Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: Why We Must Stay in Iraq

Vietnam is once again in the air. Last month's antiwar demonstrations in Crawford, Tex., have been heralded as the beginning of an antiwar movement that will take to the streets like the one of 30 years ago. Influential pundits -- in the manner of a gloomy Walter Cronkite after the Tet offensive -- are assuring us that we can't win in Iraq and that we have no option but a summary withdrawal. We may even have a new McGovern-style presidential "peace" candidate in Wisconsin Sen. Russ Fei

Timothy Naftali: Department of Homeland Screw-Up

... The response to Katrina thus far indicates two flaws in the Bush administration's thinking about homeland security. The federal government hasn't learned how to plan for a tragedy that demands putting a city on sustained life-support, as opposed to a one-moment-in-time attack that requires recovering the dead and injured from debris and then quickly rebuilding. And DHS appears unwilling to plan for the early use of the U.S. military to cope with a civilian tragedy. Presidential administratio

Mary L. Dudziak: Out of Our Crises Should Emerge a New Commitment to Democracy

[Mary L. Dudziak is a professor at the University of Southern California Law School and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.] AS WATERS rose in the streets of Biloxi and New Orleans, President Bush took to the airwaves in San Diego on Tuesday in an effort to capture the nation's attention with a different crisis. The war in Iraq, which he framed as part of a ''war on terror" tied to Sept. 11, had its legacy in World War II, he argued, and the nation must devote itself

Joel Kotkin: Will New Orleans Revive?

[Mr. Kotkin, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "The City: A Global History" (Modern Library, 2005).] Like the Mississippi itself, cities have risen and fallen through history. Herodotus noted in his own time, the 5th century B.C., that "human prosperity never abides long in the same place." Many of the cities that were "great" in his time were small in the recent past, he noted, while many leading cities of his yout

Joshua Brown: The View from Air Force One (Illustration)

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Francis Fukuyama: The Price of the Iraq War ... Undermining Support for the Real War on Islamist Enemies

[Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is editorial board chairman of a new magazine, The American Interest.] ... It is tempting to see continuity with the American character and foreign policy tradition in the Bush administration's response to 9/11, and many have done so. We have tended toward the forcefully unilateral when we have felt ourselves under duress; and we have spoken in highly idea

Daniel Pipes: Islamists, Get Out

[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 full implications of the London terrorist attacks by domestic jihadis sink in, Westerners are speaking out about the problem of radical Islam with new clarity and boldness.The most profound development is the sudden need of the British and others to define the

Jon Christensen: The White House and Conservation

Never before has an administration done so much for conservation by doing so little. The Bush administration is holding a White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation in St. Louis, next week, Monday through Wednesday, August 29-31. That this administration is holding this conference at the end of August says something about the priority it puts on conservation. Not much. President Bush clearly has bigger issues on his agenda, even in Idaho, where he has been vacationing in the

Juan Cole: Why Iraq Isn't Malaysia

Steve Gilliard drives a silver stake through the persistent hope of some that Iraq's"insurgency" can be defeated as the communists were defeated by the British in colonial Malaya (Malaysia). This comparison always neglects to note that the British had been the colonial power in Malaya since the nineteenth century, with a brief interregnum. They hadn't just shown up suddenly in 1952. They had enormous logistical an

Juan Cole: Hey, Now Iraq Has a Constitution!

So they had the ceremony, and the drafting committee (minus Sunni Arab members) presented the final draft of the permanent Iraqi constitution to parliament on Sunday. But parliament did not vote on it. The Sunni Arabs did not attend. Parliament has abdicated its responsibilities toward the constitution and put it in the lap of the October 15 national referendum. Al-Hayat aptly said that the Iraqi constitution has been delivered by caesarian section. It was plucked from the womb of the drafting c

Elliott Gorn: There's A Long Liberal Tradition of Motherhood and Social Justice

[Elliott Gorn teaches history at Brown University. He is the author of "Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America," published in 2001 by Hill and Wang.] Cindy Sheehan has stumbled onto something big that has deep roots in American culture, and liberals ought to pay attention. She has single-handedly, and despite the smear campaigns of administration supporters, revived an old tradition of liberal motherhood. It is a simple idea: Americans assume that

Joseph Ellis: Baghdad's Foundering Fathers

[JOSEPH J. ELLIS is author of "His Excellency: George Washington" (Knopf, 2004) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" (Knopf, 2001).] THE GREAT British philosopher and essayist Alfred North Whitehead once observed that there were only two instances in history when the political leadership of an emerging nation behaved as well as anyone could reasonably expect. The first was Rome under Caesar Augustus. The second was the

Juan Cole: The Iraqi Constitution ... DOA?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com/.] On Thursday, the third deadline for finishing Iraq's new constitution passed without agreement, as Sunni leaders balked at Shiite and Kurdish demands for federalism and regional control of oil wealth. In response, Shiite leaders threatened -- yet again -- to bypass the Sunnis, use their majority to app

Gavan McCormack: If You Ran North Korea, You'd Want Nukes too Given American Hostility

[Gavan McCormack, Australian National University (Canberra) and International Christian University (Tokyo), is a coordinator of Japan Focus. His most recent book is Target North Korea. He wrote this article for Japan Focus and for Sekai, where it appears in Japanese in the October issue. Posted August 24, 2005.] Four times now since August 2003, the government of China has been host to what have become known as the "Six-Sided Talks." The key protagonists, the United States

Andrei Lankov: Why Women Have Taken the Lead in Bringing Capitalism to North Korea

[Dr Andrei Lankov is a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and Korea Center, the Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia.] A defector from the North, a typical tough Korean auntie with trademark permed hair, smiled when asked about "men's role&q

Andrei Lankov: North Korea's Missionary Position

[Dr Andrei Lankov is a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and Korea Center, the Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia.] Churches are opening in North Korea, a country long known for its hostility to any religion, and especially Protestantism. But i

Andrei Lankov: Welcome to Capitalism, North Korean Comrades

[Dr Andrei Lankov is a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and Korea Center, the Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia.] A creeping revolution, both social and economic, is under way in North Korea and it seems there's no turning back. For decades, the cou

David N. Gibbs: How Elites Use Pretexts to Manufacture Public Support for War

This article will analyze the use of pretexts in US foreign policy. The basic argument is that American foreign policy since 1945 has followed a distinct pattern, wherein policy e´lites have sought to implement programs of external expansion, which in turn have been frustrated by public skepticism. In order to persuade the public on the need for assertive action overseas—often accompanied by increases in the military budget—e´lites have sought out various pretexts to justify these actions. This

Timothy Garton Ash: Iraq Is America's Boer War

If you want to know what London was like in 1905, come to Washington in 2005. Imperial gravitas and massive self-importance. ... As Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, put it in 1902: "The weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of his fate." The United States is now that weary Titan. In the British case, the angst was a result of the unexpectedly protracted, bloody and costly Boer war, in which a small group of foreign insurgents defied the mightiest m

Benny Morris: Palestinians on the Right Side of History

[Benny Morris, the author of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited," is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel.] THERE is, from the historian's perch, something fitting about the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. I am not speaking about the fact that this appallingly overcrowded area has 1.3 million Arabs who need every inch of its 140 square miles to even begin to imagine a better life and who regard their former Jewis