On India-Pakistan Relations

Sumit Ganguly of Indiana University is the author of Fearful Symmetry: India and Pakistan under the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (Oxford and University of Washington, 2005) and India Since 1980 (Cambridge, forthcoming). This talk was given at the History Institute for Teachers on “Teaching India,” March 11-12, 2006, sponsored by FPRI’s

Daniel Pipes: Subsidizing the Enemy

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] An Islamic school in London is teaching that non-Muslims are akin to pigs and dogs, and it is doing so with subventions from the British taxpayer. More alarmingly, when notified of this problem, the British authorities indicate they intend to do nothing about it.T

Eric Alterman: Bush's Other War

The Bush Administration's undeclared war on the media has opened up another front, with an FBI demand that its agents be allowed to embark on a fishing expedition through the private papers of the late muckraker Jack Anderson. This action follows another Administration effort to criminalize, under the 1917 Espionage Act, the receiving of classified information; it is prosecuting two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) members for passing on data from Pentagon official Larry Franklin

Ruth Rosen: What women talk about when men are not listening

[Ruth Rosen is a journalist and historian, teaches public policy and history at U.C. Berkeley, is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute, and is the author of "The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Changed America." ] If you think its about sexual prowess, you’d be wrong. If you think it’s about size, forget it. And if you imagine we follow the various pissing contests going on among male liberals, you’re too self-absorbed. It’s about what I call the Care Crisis.