Roundup: Historians' Take

David Ronfeldt : The end of history or the resumption of tribalism?

[David Ronfeldt is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, and the author of "Al Qaeda and Its Affiliates: A Global Tribe Waging Segmental Warfare?"] Western strategists and policymakers should stop talking about a clash of civilizations and focus on the real problem: extreme tribalism. Recent events - riots in many nations protesting cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, Sunni-Shiite warring in Iraq, the Taliban resurgence in A

Harvey Sicherman: The flaws in the noisome paper about the Israel Lobby

[Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state.] John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, have stirred great controversy with their attack on the "Israel Lobby."

Daniel Pipes: Israel Shuns Victory

As Israelis go to the polls, not one of the leading parties offers the option of winning the war against the Palestinian Arabs. It's a striking and dangerous lacuna.First, some background. Wars are won, the historical record shows, when one side feels compelled to give up on its goals. This is only logical, for so long as both sides hope to achieve their war ambitions, fighting either continues or potentially can resume. For example, although defeated in World War I, the Germans did no

Martin Kramer: Power will not moderate Hamas

The election of Hamas has prompted an epidemic of self-induced amnesia among pundits who interpret Palestinian politics. For years they argued that Israel should do everything to bolster Yasser Arafat, and later Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), lest Hamas gain ground. Hamas would grow if Israel did not make far-reaching concessions, thus destroying any prospect of a negotiated peace. But now that Hamas has assumed power, these very same pundits ooze reassurances that Hamas is a

Harvey Wasserman: Today's melt-down anniversary confirms nuke revival as a form of Three Mile Island Insanity

[Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is available at www.harveywasserman.com. He is co-author, with Dan Juhl, of HARVESTING WIND ENERGY AS A CASH CROP: GUIDE TO LOCALLY OWNED WIND FARMING (danmar.us).] Today's twenty-seventh anniversary of the disaster at Three Mile Island finds the nuclear industry pushing yet another lunatic attempt to revive atomic energy. This periodic outbreak of industry-

Francis Fukuyama & Adam Garfinkle: Promote democracy and prevent terrorism--but don't conflate the two

[Mr. Fukuyama is professor at Johns Hopkins and author of "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy," published this month by Yale. Mr. Garfinkle is editor of the American Interest.] As an editorial in The Wall Street Journal recently asked: "Anyone out there have a better idea" than the Bush administration's policy of high-profile democracy promotion in the Arab and Muslim worlds as a means to fight terrorism? Well, yes, there

Jeffrey Herf & Andrei S. Markovits: Letter to the Editor of the London Review of Books ... About Israel Lobby

[Jeffrey Herf is Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland. Andrei S. Markovits is Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, Department of Political Science and Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, The University of Michigan] Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism. So it is with dismay that we read John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's "

Victor Davis Hanson: My How the Left Has Changed

I live in a central California farmhouse built by my great-great-grandmother in the 1870s. But if the clapboard house looks more or less unchanged from its earliest photographs taken in the 1920s, the world down the road is unrecognizable. In 1890, my grandfather was born here. Eighty years later he still related to us his grandmother's wild stories of post-Civil War Missouri. She along with her son, my great-grandfather, had come west from there on the new railroad. When the

Tom Palaima: Courage when it counts

[Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.] The strange thing about history - not just ancient history, but the history of our own times - is that it teaches us that virtue can be forgotten. Virtue also can be so absent from our lives that we may not know what it is. You might have read recently on the front page of the American-Statesman that I am leading a one-man campaign at the University of Texas at Austin against the

Ruth Wisse: About the Israel Lobby

[Ms. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard.] In Boston in the early 1980s, I was asked by an Irish cab driver what language I had been speaking with a fellow passenger we had just dropped off. When I told him, Hebrew, the language of Israel, the man exclaimed: "Israel! That's America's fighting front line! Israel fights our battles better than we could fight them ourselves." Now Professors

Gary Leupp: Even Ambassador Khalilzad Says “We’ve Opened Pandora’s Box”

Last August I wrote of the Bush administration, “They’ve opened up a Pandora’s box by their criminal invasion, and they’re not going to close it so easily.” I make no claim to originality in using the metaphor, which has been used by other critics of the war. But now I see even the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, acknowledging “We have opened the Pandora’s box,” adding, “the question is, what is the way forward?” “The way forward,” he answers his own question, while mixin

Daniel Pipes: The Palestinian-Israeli War ... Where It Came From, and How to End It

The following is an edited transcript of a speech given by Daniel Pipes at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, November 16, 2005, followed by an extensive question-and-answer period. The transcript was edited by The Commonwealth Club.A Palestinian-Israeli war probably is not the way most of you think of it. In the definition of the problem lies both an understanding of the Arab-Israeli theater and its potential solution. The consensus view is that this is not a war. This is diploma

Michael T. Klare: Reigniting the Arms Race

[Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency.] During the early cold war era, both superpowers provided nuclear technology to selected Third World countries -- the United States to South Korea and Iran (under the Shah), the Soviet Union to China and North Korea -- as a way of cementing ties with favored allies and shifti

H.W. Brands: Be Sure Before You Censure

[H. W. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author, most recently, of "Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times."] RUSSELL FEINGOLD, the outspoken Democratic senator from Wisconsin, wants to censure President Bush for authorizing wiretaps of Americans without court orders. His fellow Democrats haven't exactly leaped to his side, but a recent poll indicated that 46 percent of the public considers censure warranted. If that figure increases, Mr.

Daniel Pipes: White House Nonchalance

Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog. Expect the Bush administration to continue to make the Middle East the center of American foreign policy. Also expect its strategies to remain basically unchanged – despite their mixed record so far. That's the message in a major foreign policy document

Michael Parenti: Right-Wing Judicial Activism

[Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press), all available in paperback; also visit: www.michaelparenti.org.] Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts assured the senators that he would not be one of those noisome activist judges who inject their p

Martin E. Marty: Resisting "Theocracy"

In his new book, Baptizing America, Rabbi James Rudin speaks of a developing American "Christocracy." Kevin Phillips, in American Theocracy, writes about a developing "theocracy." Rudin is a moderate and Phillips has carefully detailed his own odyssey. Reviews of Phillips are coming in furiously fast, so we will concentrate on the "Radical Religion" theme of his subtitle, which is linked with two others, "Oil" and "Borrowed Money." Not swimmi

Juan Cole: Top Ten Catastrophes of the Third Year of American Iraq

The American war against Iraq began on March 20, 2003, so today is the third anniversary. The Himalyan mistakes of the American administration of the country in its first two years have by now been much analyzed -- the punitive steps against even low-level Baath Party members, the firing of tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs, the dissolution of the army, the permitting of looting on a vast scale, the failure to understand tribal honor, the failure to get a handle on the early guerrilla war, the fa

Mark Naison: When Inner City Neighborhoods Produced Strong Black Men

As someone who heads a research project- the Bronx African American History Project- that has benefited from the guidance and leadership of strong black men, I read the article in today's NY Times "Black Men Falling Further Behind" with a heavy heart. The communities described in this article, filled with fatherless families, male unemployment rates of over 65 %, and young men who see prison as an inevitability and a rite of passage, would have been unimaginab

Tom Engelhardt: Iran and the Irrationality Factor

[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 Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.] As readers flee news on the printed page for an on-line life and classified ads head out the door for Craigslist and points west, the Washin