Roundup: Historians' Take

Michael Beschloss: The 5 Year Itch

In the fall of 1937, less than a year after winning re-election by the greatest popular landslide in history, Franklin Roosevelt was suffering from a second-term slump. So menacing was the economy that FDR's Treasury secretary warned him, "We are headed right into another depression!" Many congressional Democrats told the president they would jeopardize their jobs if they voted for New Deal bills. In 1938, many Democratic candidates distanced themselves from Roosevelt—and FDR lashed ou

Eric Alterman: First Casualty Of War

[Eric Alterman is a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. His "When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its Consequences" is just out in paperback from Penguin.] It is just a coincidence, but fortuitous nevertheless, that the Democrats forced the Senate into a special secret session to discuss how we got into the war in Iraq during the same week that we finally learned the nation was deliberately misled about the famous "Tonkin intercepts&

Daniel Pipes: The Bush Doctrine

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] To commemorate Commentary magazine's 60th anniversary, and in an effort to advance discussion of the present American position in the world, the editors asked a number of thinkers to consider a statement and four questions. In response to a radically changed worl

Victor Davis Hanson: Why U.S. critics turn a blind eye to atrocities

To paraphrase the Ancient Greeks, it is easy to be moral in your sleep. Abstract ethics or soapbox lectures demanding superhuman perfection mean little without deeds. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other global humanitarian groups recently expressed criticism over the slated trial of the mass murderer Saddam Hussein. Such self-appointed auditors of moral excellence were worried that his legal representation was inadequate. Or perhaps they felt the court of the new Ira

Jack Granatstein: Quebecers Hurt Canada By Dictating Foreign Policy

Quebecers effectively dictate Canada's foreign policy to the detriment of its national interest and unity, an eminent historian asserted yesterday. Canada's decisions to stay out of the Iraq war and the American missile defence program were both driven by overwhelming opposition in Quebec -- views not shared to the same degree in the rest of Canada, Jack Granatstein told the annual Ottawa conference of the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute. "French-C

Daniel Pipes: Iran's Final Solution Plan

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] "Iran's stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon [i.e., Israel]. We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region." No, those are not the words of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking

Linda Kerber: David Brooks's Misapplication of Hofstadter

[The writer is a professor of history at the University of Iowa.] Predicting that Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation will go no further than the alleged perjury of I. Lewis Libby Jr., David Brooks invokes the great historian Richard Hofstadter's characterization of a "paranoid style in American politics" to describe Democrats who conclude that Mr. Libby's lies obfuscated the administration's intention to go to war in Iraq. But Mr. Hofstadter's focus in that

David C. Hendrickson & Robert W. Tucker: How Far Bush Has Strayed in Foreign Policy from the Founders'

[David C. Hendrickson is a professor of political science at Colorado College, and Robert W. Tucker, a professor emeritus of U.S. foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University.] ...In Bush's first term, the "Bush Doctrine" meant above all the avowal that the United States would not sit on its hands and await the development of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of tyrants but was prepared, on the contrary, to take the offensive against them. Now it is the "bein

Lewis Gould: The Bush White House Is in Trouble Because of Its Disdain for Governing

There is an old theatrical adage that tragedy is easy, comedy is hard. For politicians, that could be reformulated as: Campaigning is easy, governing is hard. The Bush administration, long disdainful of governance as an exercise for wimps and Democrats, now finds its political and legal troubles mounting while its time-tested campaign mode falters. The divide between campaigning and governing has existed for all administrations, of course, and was particularly and painfully evident during the da

Victor Davis Hanson: What Bush Needs to Do Now

For good or evil, George W. Bush will have to cross the Rubicon on judicial nominations, politicized indictments, Iraq, the greater Middle East, and the constant frenzy of the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic party — and now march on his various adversaries as never before. He can choose either to be nicked and slowly bled to death in his second term, or to bare his fangs and like some cornered carnivore start slashing back. Before Harriet Miers, conservatives pined for a Chief Ju

Joshua Brown: Karl & Scooter (Illustration)

 

Victor Davis Hanson: 2,000 Dead, in Context

AS the aggregate number of American military fatalities in Iraq has crept up over the past 13 months - from 1,000 to 1,500 dead, and now to 2,000 - public support for the war has commensurately declined. With the nightly ghoulish news of improvised explosives and suicide bombers, Americans perhaps do not appreciate that the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the effort to establish a democratic government in Iraq have been accomplished at relatively moderate cost - two-thirds of the civilian fatalit

Daniel Pipes: Islamophobia?

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 Islamist group named Hizb ut-Tahrir seeks to bring the world under Islamic law and advocates suicide attacks against Israelis. Facing proscription in Great Britain, it opened a clandestine front operation at British universities called"Stop Islamophobia," the

Joshua Zeitz: The Plame Game

On one point John Steele Gordon, in his post yesterday about the Valerie Plame affair, and I are in complete agreement. As Mr. Gordon wryly notes, whatever the outcome of the special grand jury investigating Plamegate, the “Washington punditocracy is throwing out predictions by the ton based on little more than tea-leaf reading.” Well said. I’ve actually stopped following the inside-game coverage. It seems pointless to engage in baseless speculation. Within ten days the grand jury will either in

Carolyn Eisenberg: What History Will Say About the Iraq War

[Carolyn Eisenberg is a Steering Committee member of Historians Against the War. She is also a professor of U.S. foreign policy at Hofstra University. The following speech was written to be delivered at the recent anti-war rally in Washington on September 24. It was not actually delivered because of scheduling delays.] Donald Rumsfeld encouraged the Pentagon press corps this week to forget the short term and start thinking like historians. In looking at the situation in Iraq and Afg

Michael Meckler: 'Establishment' Politics Enters Cyberspace

[Michael Meckler is a journalist and historian who lives in Columbus.] The blogosphere's importance in Democratic politics has acquired additional scrutiny in the wake of Rep. Sherrod Brown's recent decision to re-enter next year's Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Mike DeWine. Brown, of Lorain, earlier had announced that he would not give up his House seat to run for the Senate. That encouraged Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett to seek the Democratic nomina

Gavan McCormack: What Koizumi's Post Office Reform Is All About

[Gavan McCormack is professor in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at Australian National University and visiting professor at International Christian University in Tokyo. He is a coordinator of Japan Focus.] ... The election was called because Koizumi insisted the Post Office must be privatized. Yet nobody in Japan suggested that the service offered by the Post Office was unsatisfactory and Koizumi offered little explanation other than the mantra: “kan kara min e” (f

Victor Davis Hanson: How the violence in Iraq will end ... with a whimper

The Western media was relatively quiet about the quite amazing news from the recent trifecta in Iraq: very little violence on election day, Sunni participation, and approval of the constitution. Those who forecasted that either the Sunnis would boycott, or that the constitution would be — and should be — rejected, stayed mum. But how odd that in the face of threats, a higher percentage of Iraqis in this nascent democracy voted in a referendum than did we Americans during our most re

Christine Stansell: Torment and Justice in Cambodia

[Christine Stansell is a professor of history at Princeton. She traveled to Cambodia this May in the context of her teaching and writing about the aftermath of catastrophic violence.] "Something terrible happened here. And I don’t know what it is,” Bill Herod remembers thinking in his first days in Phnom Penh in 1980. He was with Church World Service, one of a group of aid workers allowed into the country after the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 and put an

Tom Engelhardt: Name that War

[Mr. Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.] ... "Increasingly, officials say, Syria is to the Iraq war what Cambodia was in the Vietnam War: a sanctuary for fighters, money and supplies to flow over the border and, ultimatel