Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's

The catastrophe in Iraq, the scope of which is now apparent to even the most disengaged observer, and his mishandling of the Dubai port issue have sent President George W. Bush's public approval ratings to the lowest of his presidency. According to a Reuters poll, only 34 percent of Americans believe he is doing a good job overall. Only 30 percent, less than a third, think he is managing the Iraq situation well. A remarkable 72 percent of American troops polled in Iraq think the U.S. should leav

Athan Theoharis: The FISA File

With a debate now raging over George W. Bush's secret authorization of warrantless wiretaps by the National Security Agency in defiance of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we must take another look at why Congress passed the act in the first place. The legislative history clearly shows that the intention was to deny the President the unchecked right to determine whether a proposed target met a legitimate "foreign intelligence" need. Instead, Congress ordained that all pr

Ira Chernus: Praise the Lord and Pass the Petition

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea and later this year will publish Monster to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be reached at chernus@colorado.edu.] If you are waiting for a religious left to emerge to offset the power of the religious right, it may already be in your own neighborhood at a local ch

Daniel Pipes: Civil War in Iraq?

[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 bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy.The destruction of the Golden Dome, built in 1905 and one of the holiest shrines of Shiite Islam, represents an escalation of the Sun

Jonathan Zimmerman: Take a pass on Beijing Games

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools" (Harvard University Press).] A fascist, dictatorial regime plans to host the Olympic Games. Critics call for a boycott, but the Games come off as planned. And on the field of world opinion, the hosts score an enormous victory. Berlin in 1936? No, Beijing in 2008. Now that the Winter Olympic

Mark Naison: Lawrence Summer's Resignation an Affirmation of Harvard's Preeminence

The resignation of Harvard President Lawrence Summer has been widely denounced as a victory for leftist faculty members who totally are out of touch with the worldview and beliefs of most people in theUnited States . There is some truth to that accusation. But it is precisely because Harvard faculty are out of touch with the thinking of most Americans that Harvard will remain the nation's pre eminent research university and continue to attract talented scholars from all

Keith David Watenpaugh: The coming civil war in Iraq

[Keith David Watenpaugh is an author and the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Distinguished Fellow in Democracy and Diversity at the Tanner Humanities Institute, University of Utah. In July he will join the faculty of the University of California, Davis, as associate professor of Modern Islamic Studies.] The coming civil war in Iraq Keith David Watenpaugh Salt Lake Tribune When I was in Baghdad just a few weeks after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was witness to the ugly sight o

Robert "KC" Johnson: The Perils of Academic Unions

[KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.] New York City’s academic community has experienced more than a semester of labor turbulence. In September, after a summer of eschewing all formal contract negotiations, the City University of New York’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, convened a mass meeting to rally support for a strike. Six weeks later, New York University graduate students walked off the jo

Stephanie Coontz: 'Traditional' marriage has changed a lot

[Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College and is the author of "Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage" (Viking Penguin).] Pundits and politicians love to pontificate about strengthening traditional marriage. But as someone who has studied marriage forms and family life for more than three decades, I wonder how many of them have the faintest idea of what they're talking about. I suppose they mean the "tr

Joshua Brown: Who Could Have Foreseen This? (Illustration)

 

Francis Fukuyama: After Neoconservatism

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq,

Daniel Pipes: Those Danish Cartoons and Me

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Did you know that I had a hand in the Danish cartoons of Muhammad?No? Well, neither did I until I found this out in early February on a conspiracist Web site. To clear the record, I'll start with the facts, then outline the conspiracy theory.What actually h

Tom Engelhardt: War of the Quailhawks

[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.] Over a week ago, Vice President Cheney managed to put a couple of hundred pellets of buckshot into his 78 year-old friend and Texas Republican Party builder,

Juan Cole: Bringing the United Nations Back In to Iraq

There will be anti-War protests in the coming month, as the 3-year anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq approaches. I think it is time to demand a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq. I suspect a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians want that. The Sunni Arabs demand it. The Sadrists demand it. It is time. Saying that the guerrillas would take advantage of a timetable, given the carnage we saw on Monday (see below) is frankly silly. They are taking advantage of the curr

Gary Leupp: Those Danish Muhammad Cartoons

[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 visited Denmark as a child and have fond memories of Copenhagen’s immaculate streets, bright sunlight, and touristy Viking-icon ambiance. I remember, too, visiting the Tuborg brewery and consuming a little too much free soda. I h

Jonathan Zimmerman: Fear of Insulting Muslims No Sign of Respect

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of"Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools" (Harvard University Press, 2002).] The Great Cartoon Controversy just won't go away. Last week, rioters in Pakistan set fire to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, two cellular phone companies and a bus terminal -- all to protest a series of Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. For good measure, they also burned the Danish

Daniel Pipes: How the Cartoon Protests Harm Muslims

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] What are the long-term consequences of the Muhammad cartoon furor? I predict it is helping bring on not a clash of civilizations but their mutual pulling apart. This separation, which has been building for years, has

Tom Engelhardt: A Permanent Basis for Withdrawal?

We're in a new period in the war in Iraq -- one that brings to mind the Nixonian era of"Vietnamization": A President presiding over an increasingly unpopular war that won't end; an election bearing down; the need to placate a restive American public; and an army under so much strain that it seems to be running off the rails. So it's not surprising that the media is now reporting on administration plans for, or"speculation" about, or"signs of," or

Joshua Brown: Cheney Shoots Friend (Illustration)

 

Daniel Pipes: "Moslem States Represent a Potential Threat to World Peace"

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] How did the U.S. government perceive Islam as a political force in the old days? For an answer, I propose a look at a" confidential" 76-page study (declassified in 1979) published sixty years ago tomorrow by the Military Intelligence Service of the U.S. War Department.